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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

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Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#111

Post by shiftpgdn »

Gravityloss wrote: post #92
steveBK123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol. I…

It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.

Nobody got fired buying IBM^H^H^H Amazon.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#112

Post by bearjaws »

dncornholio wrote: post #94

This title is toxic. Don't push AWS on me. AWS is for huge corporations or for devs who don't know how an internet application works.

> for devs who don't know how an internet application works.

I'd argue AWS is even more risky than any other solution for people who don't know how applications work. Theres about 3,000,000 footguns loaded into AWS.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#113

Post by likeabbas »

von_lohengramm wrote: post #34
fulafel wrote: post #4

It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…

> And don't even get me started on how much work by this time has gone to build the infra-as-code to manage the rube golderg machine, you'll (seriously) have more lines of CDK code than app logic (that was slower to develop & harder to debug than your actual app code per line). Of all the AWS complaints, CDK is one of yours? I absolutely love CDK and its take on infra-as-code where you construct OO constructs imperat…

I love CDK but it does have issues. Like if you wanted to launch your load balancer in a new AZ you would need to structure the code to carefully create the new infrastructure, pivot your DNS to point to the new load balancer, then you can delete the old infra. It’s more complicated then just adding more subnets unfortunately

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#114

Post by tpetry »

fulafel wrote: post #12
philliphaydon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. Why would you care about the redundancy on staging / dev? Just making up things to inflate AWS costs now.

If you're not testing az failovers you're probably just wasting money, like untested backups... But it's true that most people don't know this and aren't testing it because they don't know that az failovers don't automatically just work(tm). And the second downside of course would be asymmetry between the envs and divergence in the IaC etc resulting in more complexity and engineering work. (Of course you're probably…

Are AZ failovers not done automatically? Where can I read more about that?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#115

Post by specialp »

von_lohengramm wrote: post #34
fulafel wrote: post #4

It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…

> And don't even get me started on how much work by this time has gone to build the infra-as-code to manage the rube golderg machine, you'll (seriously) have more lines of CDK code than app logic (that was slower to develop & harder to debug than your actual app code per line). Of all the AWS complaints, CDK is one of yours? I absolutely love CDK and its take on infra-as-code where you construct OO constructs imperat…

I would also be interested in what would be the alternative not in the cloud? AWS deployments can get complicated due to the IAM rules, networking rules, security groups. But if I told someone, bring up a stack like that on bare metal, and make it repeatable what would that be?

For those of us that have worked on systems pre-cloud it does feel sometimes that it was easier in the past. But if you went to explain to someone new what to do, you realize how much you are taking for granted the knowledge and effort involved. Also the long term maintenance.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#116

Post by bombcar »

Gravityloss wrote: post #92
steveBK123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an "onPrem" & "Big Data" guy I've been astonished at how fast the bill can run up. We are in the middle of a cloud adoption where the big proponent started with "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" to "hey so we need to consolidate these 3 DBs, and X is on vacation so lets spin this service down, and lets not worry about multi AZ/region yet" .. all before we even have a PROD launch, lol. I…

It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.

Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#117

Post by brightball »

nojito wrote: post #108
brightball wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the playbook though. It's used by everybody. Microsoft, for example, has all of their certified developer programs. Company that use Microsoft development infrastructure like SQL Server end up getting huge discounts based on how many developers they have on staff with MS certs. This biases companies to hiring people with those certs, which reinforces the perception of value that developers have from getting t…

You'll be hard pressed to meet the business protections a MS contract gets your organization by using someone else.

What type of protections?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#118

Post by bombcar »

philliphaydon wrote: post #73
sokoloff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in colo days, I saw a lot of post-mortems that read “the thing we thought was redundant wasn’t”, leading me to call them “redundant like an appendix [rather than like a kidney]”. We instituted quarterly “game day testing” where we forcibly turned off one of the redundant items in all of our systems. It took us about 6 such cycles before these tests didn’t turn up outages that were just waiting for us. Thinking b…

> Thinking back on those, it’s hard for me to believe that most cloud hosted companies are prepared by checking a box without actually testing. We are talking about MultiAZ, Availability Zones. Not different regions. Setting up redundancy across regions is not easy. But for majority of the people using AWS a single region with MultiAZ is good enough.

It's hard to simulate an AZ failing, and when it does, half the internet goes offline, so people don't really complain that much.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#119

Post by Gravityloss »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #111
Gravityloss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.

Nobody got fired buying IBM^H^H^H Amazon.

If I was a CEO, and my CTO did such a poor job, firing would certainly be a consideration...

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#120

Post by JamesSwift »

count wrote: post #101
andrewstuart wrote: post #17

It is strange that bandwidth/traffic/egress seems to be an afterthought in this post and I think the numbers in the linked blog post are wrong anyway. Bandwidth out of AWS is at best 9 cents per gigabyte, which is HUGE and for many applications the primary cost. Indeed when I saw the title of the post I thought "there's only one number you need to know with AWS, it's 9 cents per gigabyte". Please correct me if I am w…

I've moved probably thousands? of workloads to AWS in the last decade. Not a single one of them has been 'internet facing' or pushed much/any data out of the environment. Average bandwidth bills are I'd guess most of AWS's customers aren't....that kind of shop. If you are, that's definitely something to be aware of though, no doubt.

In every single AWS setup I've worked with (~10), bandwidth has been a not-insignificant portion of the cost. And its been surprising each time for anyone looking at the bill that bandwidth was as much as it was.
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