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AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

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Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#111
post #87

This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter. When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wage…

> you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy You also absolutely need this with EC2 instances, which is what the comparison was about. So no, it's not unfair. If you're using an AWS service built on top of EC2, Fargate, or anything else, you WILL see the same costs (on top of the extremely expensive Ops engineer you hire to do it, of course). > need to pay for the premises and their physical secu…

AWS counts as managed servers with constant security monitoring. That's a huge difference to paying for a dedicated server where you're responsible for the installation and maintenance of the operating system and all software, intrusion detection and thread responses, and server monitoring.

I am a Hetzner customer for my forthcoming small company in order to keep running costs low, but it's not as if companies using AWS were irrational. You get what you pay for.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#112
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

Sure, but AWS has more downtime than I do :-)

If we assume that you're a human being that sleeps, say 8 hrs/day, and not an LLM, that leaves you with 16 hours of consciousness a day, for an uptime of 66%. That's upsidedown nines. You don't even crack one nine of uptime. If we assume you've a diet of meth and cocaine, and only sleep 2 hours a day, that still puts you at only like 92% uptime.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

When your AWS bill suddenly spikes to $69k because some data science intern left a huge gpu backed EC2 instance running in ap-southeast-2 with a misconfigured auto-scaling group, and your CTO is at a "digital transformation" conference, and you have hundreds of angry investors asking why your burn rate tripled, you’ll get it. Or you need to debug why your Lambda function is throttling and you find out that the CloudW…

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Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)

But on Hetzner, you can usually get a dedicated server installed and ready tomorrow.

Even sooner than that. I bought a dedicated server on auction and it was ready 2h after the payment.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

When your AWS bill suddenly spikes to $69k because some data science intern left a huge gpu backed EC2 instance running in ap-southeast-2 with a misconfigured auto-scaling group, and your CTO is at a "digital transformation" conference, and you have hundreds of angry investors asking why your burn rate tripled, you’ll get it. Or you need to debug why your Lambda function is throttling and you find out that the CloudW…

[dead]

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#116

S3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have. Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router. This is a boring argument that has been done to death.

Herzner storage is a drop in replacement for S3. Even though there are some minor differences, it's not like the difference between a managed NAT and a router.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#117
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your system goes down on AWS and your AWS admin is on holiday, you'll have the same problem. What is your point?

Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it. Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hard…

You said developers have the knowledge and credentials (and thus the work) of managing your infra, and a moment later basically asserted you're saving money on the salary for the sysadmin. This is the actual lie you got sold on.

AWS isn't going to help you setup your security, you have to do it yourself. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to monitor your database performance. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to setup your networking. Previously a sysadmin would do this, ...

Managing hardware and updating hosts is maybe 10% of the work of a sysadmin. You can't buy much on 1/10th of a sysadmins salary, and even the things you can, the quality and response time are generally going to be shit compared to someone who cares about your company (been there).

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#118
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents an EC2 instance from going down in exactly the same way? Other hosting providers offer automatic backup too - it's not an AWS exclusive feature.

Nothing. It's just that I'm not the one responsible to fix it at 3am.

Then who is responsible to fix it?

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#119
post #83
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that we would need to have someone on payroll to have a usable machine? Then why not just have... a SysAdmin? Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?

Because people aren't going on AWS for EC2, they go on it to have access to RDS, S3, EKS, ELB, SNS, Cognito, etc. Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

A lot of people do use AWS for EC2.

Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale

> Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#120
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your system goes down on AWS and your AWS admin is on holiday, you'll have the same problem. What is your point?

Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it. Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hard…

> Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

is that because they were using AWS so hired people who knew AWS?

I would personally have far more confidence in my ability to troubleshoot or redeploy a dedicated server than the AWS services to replace it.

> Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

There are lots of options for renting dedicated hardware, that the service provider will maintain,. Its still far cheaper than AWS. Even if you have redundancy for everything its still a lot cheaper.

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