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Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

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Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#41

Post by TylerE »

ukd1 wrote: post #37
TylerE wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth on DO is (worst case), $20.48/TB, so their 17TB usage would cost $348/month. A far cry from $5,000.

You miss the point; bandwidth from a single source != CDN. Hosting without a CDN would be extremely slow for people that were far (hops) away from DO. CDN's solve this, and other issues.

How much does that really matter? Even going to the otherside of the world is only 200ms or so, and the time taken to run rubygems is hardly a factor in just about any workflow I can imagine.

Think of it another way - what would be more valuble - RubyGems hosted on CDN, or RubyGems on DO and give a couple of grants for talent hackers to work on their gems fulltime for a few months. (ala GSoC)

Even if you ARE concerned about latency, have one download server in the US (E.g. DO), one in Europe (e.g. Hetzner) and one in SE Asia (Not sure who's cheap and good-ish there), and you'd still be a 1/4 the cost of AWS bandwidth or less.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#42

Post by adventured »

patio11 wrote: post #6

While one could probably knock a couple thousand bucks off that if one cared to (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish but invariably comes up in HN discussions of hosting costs), the amazing thing is that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are able to use core infrastructure which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

Serious question: muni water dept billing clerks make over $84,000 per year all in?

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#44

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

adventured wrote: post #42
patio11 wrote: post #6

While one could probably knock a couple thousand bucks off that if one cared to (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish but invariably comes up in HN discussions of hosting costs), the amazing thing is that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are able to use core infrastructure which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

Serious question: muni water dept billing clerks make over $84,000 per year all in?

Once you factor in employer-paid benefits, pension, etc, the employer's cost is something like 140% of the employee's gross pay. This turns the $84,000 into a $60,000 gross salary.

If you include other costs, like the office space and equipment used by the employee, it starts to sound pretty reasonable.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#45

Post by fletchowns »

adventured wrote: post #42
patio11 wrote: post #6

While one could probably knock a couple thousand bucks off that if one cared to (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish but invariably comes up in HN discussions of hosting costs), the amazing thing is that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are able to use core infrastructure which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

Serious question: muni water dept billing clerks make over $84,000 per year all in?

An employee costs a lot more than just the cost of their salary.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#46

Post by ghshephard »

adrianpike wrote: post #20
ghshephard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you including person costs in that $7k? If so, I totally agree.

Only the person costs associated with the configuration/management of the servers - not the people time associated with the code, and high level system administration (which you still need with AWS).

I.E. The people who bought the servers, racked the servers, went down to the CoLo at night, set up the virtualization environment, hooked up the routers, configured the routers, the switches, the firewalls, the vlans -- those people I am including.

I'm not including the DBAs who manage the schema, people who push the code, do the design, etc...

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#47

Post by ghshephard »

ilaksh wrote: post #17
ghshephard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you worked for Rackspace, Linode or Digital Ocean?

I've worked for one of their (direct) large competitors, but haven't worked for those three companies.

I've currently got active accounts with all three of those VPS providers - I love them, and use them every day - particularly Linode, but also Slicehost/Rackspace, and DigitalOcean. I even have a bare metal server at ServerBeach - which I realize I need to shut down...

At this exact instant I have six terminal windows open across DO/Linode. I host a moderately popular California Food Blog, and have about 15 years experience in various companies that have had hosting responsibilities.

I'm not saying you can't do great things with the VPS providers - I'm just suggesting that the tradeoff between saving $2-$3k (at most) with Digital Ocean, would be more than made up by the technology risk, hassle of having to re-invent a lot of the services that you get automatically from AWS.

That could change sometime in the (near) future - but right now, AWS is an easy (and honestly, all things considered, relatively cheap) solution for this type of application.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#48

Post by evanphx »

TylerE wrote: post #41
ukd1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the point; bandwidth from a single source != CDN. Hosting without a CDN would be extremely slow for people that were far (hops) away from DO. CDN's solve this, and other issues.

How much does that really matter? Even going to the otherside of the world is only 200ms or so, and the time taken to run rubygems is hardly a factor in just about any workflow I can imagine. Think of it another way - what would be more valuble - RubyGems hosted on CDN, or RubyGems on DO and give a couple of grants for talent hackers to work on their gems fulltime for a few months. (ala GSoC) Even if you ARE concerne…

Person who pays the bill here. Latency does matter and we're paying an additional $1.5k new in Feb to improve european latency. RubyCentral can afford to spend the money to improve latency issues, so we do!

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#49

Post by stickydink »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #29
stickydink wrote: post #15

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!

This bill is 2/3 bandwidth, and 1/3 compute. 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 wee…

We aren't paying that much in cut just yet. We're a small team (6 engineers in total). You don't have to be pulling in millions per week to get high on the grossing charts. We're probably around 1/4 of what you estimated.

Though you mention delivering the assets. Actually (like a lot of games) we make a big effort in getting under 50MB over-the-air limit on the App Store. The total content for retina iPhone is ~300MB, delivered in parts as you progress in the game. That's kept on S3, downloaded through CloudFront.

But yes! You're right, it's mostly a hell of a lot of JSON flying around.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#50

Post by evanphx »

I thought I'd answer some of your questions, as the person that pays the bill.

1. This can be cheaper on AWS. We've been meaning to move to reserve instances, paying a year at a time, for a while and simply haven't done it yet.

2. Fastly has already donate CDN usage to us, but we haven't fully utilized it yet as we're (slowly) sort out some issues between primary gem serving and the bundler APIs.

3. RubyCentral pays the bill and can afford to do so via the proceeds generated from RubyConf and RailsConf.

4. The administration is an all volunteer (myself included) effort. Because of that, paying a premium to use AWS has it's advantages because it allows more volunteers have help out given the well traveled platform. In the past, RubyGems was hosted on dedicated hardware within Rackspace. While this was certainly cheaper, it created administrative issues. Granted those can be solved without using AWS, but we get back to again desiring to have as low of friction on the administration as possible.

Any other questions?

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