AWS gains is like a bell curve, the value is highest in the middle. If you're very small, you probably don't need it, and DigitalOcean without surprise costs should do. When you start getting large enough, AWS starts paying off, as you get really huge, then it might be cheaper to colocate and hire your own admins. However, I think Netflix shows you can't be too big tho for AWS. Their hybrid approach is probably best. Run on AWS/GCP for things that you just can't afford to fail, then move your non critical workload to colocation.
Self-Hosting Still Pays
121–130 of 343 posts
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#122So, as someone that works for an enterprise that uses AWS... if we went colocation, how would we replicate: SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Lambda, Kinesis, ECR, ALB, Aurora, S3, Glacier, EMR, EKS, multiple AZs, multiple regions, etc? For us to get the same functionality as all of these services in colocated data centers would be an INSANE amount of work, we'd have to hire so many IT/hardware specialists fo…
If you hadn't tethered your software to proprietary AWS services in the first place, you wouldn't have the problem to "replicate" all of that on your own infrastructure. You would simply "have" that stuff - or better said: you'd have the parts that you actually need (having a giant grab bag of ready-to-use cloud services at your disposal tends to entice developers to use them, regardless of actual need, especially in "enterprisey" environments where just another service doesn't really ring a bell with anyone, corporate pays for everything anyway and every developer is constantly engaged in putting more tech buzz words on their CVs).
Queueing and messaging systems, databases, key-value stores, backup solutions etc. have all been invented pre-AWS, and there are battle-tested solutions for all of that out there, actively being used by companies which did not choose to depend on AWS.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ahh very true, I was just assuming that most people are not operating under these conditions.
Those are also areas where AWS will negotiate on price with an enterprise though.
If you're small, you can certainly save money with LightSail.
EC2 gives you better pricing options when you commit to spend though (even if you aren't an enterprise...).
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There is a lot there, and some of it is apples to apples and some is definitely apples to oranges. I'm just saying overall you have the same number of headaches, they are just different headaches. Just last week there was significant degradation that took quite some time to be admitted (admitted might be the wrong word but everyone seemed to know there was an issue with AWS before AWS said their was an issue)
> I don't have to create purchase orders and wait for hardware.
> 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.
This isn't that hard if you still have the expertise in house. Yes it is work and knowhow, but so is AWS networking/wiring, service interop.
> AWS cares
I think this is arguable and YMMV. Sure it depends on who you are and who you talk to.
Im not saying AWS isn't viable tech, and there are 30 ways to skin a cat at the end of the day if you end up with a skinned cat you like you're good to go. I believe most people don't need AWS to accomplish what they are looking for (subjective for sure). I also find it not the savings or experience that is in the marketing materials or sales pitches. This isn't a binary right or wrong decision, all we need is a skinned cat at the end of the day.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#125I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…
> 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper.
Here's the thing though. For most startups, 99% of the value comes from the long right-tail of that 1% chance of explosive viral growth out of left-field.
You're right, most companies aren't ever going to need that kind of overnight scalability. But most of those startups will wind up failing anyway. At the end of the day, everyone's betting that they'll be the exception that makes it big. Without that possibility it's not worth showing up at the table.
And if it does come, you need to be ready to move fast. Like, "we hit the front-page of Reddit and we have 5 minutes to scale up our traffic by 5000%" fast. If you take your time to collect some revenue and circle back, the ship has likely sailed.
I'm not saying thinking this way is sensible for every org. But it's definitely sensible for at least some business models. In particular within the hyper-growth SV startup scene. Foregoing scalability because most startups don't go viral, would be like an aspiring actor foregoing headshots because most auditions don't get callbacks.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No better reliability? Pretty sure EC2 instances and EBS volumes have a lot more redundency than a single server. You really need two colocated servers to replace a single EC2 instance. Still probably cheaper but also a larger time investment. If the difference between AWS vs colocation is an additional FTE then AWS is cheaper.
I'm always nonplussed by the "additional FTE" argument, its obscenely overestimated - """We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up t…
Tftp?
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#127I 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…
Yeah, I'm rather confused too. I run a site with over 10TB transfer per month on a $15 / month Digital Ocean virtual machine. It's fast enough and Cloudflare caches over 80% so I seldom go over the included 2TB of monthly bandwidth.
I'm sure STH has more visitors though.
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#128I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…
> 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Here's the thing though. For most startups, 99% of the value comes from the long right-tail of that 1% chance of explosive viral growth out of left-field. You're right, most companies aren't ever going to need that kind of overnight scalability. But most of those s…
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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#129I'm a bit conflicted about this.
Yes, AWS is expensive. And depending on your workload you can certainly save a fair wedge of cash by colo-ing things.
For wordpress, (the site that is running serverthehome) its perfectly possible to run it in a lambda, with aggressive caching and save a whole bunch of cash. depending on plugins, load and a number of other things, it could be a potential saving of 90%. (plus a massive reduction in attack surface)
Before you ask, yes I do know from bitter experience, parts of the financial times had WP wedged into them. making them fast and secure was an interesting experience.
AWS is only cost effective when you are using ec2 with a duty cycle of less than 50%. This means that you are not using AWS for hosting 24/7 compute.
In terms of storage, There are two compelling offerings, S3 and EFS/lustre. however if you're a large scale EFS user, its better to run your own GPFS system.
The hardest part of "scaling" is orchestration. If you're using K8s, there really isn't much difference between running it on virtual vs real steel, barring bringup scripts(don't get me started on networking in K8s, its totally warped.)
TLDR:
IF you need 100+ machines on 24/7, AWS is going to be more expensive.
If you have transient loads, and the average time on for a machine is 4 hours or less, then AWS is for you. However, you'd better use all the other bits that come with AWS to make it cheaper, like fronting it with fastly/otherCDN
Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays
#130TIL: 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…
> TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value.
Is it only expensive if developer time is free or if it is, let's say, a quarter of a typical Bay Area senior engineer?
Salary levels are vary quite a lot across the world, even looking only at developed countries. At what $/hr level does managing your infrastructure become more cost-effective?