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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#111

Post by AnthonyMouse »

etothepii wrote: post #53
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't very specific about how it works ("defends against the most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks" whatever that means), but it sounds like they're going to drop weird looking packets. The problem is, one of the more common types of DDoS is that the attacker has a botnet with a million machines in it and has them all make legitimate requests to your service all day, thereby…

Why is this unlikely? If you do it several times then they will start to get annoyed and say no but a service like AWS is all about the long term customer relations. I've had bills of ~$1k refunded even though I'm a ~$3 p.m. user.

Waiving a bill for a thousand dollars isn't really costing them a thousand dollars because their underlying cost is much lower than that.

Do the math on how much the S3 bill would be if a million bots each with a 100Mbps cable connection would DDoS you for a month. A thousand dollars is too low by how many orders of magnitude?

You might get them to waive that, maybe, or maybe not. Even at their cost they'd never make it back from you. Do you have any guarantee that they will? What happens if they don't? What happens if they do it once, but the attack hasn't ended?

Re: The cost of cloud

#112

Post by dijit »

Thristle wrote: post #108
dijit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess “small” is open for interpretation. Let’s say 720vCPU for the cluster and about 2.3TiB of memory. These would be quite small nodes if you bought them as machines in a datacenter. Most modern machines have 40+vCPU and 128G+ RAM each. I have 36machines in my GKE nodepool with 20vCPU and 64G of ram. So the aggregate totals sound high but it’s not many. In terms of real machines I could have fewer, like 18 or so.

that compute is much larger then startups i worked for that make millions of dollars/50+ M unique users per month. so obviously not "corporate" sized but definitely not small Looking at the GKE price calc - N2 machines (which i have no idea if they are cheapest per vcpu/mem) * 7 will give you 896 vcpu and 3584 GB ram. that will cost you 21K per month for a zonal cluster we can do napkin calculations but that won't he…

I have definitely looked into getting the costs down, we’re not doing anything truly special.

Making use of best practice costs a lot more than most people expect, interzonal networking is charged, for example; a lot of people also assume that redundancies are built in to things like RDS or CloudSQL, but they’re not, and you should be having replicas.

And of course traffic to databases is interzonal networking.

It adds up, not a lot can be done In Many cases.

Re: The cost of cloud

#113

Post by pclmulqdq »

grogenaut wrote: post #24
bluefirebrand wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds If those companies ever migrated to AWS it would probably still take months to get a small EC2 instance allocated to them. Likely the problem is bureaucracy, not competence.

Well at least then you're only waiting on the bureaucracy and then seconds for AWS instead of beaurocracy and then machine order, setup, provisioning, and re-provisioning time, all with their own bureaucracy time :) When I worked in Sony games I had the choice between AWS and the IT department. The IT department was fine, just it was a 6 month lead time for the hardware and they had a tendency to optimize servers the…

This is the use case that the cloud is really designed for, and most people who are 100% anti-cloud don't realize how peaky many workloads can actually be. However, I doubt that most cloud advocates understand this.

Re: The cost of cloud

#114

Post by rmbyrro »

trabant00 wrote: post #51
csydas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly bu…

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc).…

Thing is: many AWS customers have a sub-100k/mo bill. Savings from this sub-100k person will be relatively lower.

On top of that, for small/mid-sized companies, it's difficult to avoid "employee-lockin". It's perceived as a minor risk to have a vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, often they turn out to be right.

Re: The cost of cloud

#115

Post by bushbaba »

cgio wrote: post #99
Rastonbury wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For business perspective, it's large irreversible upfront investment on capex vs ongoing opex. Sizing and building a data center is risky, execs not wanting to attach their names to $xxM data center project. Cost wise Capex are depreciated, this gives less visibility on month on month costs compared with opex which goes onto income statement. Developer work as capex is intangible asset, which has a bit more 'flexibil…

Depreciation of assets also goes on P&L so no difference on periodic visibility. Also, while not capex, prepayments/reservations for cloud services are in fact assets/liabilities so yes opex vs capex is a good high level distinction but not 100% the essence.

The capex vs opex argument in cloud is more about having better transparency on your infra costs on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. With DCs you need to make large upfront purchases for todays and the next 3 years needs. If you under estimate you’ll be unable to grow further. If you over estimate you’ll be stuck with a bunch of unused infra.

Now say you want to spin up a new feature/product. Can you accurately forecast the compute needs? How difficult would it be to get a large capex PO out through your internal orgs on the unreleased non-revenue functionality.

Compare that to cloud where you pay for what you need. Calculating marginal cost is much easier, and securing budget on an ongoing basis to pay for clouds opex is also much easier, as you can easily show to finance the profit margins.

Re: The cost of cloud

#116

Post by rmbyrro »

Aeolun wrote: post #81
throwaway91822 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintained a datacenter with approx 1000 hypervisors with a very small team and took few weeks to start having production workloads. The effort to maintain hardware was quite little and it was hugely cheaper than any cloud service. Having said that, your requirement is pretty absurd. Billions of people choose to own and maintain houses and cars and cook their own food because it's cheaper than the alternatives. Nob…

> Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks. To be fair, there’s also nobody that would listen to them over a professional mechanic or cook.

And they wouldn't open a commercial restaurant on top of their DIY "home food infrastructure".

Re: The cost of cloud

#117

Post by bushbaba »

izacus wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.

And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired). So what's the balance?

Startups spend way more on staffing than cloud. generally the cloud Premium is less than the cost of a single employee for an early stage startup.

As the startup scales it’s about velocity of product. Spending 10% your time to save 20% on cost is a bad strategy. Instead startups should take that 10% time and invest it into their core product. This would lead to an accelerated timeframe for raising their next funding, which will be much larger than any cost savings. Eventually in the future once growth slows down you can focus on costs to improve profit.

*you still want to ensure your costs grow slower than top line rev.

Re: The cost of cloud

#118

Post by orev »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #100
sherifnada wrote: post #66

If you run your own datacenter, there is also the opportunity cost of slowing down R&D and new development work. Let's say the year is 2012 and Redshift is introduced, completely changing how organizations can generate insights from their data. Running your own datacenter? good luck waiting for the ops team to install something similar! It might take you a couple of quarters assuming they are already competent at it.…

Is this how people really think?

It’s definitely the message cloud marketing has been cramming into people’s brains, and most of them are falling for it. Why am I seeing cloud ads in an airport, and never ads for any other low level technology like Ethernet or LDAP? Because they’re doing an end-run around tech people and targeting CEOs with these completely unrealistic messages.

Re: The cost of cloud

#119

Post by redis_mlc »

curious_cat_163 wrote: post #20

Just curious: if you are an enterprise, what do you think (besides cost) is a compelling argument in 2022 for not going to a public cloud? This is probably a Ask HN, so please do point me to it if you know an existing one.

No post body was provided.

Re: The cost of cloud

#120

Post by Too »

rmbyrro wrote: post #116
Aeolun wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks. To be fair, there’s also nobody that would listen to them over a professional mechanic or cook.

And they wouldn't open a commercial restaurant on top of their DIY "home food infrastructure".

Airbnb? :)

You’ve got a very wide variety of home professionals, especially looking at YouTubers, some being fantastic, while others …not so much.

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