My advise as a CTO is to avoid AWS or GCS in all stages of a healthy company. The danger of getting locked-in. The aggressive sales team bugging you every week. The impossible to comprehend pricing model.
Hire yourself a decent set of says engineers and go for VMs in an early stage of the company. A switch to bare metal could be taken in a later stage. No always needed.
Self-Hosting Still Pays
111–120 of 343 posts
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I have to echo everything you're saying here.
Anyone putting anything in "the cloud" and not designing for failure as a first principle is shooting themselves in the foot. I've encountered a lot of folks trying to do this and building systems that can't tolerate downtime and it starts long, difficult conversations always.
But I've never once needed to actually pay attention to those instance retirement emails or GCP auto-migrations. We've built to expect it and we let the provider handle that for us.
Time saved for everyone.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#113The cloud enables much faster iterations and experimentstions, I rarely see this factored into the cost of colo/on-prem.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#114TIL: 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.
We moved to AWS because bad things happen there less often than they were happening to us with various DC providers we used to use.
I've never had AWS tell us that they can't find the server we're renting that suffered HDD failure. AWS has never cut us off from the Internet because a sysop typed a command in the wrong session.
And we find AWS support to be far quicker to respond, and far more effective, than our previous providers.
So, YMMV, but AWS is pretty damn good for our requirements.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have extensive infrastructure running across 3 separate org accounts for blast radius, with multiple separate VPCs per org, RDS databases across multiple AZs, and a large variety of instances. Everything is built up and torn down via Terraform, and ZERO maintenance tasks are done via the console. Changes to infrastructure configuration are managed via CAB which approves PRs on Github which are automatically deploye…
We see just as much downtown with AWS with DR/HA/MTTR as with colo. You still have to set it all up and maintain it, its just different setup and maintenance than if you actually have a servers in DCs. Most people still have the learning curve with AWS and usually do it incorrectly, or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring. It's really a matter of who within the company wants to know…
> or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring.
Please compare apples to apples. If you are comparing to colo, I don't know of any colocation facilities which provide higher level services (say, Kinesis). They might provide some features like CDNs, but nothing very fancy.
You are left with a EC2 vs servers racked in some colocation facility comparison.
At that point, it's not even fair. I can run a terraform script and spin up a copy of the production environment in minutes. I don't have to create purchase orders and wait for hardware. I don't have to issue tickets. If any machine goes down it can be recovered in minutes, and it will spin up in another hypervisor, maybe even a different datacenter.
You don't have to spend time and resources with discussions on how the 'network topology' is going to look like, and then send people off to implement and wire up stuff.
You don't have to spend cycles diagnosing issues just to find out that there's a bad transceiver in a NIC somewhere. YOU DONT CARE. AWS cares and, even if they can't find an issue, stop/start, new hardware in minutes.
You cannot compare the two in good faith. Sure, it might make sense to host some workloads in a colo, but you are giving up a lot.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t go for AWS for EC2. You go for AWS because in half a day you can whip up a secure, managed and auto scaling app using their proprietary services like SQS, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, Dynamo etc.
Right, but my argument is that most products--especially when the company is a startup--doesn't need that kind of scalability and won't for quite some time, if ever. They all start out starry-eyed thinking they're the next unicorn and oh-my-gawd what if we start getting the kind of traffic Facebook gets tomorrow?! That's just not a reality. Facebook themselves didn't get that traffic for several years.
I think you're missing the benefits outside of scalability. There are a lot of native AWS services that help you to quickly prototype and build reliable solutions. A startup saves a lot of money (and time) by not needing to hire a whole devops team to manage various service clusters.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
> LightSail isn't any cheaper than the EC2 instance types backing it.
Sure it is: Lightsail includes plenty of transfer with its price. At the $10 tier you get 3tb thrown in. If you're doing anything that burns even a modest amount of transfer, the price difference will be sizable.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#118I tried to back into the estimates here, and I can't quite get my head around them.
$737.19 of transfer out is 8TB per month at standard EC2->internet prices, which is fine; something like 25 Mb/s on average.
$3558.56 for EC2 is something like 20 x m5a.2xlarge ... and that makes no sense to me. That's 160 vCPUs and 640GB of RAM.
How does a WP site like that possibly need that much compute? The whole thing feels like it ought to be a pair of instances plus $20 a month for Cloudflare.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The whole point of my statement was that it's NOT a technical argument.
Anyone with significant experience and maturity knows this already. Being technically correct doesn't matter if you've created more work for yourself than you can handle.
"Scalability" is much more often a people management problem rather than a technical one. Please come back and tell me how you feel about this when you have 10^4+ servers in your care.
The nice thing about well-orchestrated cloud is that you can run your infrastructure the same way whether you have 10^1 or 10^5.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#120If I'm reading the source html pages of "servethehome.com" correctly, it's a Wordpress site and that's what Patrick is basing hosting cost comparisons on. I've mentioned before[0] that AWS too expensive and overkill for Wordpress sites (especially simpler non-ecommerce ones). I don't think this conclusion is controversial. Simpler hosting requirements is why Patrick only has to spend 4 hours of labor in 1 year to upg…
Totally correct. I mention that a bit in the video as well. Also - I do not view this as an AWS v. Colo. We use AWS for some services as well so it is a specific part of the workload we run (not just WP) that is in our hosting cluster.
And again, this is a fraction of what we have in data cetners due to the labs and such.