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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#101

Post by immibis »

fcpk wrote: post #5

yet another obsessive take on "cloud is bad and expensive" eh? I think they vastly forget the value of some SaaS offerings in terms of time saving for small companies. running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. sure if the setup is simple and only requires a few classic components, this is way cheaper and for a 99.9%…

> running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people

Then don't. If your team and budget are small enough not to hire a sysadmin, then your workload is (almost certainly) small enough to fit on one server, one Postgres database, Jenkins or a bash script, and certainly no k8s.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#102

Post by noosphr »

saulpw wrote: post #82
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Computing power (compute, memory, storage) has increased 100x or more since 2005, but AWS prices are not proportionally cheaper. So where you were getting a reasonable value in ~2012, that value is no longer reasonable, and by an increasing margin.

This is the big one.

In 2006 when the first EC2 instances showed up they were on par with an ok laptop and would take 24 months to pay enough in rent to cover the cost of hardware.

Today the smallest instance is a joke and the medium instances are the size of a 5 year old phone. It takes between 3 to 6 months to pay enough in rent to cover the cost of the hardware.

What was a great deal in 2006 is a terrible one today.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#103

Post by immibis »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #73
kelnos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've gone a little nuts defining "production system" these days. I've worked for companies with zero-downtime deployments and quite a lot of redundancy for high availability, and for some applications it's definitely worthwhile. But I think for many (most?) businesses, one nine is just fine. That's perfectly doable by one person, even if you want, say, >=96% uptime, which allows for 350 hours of downtime per…

One thing that AWS, Google and Azure do that your own systems don't is release their updates whenever it suits them, often taking down your business down in the middle of the day with their own problems. You can't fix it, you can't rollback what you just did and get back up and running you just have to sit and wait. That is quite different to a business that turns off its boxes for an hour at 0100 Sunday morning to d…

It also feels like AWS (or Azure) isn't really that much more reliable than your own thing. But half the internet is down at the same time so you don't get blamed as much.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#104

Post by nineteen999 »

shooker435 wrote: post #23

The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern. This means that teams must make…

> This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner

Right. But none of the cloud providers encourage that mode of thinking, since they all have complete different frontends, API's, different versions of the same services (load balancers, storage) etc. Even if you standardize on k8s, the implementation can be chalk and cheese between two cloud providers. The lock in is way worse with cloud providers.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#105

Post by kiwijamo »

brendamn wrote: post #26

If you’re going to write a post about why self-hosting is better than cloud*, then it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site loads in under a minute. * at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.

Loaded instantly for me. :)

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#106

Post by kiwijamo »

selectively wrote: post #27
ranger_danger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have also threatened to cancel my account more than once because I typed "ipfs daemon". https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/issues/10327 https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/moved-ipfs-node-result-netscan-d... >This happens with Hetzner all the time because they have no VLANs and all customers are on a single LAN and IPFS tries to discover other nodes in the same LAN by default.

Hetzner is also sinkholed by lots of EDR products because they host a ton of malicious garbage. They are a bad actor.

Same as AWS. I've added quite a few AWS ip ranges to my firewall.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#107

Post by johnea »

The idea that it's cheaper not to use AWS is clear.

I was hoping to see more about porting AWS proprietary features into generic servers.

A big part of the problem isn't just monthly rent, it's vendor lock-in. When your whole system is implemented using AWS specific features, you're not going to run anywhere else.

AWS, and any other third party vendor, can and does obsolete features. Then you're having to port your system just to keep it running on the third party service.

Once you're implemented in a generic server, in a VPS, or your mom's basement, you're free to move to any other hosting provider, data center, whatever.

The loss of understanding that 3rd party dependencies are not good for your company or project, seems a bigger loss to the technical community than FTP hacking...

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#108

Post by tamimio »

Why it feels like the author is too young and just had breaking discovery that he can have servers without clouds!? Always been a thing, clouds were/are used in areas where it would be better, say some integration with already existing infrastructure, or some quick scaling. Just like everything, there’s always upside and downside, and it’s just about what suits your needs. The author should next try an on-prem approach where he even controls the hardware, even more cheaper but with extra maintenance. For example, I found a used server a while ago (44 Core HP Z840 WorkStation Dual Xeon E5-2699 V4 512GB RAM) for around $1000, that’s a one time pay.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#109

Post by John23832 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require.

You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#110

Post by tamimio »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #18

"I FINALLY got everything off the cloud" ... ... "P.S. follow me on Twitter" So uh, not everything

It’s probably the whole point, so he can post later how he paid the $120 from twitter income and now running it for free :)
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