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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

#191

Post by windexh8er »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #100
aljgz wrote: post #49

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…

I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI. If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS. Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating…

I don't think your comment hits like you think it does. I think your intent with "cheap" implies some level of being lesser. In my experience that is not the reality. Similar to opp I migrated a startup from 5x cost in AWS to DO years ago. In fact that "cheap" competitor was able to give them better performance, more reliability and more features for a lot less.

AWS is almost never required and almost never the best option. It's the Cisco of options, it's often the default but for no good reason other than someone on the team probably knows enough about AWS to make it work.

Almost every startup I've worked at has leveraged AWS as their primary but when not they end up using AWS for something. And in every startup there's always contention with AWS spend and all of these startups invest significant time and, funny enough money (via cost savings products or consulting), to reduce their AWS bill. And yet, they never seem to try anything else. Doomed to the cyclical cost savings cycle. Amazon knows this and the UI/UX is designed to keep companies in this money burning loop.

Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].

[0] https://mashable.com/article/amazon-web-services-outage-may-...

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

#192

Post by finaard »

panny wrote: post #104
finaard wrote: post #84

> My business email system still does not work. This is always the weird things in those rants. He's complaining that after 4 days his mails are offline. Now I'm doing a mix of physical servers in rented rackspace, and rented servers - but even there I can have billing mixups where they deactivate servers for no good reason. And to get email working again the limiting factor would be the DNS TTL - new servers would b…

>new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down Yeah, no that's not how it works with email. You have to build reputation for weeks or receivers throttle you.

I'm not running a spam business. I've been operating my own mailservers (and related infrastructure) for more than 25 years now, without issues.

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

#193

Post by cube00 »

djyde wrote: post #33

I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times: 1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep. 2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started se…

I really wanted to like Cloudflare Workers and I'm sure there's good technical reasons but the way you need to use a Wrangler project to do things like enabling email felt too much like I was about to get locked into the platform.

It seemed like the bindings you needed to set to allow email can't actually be set (or even seen once Wrangler sets them) from the console at all.

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

#194

Post by epistasis »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #188
aljgz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not showing the price was not "my problem". It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user. No thank you

> It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user. I spent 5 years optimizing spendings on AWS at various companies. Yes, it does come with traps and footguns. On the other hand if you know what are you doing, there are plenty of tools to optimize your spendings with RIs, saving plans, auto-scaling, etc, and spend less than the list pr…

Everything you describe is reinforcing the point of the person you are responding to.

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

#195

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

sillyfluke wrote: post #163
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't know in advance how much bandwidth will you use, how much traffic will you have, what auto-scaling rule will it trigger, etc. It's not obfuscation, it's billing based on your usage. And as with everything in life, there are tradeoffs.

Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.

You can set up cost-based alerts (actual or forecasted) that send notifications via email or SNS. Based on this you can set up automations, such as applying an IAM policy to prevent further resource creation, shut down resources, etc.

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

#196

Post by sokoloff »

stavros wrote: post #186
sokoloff wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this allegory, did AWS take all the apples in the crate while paying them $1 for every apple, thus becoming the bad guy?

No. It took the entire crate and paid nothing.

I think there's a massive difference between "paying what was required by the offer" and "paying less than was required by the offer" and only one of them makes you a thief.

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

#197

Post by tcp_handshaker »

tedivm wrote: post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

I lost my sympathy for many of the open source projects philosophy, the first time I sent a patch to Redis, one of the committers took as its own, never replying to my messages, and patched it in its name. They deserve Valkey.

And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...

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

#198

Post by rpdillon »

gobdovan wrote: post #142
rpdillon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model". https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine... We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers. With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an o…

A lot of those projects are not companies selling software. They're effectively public infrastructure projects, often governed by non-profit foundations or community institutions. Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the…

Indeed! I just don't think it's on Amazon to fix those institutional and economic realities when they decide to host a project that people find useful.

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

#199

Post by ivan_gammel »

aljgz wrote: post #49

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…

This is the only correct way to do it: choose infrastructure provider that can help you deliver. AWS is good, just not for everyone. It stands somewhere between services like Heroku and bare metal, abstracting a lot of maintenance, but offering some control over scaling architecture. Which means that as a cloud provider it helps to scale, not to build the cheapest and simplest setup possible. If you have VC money and pitch growth, AWS might be a safe choice - 2 years of startup credits they offer via accelerator programs help you not to bother too much about your infra budget and build first 18 months before you start optimizing spending (and then you know it, have good forecasting etc). If you are bootstrapped or indie developer, choose what you can afford and choose something simple. Hetzner, DO etc will work fine.

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

#200

Post by esseph »

goosejuice wrote: post #92
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…

> spending $20k a month on GCP > burning money in cloud I suspect there's two reasons why this happens. One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.

> many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops

Sounds expensive

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