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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#101

Post by Zelphyr »

umvi wrote: post #75
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Well for me it's more like... why should I pay $5/month for the cheapest DO droplet for a little utility web app that gets less than one hit per day? Seems like a waste to pay for a month of VM time when only a few milliseconds are actually used. I like the idea of FaaS where I'm not being charged when my code isn't running.

For me it's because I don't want to spend more time configuring a hosting environment than it took to write the utility web app. I can spin up a DigitalOcean droplet in two minutes and spend the other 58 minutes writing the code.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#102

Post by busterarm »

Zelphyr wrote: post #95
busterarm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware. For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking th…

I've mentioned this elsewhere but; I'm not arguing co-location over cloud. I'm arguing inexpensive cloud like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail over a complex AWS configuration designed to scale with near infinite flexibility. Why does a product that gets 100 visitors a day need that? $5-10/month serves them just fine.

LightSail isn't any cheaper than the EC2 instance types backing it. Everything else (VPCs, IAM roles, etc) doesn't have a cost associated.

What you're missing is that cost/complexity-wise, LightSail and EC2 are equivalent. The only difference between them is your interface to it. LightSail doesn't give you some pretty necessary knobs to kick things into a working state when the EC2 instances are having a burger. In fact, the last time I used LightSail and had a problem with unavailable instances, I just ran the ec2 api commands against the lightsail instance IDs to solve my problem.

DigitalOcean has some networking properties that make it extremely undesirable for some use cases and Linode is frequently the target of massive global DDOS. I remember well a few years ago the Christmas Eve Linode DDOS because I had to work 20 hours that day.

Thankfully it was only 20 hours because we were already in the process of moving off of Linode and we just decided to flip all of the switches to serve out of AWS. Most of the time was spent waiting on DNS TTLs.

Instance costs across all of the cloud providers are pretty competitive. Where AWS and Google Cloud and Azure are more expensive are in those "extra" services where you would be paying people to run infrastructure (elasticsearch, sql databases, etc). DO, Linode, etc, don't give you that option -- it's not an apples-to-apples comparison....and in most cases you shouldn't use some of these things. Definitely no service where you can't just pick up and go use some other hosting tomorrow. Cloud vendor lock-in is real.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#103

Post by welterde »

umvi wrote: post #75
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Well for me it's more like... why should I pay $5/month for the cheapest DO droplet for a little utility web app that gets less than one hit per day? Seems like a waste to pay for a month of VM time when only a few milliseconds are actually used. I like the idea of FaaS where I'm not being charged when my code isn't running.

Classical web hosting still exists. Probably even has less vendor lock-in and is less likely to bankrupt you if someone posts the small utility web app on HN.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#104

Post by oblio »

candiodari wrote: post #82
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, AWS isn't for a smaller company. When you have a real finance department that vets each third party or have some governmental requirement to get three quotes for each new service (part of requirements set out to minimize grift in sourcing), having a single bill that can be expanded to include new projects and services makes it a little simple. This causes a problem during cost cutting because unless it's a prio…

And yet, AWS isn't for a really larger company either. At some point the bills become so huge that running your own IT and datacenters is cheaper. Usually a lot. Even when it means building some AWS services yourself. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/dropbox-aws/

> These large companies rely on these established solutions, paying much bigger bills than Dropbox – surely, there must be a good reason for it. Maybe the answer is this: the cloud isn’t the answer for everyone, but it probably is for most companies.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#105

Post by Zelphyr »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #99
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Is it safe to assume these are nascent startups that need scale to succeed? If that's the case, then you are probably right that most will never need to scale. You can build them a solution that can't scale and it'll be the correct solution for the 90% that fail. And it'll be the wrong solution for the 10% that succeed.

The 10% that succeed won't need that kind of scale on the day they launch though. Probably not even the first 12-24 months after they launch. There will be plenty of time to see what kinds of traffic they really can expect and then plan for that.

In other words; I can build them something for $10,000 that gets them to market in a month that may not be what they need in five years or I can build them something for $100,000 that gets them to market in a year, meanwhile, their scrappy competitor launched 11 months before them.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#106

Post by johnklos »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

This is SO myopic.

You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server?

This is incredibly naive.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#107

Post by darth_avocado »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

clearly you've never had to deal with physical servers. A dead mouse once caused an outage (fire) that took an entire dev team days to fix. I'd rather not deal with that in my lifetime.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#108

Post by kroolik »

anonfornoreason wrote: post #27
Rantenki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$. Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down. Yes, y…

I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but wit…

You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great!

This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora.

Once you have expertise doing X, it might seem wrong paying premium to cloud providers to do the same thing for you. But other companies don't have you on board. They save themselves time recruiting two sysops with partcular skillset, and spin up a working HA rdbms in a day.

Comparing ec2 and vms on xenserver doesn't sound convincing because ec2 itself is simple. But comparing HA Aurora or Dynamo cluster to on-prem solution is a different beast. As a dev, I don't really want to know all the gore details of managing HA rabbitmq, and might opt for SQS instead.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#109

Post by deeviant »

busterarm wrote: post #51
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

This sounds like a Matthew McConaughey AWS commercial rather than a thought-out technical argument.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#110

Post by outworlder »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

> If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

They do not. We run many thousands of instances on AWS. Sure, given our scale, every week we get a couple of instance retirement emails. Usually they are issued many days in advance(sometimes, weeks). Per year, we may get a handful of instances that are suddenly unresponsive.

And we don't care. You know why? Because it's just a matter of issuing stop/start. Done! Server is back up, potentially even in a different datacenter, but it is none the wiser. It looks like a reboot. Even better, add an auto-recovery alert and AWS will do this for you, automatically. If part of an ASG, add health checks.

For the most part, we don't even notice when instances go down. Our workloads are engineered to be fault-tolerant. If a meteor destroys one AWS datacenter, it might temporarily take out some instances. So what? New ones will be back very shortly, all the while databases will fail-over, etc.

If these were physical instances, someone would have to do the maintenance work, purchase orders, wait for hardware to arrive, and so on and so forth. And, for most "co-location" scenarios, if your datacenter has issues, everything will go down. A single AZ in AWS has multiple datacenters, you might not even be affected if one goes up in flames.

But let's say you run a massive pet server farm and none of then can go down for any period of time. You have given names and everything, and you celebrate their birthdays. Cool. Run that on GCP then. They do auto-migration. I've never seen an instance go down.

> Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response

This is true. However, if you are running your own hardware, you have to do that IN ADDITION TO dealing with hardware and datacenter shenanigans, with either a specialized (and expensive) workforce, or a barely capable one that's shoehorned and doing double duty, with zero economies of scale, probably in a single data-center.

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