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Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

squeaky.ai

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Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#111

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

> In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason.

Not no reason; it adds work and risks incompatibility. Now, that work might be relatively small, and most software these days is compatible with aarch64, but compared to amd64 (which is the de-facto standard, already supported by everything, the default without needing to set anything up) it's still something, and businesses are risk-averse.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#112

Post by sbarre »

lostmsu wrote: post #61
sbarre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I work in a large 30,000 employee company. Everyone gets a Windows machine by default. 6 years ago our department of 200 people "went rogue" and started provisioning Macs, because it was the only way we could hire developers and provide a good developer experience for the work we were doing. This took some convincing, but it was possible. We agreed to be unsupported by the in-house help desk, but…

Are your developers forced to use laptops?

Our company issues laptops yes, because everyone can choose to either work at home or in the office.

That said, we also supply external monitors, keyboards and mice for anyone who wants one, and every worker has a discretionary budget to spend on home office accommodations (chair, standing desk, etc).

I also suspect if a developer specifically asked for a desktop computer and could (lightly) justify the need for it, we would get them a desktop, and a laptop.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#113

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jiggawatts wrote: post #87
gryf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost savings are mostly consolidation, scaling down stuff we don't need (we have peak hours) and migrating stuff to kubernetes and packing it tight.

Despite that you were paying 8x the previous amount!? How is that possible? E.g.: With Kubernetes and AWS you ought to be able to use clusters with a base of "reserved" capacity plus spot pricing for peak hours on top, right? From what I've seen (in my limited experience), that should reduce costs for most orgs, not increase them!

> How is that possible?

TLDR: AWS is really expensive compared the equivalent compute elsewhere, to the point of overwhelming its advantages.

---

Long answer that I wrote before realizing how long it was:

I'm not the person you're replying to, I don't know the exact details, I don't know their company. However:) I can tell you that AWS is a factor more expensive than renting or owning your own metal. They (claim to) offset this by 1. taking care of management for you so you need fewer ops people, and 2. letting you scale up and down as needed. The first is plausibly legitimate, but really depends on the size of your compute and the size of your human teams (and how much benefit you get from AWS-managed offerings). The second can help, but only if you've got really spiky workloads, that are only really running a tiny fraction of the time, with absolutely tiny base load. Scaling up and down helps reduce your AWS bill compared to not scaling up and down on AWS, of course, but it doesn't help that much when their elastic offerings are that much more expensive. Say, for the sake of argument that you can run most of your EC2 instances just 6 hours a day, during peak hours. That lets you win... if, and only if, EC2 instances are less than 4x the cost of just owning your own bare metal machines. I've gone so far as trying to price out using spot instances for CI work - just selectively, when they were the cheapest! - to augment instances on Hetzner Cloud. Guess what? They're so expensive that even at spot prices EC2 is a factor more expensive.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#114

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Reitet00 wrote: post #15
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I started to build today, I'd definitely go for Hetzner Cloud. There is zero possibility that I get surprised by a large bill.

Too bad Hetzner doesn't have cheaper Arm servers available. Their Ampere pricing is not really convincing.

Who cares? Their x86 servers are cheap enough to not care about ARM.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#115

Post by lostmsu »

scarface74 wrote: post #106
lostmsu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every conference room could have a device to facilitate presentation.

What device is going to have my PowerPoint slides, my IDE, my logged in AWS account, etc and everything else I need for demos? Where I work, every conference room in every corporate office has a TV and a dongle that you can plug in via either HDMI or USB C.

Any thin client would do.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#116

Post by estebank »

andrewstuart wrote: post #96
moloch-hai wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems very diplomatic of you to say you found Rust hard to learn, rather than that it was hard to make Rust do what you wanted. You seem very clear on what you wanted to do.

I managed to build it without really grasping Rust by hacking around and looking at examples of how other stuff worked that I wanted to do, and by avoiding doing things in Rust that I didn't understand - stuff as basic as function calls. The resulting code worked but was garbage and at the end of the day Rust had not clicked for me and being fluent in it still felt a distant goal. I love the idea of Rust but I don't…

If you don't mind, what where the things that were hard to deal with? You mention "function calls", but I'd like to understand what that actually means in practice. This kind of negative feedback is useful to improve Rust for any other newcomers, even if we have already soured you for good.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#117

Post by scarface74 »

lostmsu wrote: post #115
scarface74 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What device is going to have my PowerPoint slides, my IDE, my logged in AWS account, etc and everything else I need for demos? Where I work, every conference room in every corporate office has a TV and a dongle that you can plug in via either HDMI or USB C.

Any thin client would do.

I’m going to have a “thin client” with my exact setup and my IDE, PowerPoint slides etc? Are you proposing that I work from a thin client? What happens when I’m working from home?

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#118

Post by johnklos »

Not saying what you're switching from makes the title a bit click-baity.

The current title implies that AWS (Graviton or not) is somehow cheaper than other things, when AWS is quite often one of the priciest options out there.

"Switching from AWS to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill", on the other hand, is an article worth examining.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#119

Post by lostmsu »

scarface74 wrote: post #117
lostmsu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thin client would do.

I’m going to have a “thin client” with my exact setup and my IDE, PowerPoint slides etc? Are you proposing that I work from a thin client? What happens when I’m working from home?

It's only for meeting rooms.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#120

Post by scarface74 »

lostmsu wrote: post #119
scarface74 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to have a “thin client” with my exact setup and my IDE, PowerPoint slides etc? Are you proposing that I work from a thin client? What happens when I’m working from home?

It's only for meeting rooms.

So in a meeting, is this person who is presenting going to copy everything they need from their desktop? If it’s a group meeting will no one else have their computers with them?
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