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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#3

Post by andai »

At last my quest to find the stooge has come to a bitter end!

I saw some 192 core instances on Vultr, but I haven't tried them yet. What are you doing with all them cores?

I often fantasized about spinning up hundreds of nodes for various projects that needed number crunching. Then realized "wait I can just rent one big box for an hour" haha. It's really cool that we can do that now.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#4

Post by joefourier »

> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way.

Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#7

Post by jfengel »

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects.

And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs.

Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so that I don't have to boil the ocean. I figure that one of these days I might actually be forced to learn IAM and VPNs and God only knows what else. Meantime, every time I touch it my eyes bug out.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#8

Post by faangguyindia »

Why do people even bother with cloud?

I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade.

People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.

Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It seems you do not understand how CPU, RAM and Disk work to plaster such "autoscaling hyper solutions" burning money in cloud.

I moved their stuff out of the GCP managed solution and ended up with a $200-400 per month bill. The CEO can still not believe how it's even possible.

I suggested them move to Dedicated servers but they didn't want it, they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.

OK fine, we'll stay in Hyperscaler but not use any of their service other than VMs.

They racked up a ton of bills by using cloud monitoring, Datastore, and autoscalers (with no proper tuning), Kubernetes.

I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis.

I implemented a custom scaler where you can scale off of app metrics, not by just using a random peg on CPU.

I implement hot data reload by packing the data updates in gzip file, uploading to GCS and pulling from autoscaled units. Moved the stuff to Spot VMs.

The complexity of stuff in cloud is high for nothing.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#9

Post by tiffanyh »

joefourier wrote: post #4

> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way. Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting se…

> suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center.

The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above.

I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes.

AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry eventually followed.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#10

Post by andrewstuart »

faangguyindia wrote: post #8

Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It…

I worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had.

By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use.

It should have been built on a single Linux box by a single senior developer with Python and Postgres or nodejs or Ruby or whatever.

They went out of business after not too long and I couldn't help wondering if things might have been different if they hadn't spent a fortune building a giant money making machine for AWS, instead of making a web application on a Linux box.

Every AWS project I have worked on has had some significant work put into programming AWS instead of writing business functionality.

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