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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

#111

Post by adammarples »

veqq wrote: post #89
jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

In English, x or time(s) after a number marks a "unit" used by various verbs. A 10x increase. Increase by 10x. Go up 10x. Some of these verbs are negative like decrease or save. "Save 10x" is the same as "divide by 10". Four times less, 5 times smaller etc. are long attested.

No, x literally means multiply. It doesn't somehow also mean divide. They should use the percent sign, it's what it is for. 10x my costs means 10 x mycost, it's literally an equation

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

#112

Post by jaredhallen »

gerdesj wrote: post #99
jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

Cost of item = 10 First discounted cost of item = 9 => First saving = 1 Second discounted cost of item = 6 => Second saving = 4 Second saving is 4x first saving. (Edit - formatting)

But that's 4x the savings compared to another saving. I suppose you've upped the pedantry and are technically correct, but that's a pretty narrow use case and not the one used in the article.

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

#113

Post by jaredhallen »

immibis wrote: post #91
jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

Consider it as getting 10x the resources for the same price - that is, the resource-to-price ratio is 10x. Except you don't need 10x the resources so you choose to get 1x the resources for 0.1x the price instead.

Sure. Getting 10x the resources for the same price is another valid way to express the thought. Saving 10x isn't, though.

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

#114

Post by jaredhallen »

veqq wrote: post #89
jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

In English, x or time(s) after a number marks a "unit" used by various verbs. A 10x increase. Increase by 10x. Go up 10x. Some of these verbs are negative like decrease or save. "Save 10x" is the same as "divide by 10". Four times less, 5 times smaller etc. are long attested.

Agree to disagree.

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

#115

Post by system2 »

Sometimes I think I am out of the loop for using dedicated servers like OVH, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner, while others spend thousands of dollars for the things I spend barely a few hundred. This always made me think I am not a good developer enough to know the cutting-edge things others know.

Turns out most of the developers suck at handling barebones with a Linux distro + nginx and some other plugins to do the same things as the fancy-named aws stuff. If you are in the same boat, just know that most of these developers suck at what they are doing and don't care about the company budget.

You can get 99.99% of the things done with barebone + Cloudflare, including multiserver redundancy, at a fraction of AWS and Azure costs. Most of these technologies are just fancy words for basic Linux services.

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

#116

Post by paulryanrogers »

dabockster wrote: post #96
beeflet wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death, the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of money. For a blog that doesn't earn you anything, the choice is clear. Besides, you can just put it behind cloudflare for free.

> The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged to death Learn 2 load balance

If only it were that simple. Don't forget:

Learn 2 HA

Learn 2 MFA

Learn 2 backup

Learn 2 recover within RTO

Learn 2 ETL

Learn 2 queue

Learn 2 scale horizontally

Learn 2 audit log

Learn 2 SEIM

Learn 2 continuously gather SOC evidence

...

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

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

rtpg wrote: post #98
zigzag312 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few clicks. Getting through AWS documentation can be fairly time consuming.

Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time consuming. There's a question of whether you want to spend time learning AWS or spend time learning your DB's hand-rolled backup options (on top of the question of whether learning AWS's thing even absolves you of understanding your DB's internals anyways!) I do think there's value in "just" doing a thing instead of relying on the wrapper. Whether that's eas…

> Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time consuming.

apt install automysqlbackup autopostgresqlbackup

Though if you have proper filesystem snapshots then they should always see your database as consistent, right? So you can even skip database tools and just learn to make and download snapshots.

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

#118

Post by PaulKeeble »

immibis wrote: post #103
PaulKeeble wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its the "No one gets blamed for going IBM" thing in the modern era. They are making it someone elses fault and absolves the blame. The problem is if your competitor is still up you could be loosing customers on average mid day outage, even if they are down for 3x as long its not when it matters.

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

#119

Post by fragmede »

John23832 wrote: post #109
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.

You can get quite far without that box, even, and just use Cloudflare R2 as free static hosting.

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

#120

Post by koito17 »

John23832 wrote: post #109
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.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary.

Despite some pages issuing up to 8 database queries, I haven't seen responses take more than about 4 - 5 ms to generate. Since I have 16 GB of RAM to spare, I just let SQLite mmap the whole the database and store temp tables in RAM. I can further optimize the backend by e.g. replacing Tera with Askama and optimizing the SQL queries, but the easiest win for latency is to just run the binary in a VPS close to my users. However, the current setup works so well that I just see no point to changing what little "infrastructure" I've built. The other cool thing is the fact that the backend + litestream uses at most ~64 MB of RAM. Plenty of compute and RAM to spare.

It's also neat being able to allocate a few cores on the same machine to run self-hosted GitHub actions, so you can have the same machine doing CI checks, rebuilding the binary, and restarting the service. Turns out the base model M4 is really fast at compiling code compared to just about every single cloud computer I've ever used at previous jobs.

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