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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]

#81
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 windo…

But they are just using Amazon's Cloudfront. They aren't using SQS or anything. What technology risk is there in setting up Varnish and nginx on Digital Ocean? Or better yet some kind of out-of-the-box open source CDN. You would save a lot more than $2-3k.

I'm referring to Digital Ocean's technology. AWS (and Media Temple) had it's teething pains as well in it's first 4-5 years. I remember some fairly broad outages with their back end storage - but they've mostly dealt with those, and, the risk has gone down.

Note - there is another option - Deploy on multiple Platforms and be smart with your DNS balancing (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/) when serving content. Particularly now that Digital Ocean is in Singapore/Amsterdam/NewYork I can think of some useful things I could do with $10/month droplet (2 Terabytes of Transfer) $300/month, in theory, gets me 20 Terabytes in Asia, 20 Terabytes in Europe, 20 Terabytes in North America. Now, whether DO would shut me down if I actually started using that Transfer is another question altogether...

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

#82
post #71
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Really, why would that be the case? I mean the difference in Latency. A self set up Linode CDN with all six location Tokyo, JP London, UK Newark, NJ Atlanta, GA Dallas, TX Fremont, CA Would have provided 48TB of Pooled bandwidth at a very decent speed and cost around $480. Linode's Network are great, much better then DO. I am not sure if it match CloudFront, which isn't exactly the fastest CDN anyway.

Great info. Did you use rsync and push data out in a tree? How did you handle DNS? Did you do 302 requests to closer servers (by some metric) ?

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

#83
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Whoever the major commercial users are have a financial incentive to keep the service performant. They should all at least be sponsors at some level if they're not already.

Here is a partial log, every /24 that had more than 10k hits in the last 24 hours: https://gist.github.com/evanphx/9361755

Top 5 are hosting providers. Makes sense.

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

#84
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The caching mirror configuration achieves nearly the same thing. In the past, people have wanted to run their own mirrors that we directed people to, but that's got reliability and security issues.

Mirrors shouldn't be a security concern, the signatures of packages should come from "headquarters", same goes for reliability, clients should be able to, and SHOULD pull from multiple sites simultaneously.

Very true on the signatures. Using multiple sites isn't necessary though, imho.

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

#85
post #50

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…

I still don't understand how AWS was preferable to a dedicated server host. Could you elaborate on that?

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know who are the biggest consumers of bandwidth? I would guess the CI servers (Travis, Circle)

I think that bandwidth consumed by Circle should be free, since we're also hosted in AWS. Maybe somebody who knows more about the details of Amazon's billing can confirm/deny.

bandwidth is free in the same region, but not across regions.

*edit and I believe not if you end up using the public IP address instead of the internal ip address.

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

#87
post #75

While by no means insignificant, this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post. I wouldn't be surprised if most startups beat this regularly. The startup whose backend I co-created racks up an AWS bill that hovers around a half million dollars a month. We make use of all of the ways to save with Amazon: pre-paid reserved instances, negotiated deals, etc. And we're not even that big; imagine what…

> this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post.

Can only guess at why folks like any post, but it's not necessarily how large the bill is. Maybe it's how low it is for a service that's widely relied on, or maybe it's the level of transparency, which turned out to include evanphx above showing up to answer questions about the project.

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

#88
post #85
post #50

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…

I still don't understand how AWS was preferable to a dedicated server host. Could you elaborate on that?

Virtualization allows us to spin up new instances and migrate traffic to them. This means we can work entirely from chef and keep things clean. This is important for our volunteers to have a complete picture of an instance and to be able to make new ones.

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

#89
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a partial log, every /24 that had more than 10k hits in the last 24 hours: https://gist.github.com/evanphx/9361755

Top 5 are hosting providers. Makes sense.

isn't bluebox where travis is hosted?
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