131–140 of 355 posts
I've said this a hundred times and it seems not loud enough. AWS is not cheap because of your server costs. AWS is cheap because of elasticity, velocity (opportunity cost of next feature), and reduced maintenance hours. "The cloud" was never (afaik) was about getting a cheaper VPS. It was about being able to get them on demand, give them back on demand, and generally not have to maintain anything besides your code (a…
I've said this a hundred times and it seems not loud enough. AWS is not cheap because of your server costs. AWS is cheap because of elasticity, velocity (opportunity cost of next feature), and reduced maintenance hours. "The cloud" was never (afaik) was about getting a cheaper VPS. It was about being able to get them on demand, give them back on demand, and generally not have to maintain anything besides your code (a…
Even if he hired 2 FTEs in Hungary to maintain (which I doubt), it would eat 200k at most (probably much less), so they still saved 600k.
For 800k he could probably hire 10 more people, to improve development, sales, marketing, support, and that would be better investment instead of burning money on AWS.
They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…
This is likely only true until they have enough lock-in on those cloud products to really turn the screws and extract maximum profits from people that are TOTALLY screwed by being completely locked into proprietary AWS services... This is basically the natural progression of SaaS...
There's no such thing as a managed service so proprietary that it can't be essentially cloned by another provider. I remember people making the same claims about S3 long ago, and yet there are multiple providers of S3-compatible file storage services now.
Microsoft's Azure provides migration tools for people wanting to leave Amazon's AWS, and they are not alone.
Amazon tends to be (in my opinion) a few years ahead of everybody else, and different competitors focus on different areas of competition, but migrating away from AWS isn't really as hard as the "proprietary" label might make it seem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
extra people? no because I hire generalists actually capable of building software, not overpaid kids only capable of gluing aws services together.
How much of your developer time gets lost to maintaining servers. I used to think this sort of thing was a valuable use of my time but I now have over $200k in annual revenue and we pay less that $5 a month in raw compute (and that's nearly all S3). My Co-founder is always worried about the cost of our AWS but so far we just haven't witnessed it. My mandate has always been the price should be able to scale to 0. So n…
Anyway, you have a tiny on-demand business, as I caveated above. You could run it just fine on a nano ec2 instance if you needed, which is $2-3/mo.
Dedicated hosting providers. I'm so amazed that somehow people completely forget that for literally decades, web host provided dedicated hosting options at fantastic prices. Yes, loooong time ago - to get your dedicated server might have taken a few hours to provision and the instant server access that AWS brought should not be discredited. But large numbers of web host today allow you to programmatically spin up a d…
The one big thing missing from dedicated hosts is an S3 equivalent. Sure, you can get a huge hard drive for cheap but this will not have the durability requirements for storing your precious data. And if you try to use AWS just for S3 then you will pay a lot extra for the bandwidth charges of bringing the data from S3 to your server (something that is free if you were to use EC2 or other AWS services).
Dedicated hosting providers. I'm so amazed that somehow people completely forget that for literally decades, web host provided dedicated hosting options at fantastic prices. Yes, loooong time ago - to get your dedicated server might have taken a few hours to provision and the instant server access that AWS brought should not be discredited. But large numbers of web host today allow you to programmatically spin up a d…
The one big thing missing from dedicated hosts is an S3 equivalent. Sure, you can get a huge hard drive for cheap but this will not have the durability requirements for storing your precious data. And if you try to use AWS just for S3 then you will pay a lot extra for the bandwidth charges of bringing the data from S3 to your server (something that is free if you were to use EC2 or other AWS services).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
R2 and workers are absolutely not cheaper than doing it yourself. They are cheaper than AWS, but both of those services are "value-added" from AWS, and as such have a 20-100x markup.
R2 is radically cheaper than doing it yourself It's a CDN, not a filestore. CDNs mean hundreds of locations.
Cloudflare is a CDN, which, like all of its competitors, is a lot cheaper than doing it yourself because CDNs are a competitive market. There are at least 10 (if not more) CDN providers out there that have footprints in several thousand datacenters, and the product is completely undifferentiated. In a competitive market, you have to charge related to your costs, because your competitors will cut prices to their costs.
In other words, in a competitive market, economies of scale get passed on to consumers. In monopoly and oligopoly markets, that is not the case.
Object stores are becoming a competitive market, with R2, B3, and Wasabi entering the game, but buying your own machines and using Ceph is still cheaper. You still pay for "value adds" like not having to manage the machines yourself.
They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…
Yeah, you need to do calculation of what you are doing right now vs AWS. If you already have a mature team that is doing well optimising the environment, you have stable demand and no need to develop things rapidly then it is very likely that going cloud is poor choice. As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. In my opinion most projects fare much better by just letting go of this "cloud agnostic" and jus…
> It is the same story as with SQL. Trying to use frameworks to keep your app DBMS-agnostic but then nobody ever migrates their apps to another DBMS.
I agree, I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to keeps something (theoretically) cloud or DBMS agnostic, how many problems it's caused, and at the end of the day we could never "easily" move to a different cloud or DBMS without large rewrites.
I built on top of the Serverless Framework and I am constantly kicking myself for doing so (eventually I'll move off it for my main project). It's the worst of all worlds and in the Serverless Framework docs they even have sections for "GCF" vs "Lambda", if I have to write my functions/declarations differently then why am I using your layer on top? I know you get a few things for "free" with the Serverless Framework but once your project grows you run into all sorts of issues that are a PITA to work around. The truth is I'm not leaving AWS Lamda for GCF or whatever Azure has, I quite enjoy my "walled garden" and using an abstraction layer only means I get the lowest common denominator or a headache when trying to do something that is normally easy if you've fully bought in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. If you use and manage AWS resources as you would your own on-prem resources then you're not going to have a good time. As soon as you think you need EC2 instances you need to re-think your architecture. You're probably not using AWS most effectively.
So what should you use for let say, a backend API service? Don't tell me beanstalk/fargate/etc, because they're actually more expensive.