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We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#11

Post by jermaustin1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

If you've got funding (or immediate profitability due to traction) and a hockey stick growth rate, the cloud makes sense. It's just the cost of business to support rapidly scaling and developer velocity to try to capture as much of the market as fast as possible. As long as your profit stays ahead of your cloud costs, mission accomplished. If the above does not apply, of course you're going to be better off using a c…

Cloud venders also help by keeping all the network chatter internal and you not paying in/egress fees to connect to your external object store, to your external managed database, to your. The bandwidth costs can be a significant chunk of hosting.

Thankfully, I've never had a popular enough service that made the bandwidth a meaningful cost.

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#12

Post by tonymet »

A more important figure to watch out for is iOPS and burst VCPU . Things are running fine, and when you get a small traffic spike, suddenly everything hangs (IO and cpu time). Then you reluctantly upgrade to solve the problem, leaving you over-resourced for most of the day. Next bump, next upgrade until you stair-step your spending into 6 figures

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#13

Post by toomuchtodo »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #11
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

If you've got funding (or immediate profitability due to traction) and a hockey stick growth rate, the cloud makes sense. It's just the cost of business to support rapidly scaling and developer velocity to try to capture as much of the market as fast as possible. As long as your profit stays ahead of your cloud costs, mission accomplished. If the above does not apply, of course you're going to be better off using a c…

Cloud venders also help by keeping all the network chatter internal and you not paying in/egress fees to connect to your external object store, to your external managed database, to your. The bandwidth costs can be a significant chunk of hosting. Thankfully, I've never had a popular enough service that made the bandwidth a meaningful cost.

I assume you're using Backblaze to host static assets you're rendering from your compute, and using Cloudflare to front and cache those static assets. You'd also use Backblaze for backups. Most network chatter would remain within your compute, and you'd want Redis, Mongo, Elastic, or Postgres as close to the compute (maybe k8s, maybe VMs, up to you) as possible, while shipping the snapshots to your object store. To your point about bandwidth costs, I recommend Backblaze and Cloudflare because they have an arrangement in that regard [1].

Reliably decouple whenever possible.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ (Control-F "partners")

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#15

Post by fishtoaster »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

If you've got funding (or immediate profitability due to traction) and a hockey stick growth rate, the cloud makes sense. It's just the cost of business to support rapidly scaling and developer velocity to try to capture as much of the market as fast as possible. As long as your profit stays ahead of your cloud costs, mission accomplished. If the above does not apply, of course you're going to be better off using a c…

I've talked* to a number of bootstrapped and non-profit companies who are all-in on cloud and I think there are a few use-cases you're missing beyond just "we value dev velocity over cost savings." The biggest one is ease of scaling vs something like colocation. I talked to a non-profit with incredibly spiky traffic based around whenever they get mentioned in the news. Since every dollar matters for them, being able to scale down to a minimal infrastructure between spikes is key to their survival. Another company I talked to has traffic that's reliably 8x larger during US business hours vs night time and uses both autoscaling and on-demand services (dynamodb, aurora serverless) to pay ~1/3 of what they'd have to if they needed to keep that 8x capacity online all the time.

I agree that the velocity/cost tradeoff is one of the better reasons to go cloud, it's far from the only one, and it's certainly not the case that cloud is only for the price insensitive. If nothing else, the proliferation of cloud cost management tools shows plenty of companies care about their cloud spend.

* I work on an aws cost management tool and am doing a lot of customer research interviews this month.

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#16

Post by toomuchtodo »

fishtoaster wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

If you've got funding (or immediate profitability due to traction) and a hockey stick growth rate, the cloud makes sense. It's just the cost of business to support rapidly scaling and developer velocity to try to capture as much of the market as fast as possible. As long as your profit stays ahead of your cloud costs, mission accomplished. If the above does not apply, of course you're going to be better off using a c…

I've talked* to a number of bootstrapped and non-profit companies who are all-in on cloud and I think there are a few use-cases you're missing beyond just "we value dev velocity over cost savings." The biggest one is ease of scaling vs something like colocation. I talked to a non-profit with incredibly spiky traffic based around whenever they get mentioned in the news. Since every dollar matters for them, being able…

My comment is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of cost/benefit for cloud use cases, but only examples for a thread with a half life of ~24 hours.

Please consider publishing your research findings in the future if it doesn't put you at a competitive disadvantage. A rising tide lifts all boats, and cloud spend tracking and modeling is a pain in the ass (as your success demonstrates).

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#17

Post by jermaustin1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
jermaustin1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud venders also help by keeping all the network chatter internal and you not paying in/egress fees to connect to your external object store, to your external managed database, to your. The bandwidth costs can be a significant chunk of hosting. Thankfully, I've never had a popular enough service that made the bandwidth a meaningful cost.

I assume you're using Backblaze to host static assets you're rendering from your compute, and using Cloudflare to front and cache those static assets. You'd also use Backblaze for backups. Most network chatter would remain within your compute, and you'd want Redis, Mongo, Elastic, or Postgres as close to the compute (maybe k8s, maybe VMs, up to you) as possible, while shipping the snapshots to your object store. To y…

For a couple of projects I use the b2/cloudflare "free bandwidth", but I have to pay egress from my droplet to b2 on user uploads, its well within the 1TB that you get for a $5 droplet, and smaller than a rounding error against my total bandwidth bucket of 9TB. So as I said, I'm fine.

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#18

Post by toomuchtodo »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #17
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're using Backblaze to host static assets you're rendering from your compute, and using Cloudflare to front and cache those static assets. You'd also use Backblaze for backups. Most network chatter would remain within your compute, and you'd want Redis, Mongo, Elastic, or Postgres as close to the compute (maybe k8s, maybe VMs, up to you) as possible, while shipping the snapshots to your object store. To y…

For a couple of projects I use the b2/cloudflare "free bandwidth", but I have to pay egress from my droplet to b2 on user uploads, its well within the 1TB that you get for a $5 droplet, and smaller than a rounding error against my total bandwidth bucket of 9TB. So as I said, I'm fine.

Thanks for sharing your use case. I will submit a feature request with Backblaze to support request signing to support user uploads directly to the B2 object store, similar to what S3 supports [1].

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/PresignedUrl...

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#19

Post by ftreml »

smt88 wrote: post #5

Not a big AWS fan or anything, but... > they rely on bad math capabilities of their clients No, they don't. Showing hourly prices makes sense for hourly services. They also provide a detailed cost estimator, because the arithmetic gets pretty detailed: https://calculator.aws > compared to a root server for $10 that easily outperforms a $60 EC2 instance that's really overpriced. Let's say a developer costs $75/hr. If…

> The only people who are optimizing for three-figure costs every month are either:

In our case, we are doing the same for around 50 clients, so it sums up :-)

> Who would do this and why? Why would you have a load balancer in front of a single server?

afaik, for publishing something to the outside world from EKS, that's the only way - even for single node clusters

Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud

#20

Post by ftreml »

thinkindie wrote: post #8

what i think most of people are not getting about cloud providers is that you can surely get better deal out of your money if you go to bare metal, but what you will miss out is a lot of services that come with AWS and that you would end up provision and maintain (e.g. S3, cloudfront). If you are a large business that can afford certain upfront costs to setup certain services cloud services might not be the best plac…

fully agree - that's how we started - getting some servers up and running is quick and easy, but as soon as you can foresee what computer power you will need in the next months and years, baremetal is surely the better choice. If you can deal with the technical stuff, of course.
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