21–30 of 153 posts
The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
I had no idea it cost this much to host rubygems.org. The website says that hosting is provided by BlueBox?
The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers. In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has? I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure…
At a glance, this looks like AWS being used like a dedicated host, which as demonstrated, isn't exactly cheap. There's no spot or even reserved pricing, just a bunch of on-demand instances that were up 24/7 for all 28 days in February. Seems like a genuine dedicated host, reserved instances or an architecture that leverages the elastic in elastic compute cloud would be worth considering.
A lot of the price is bandwidth. They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations). (Although, actually, while I verified their total dollars spent is greater than what would be required to get a fundamentally better deal on bandwidth, I didn't take into consid…
The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
> The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money. They could get an even better deal by just going through a dedicated server provider (or even better, colocating). There's little advantage with choosing DO versus going with a dedicated server provider (and again, colocating). I guess the advantage would be the control panel that they wouldn't use, having a few one-click stac…
For one datacenter, but CloudFront gets you 40+.
The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
> The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money. They could get an even better deal by just going through a dedicated server provider (or even better, colocating). There's little advantage with choosing DO versus going with a dedicated server provider (and again, colocating). I guess the advantage would be the control panel that they wouldn't use, having a few one-click stac…
The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
It's often difficult to migrate providers when the application is complex or the owners may see the value in the provider. They're falling right into the hands of most cloud providers evil plans, they make it cheap to get started but as time moves on, it becomes more difficult to migrate away.
Everything needed to build the rubygems.org stack can be found at https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-aws
Right now we're a top 25 grossing iPhone game developer. The last AWS bill I saw was January's, a little under $200k. I'm not on the server team, so I don't know exactly what contributes most to it. But part of me really thinks it could be reduced!
Some games require massive amounts of compute, but the bandwidth to deliver the assets is generally paid by Apple.
I can guarantee you, your company is paying a metric fuck-ton more. It is called Apple's 30% cut.
Your company is paying AWS $200k to pass json messages around for analytics and social aspects of the game. You are paying Apple something like $1 million per week to distribute, market, and collect payments for the game.
I am not saying your company is dumb, or Apple is evil. I am saying your experience and anecdote isn't relevant to Ruby Gems, and offering a different way to think about the games industry vs. the open source software distribution world.
At a glance, this looks like AWS being used like a dedicated host, which as demonstrated, isn't exactly cheap. There's no spot or even reserved pricing, just a bunch of on-demand instances that were up 24/7 for all 28 days in February. Seems like a genuine dedicated host, reserved instances or an architecture that leverages the elastic in elastic compute cloud would be worth considering.
A lot of the price is bandwidth. They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations). (Although, actually, while I verified their total dollars spent is greater than what would be required to get a fundamentally better deal on bandwidth, I didn't take into consid…
You can negotiate with AWS to get the same Cloudfront pricing as you would with Akamai. I know because I'm in the the process right now.
More importantly, they could be running on 2-3 dedicated servers at OVH or Hetzer, and have Cloudflare in front of them instead of Cloudfront. Or, if they insist on Cloudfront, switch to Price Class 100 (US and EU only). Its cheaper, and latency isn't that much higher vs serving out of all Cloudfront locations.
As long as most of your content is static, and you have a solid CDN, your origin doesn't have to be highly reliable or scalable. Its just an object store to persist data for the CDN.