Slashing data transfer costs in AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#131

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #111

overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

My small business once spend 50k per month on AWS. We brought that back to 800 dollars for a similar setup at Hetzner. I find this a significant number.

"Yea this small VPS provider with 1% of the features is just as good as AWS to us" yea that's because you aren't using features as basic as AWS Nitro Enclaves and you are years behind even basic cloud security.

Hetzner is for running homelabs and basic compute, not businesses. That's why EU companies constantly ignore EU rulings on US-EU privacy shield because there's just no alternative to American cloud providers yet.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#132

Post by api » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:33 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #58

api wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a loss leader. Cloud bandwidth pricing is almost pure profit.

It's absolutely amazing that so many devs don't realise this. They seem to think that bandwidth should cost a few cents a month, when in reality it is virtually free. Perhaps the 7c/GB charge was reasonable when AWS came out 15 years ago, but networking has got orders of magnitude cheaper and faster in the intervening time period. What's more odd now that 1gigabit+ home connections are available, it should be obvious…

I feel like an entire generation of devs have been weirdly brainwashed by cloud to believe that a ton of things need to be very complex and expensive.

Of course it’s also a zero interest rate phenomenon. We are exiting a >10 year era when the name of the game was simply to grow and anything in your way could be dealt with by just throwing money at it. Nobody cared about cost as long as growth numbers went up.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#133

Post by icedchai » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #111

overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

My small business once spend 50k per month on AWS. We brought that back to 800 dollars for a similar setup at Hetzner. I find this a significant number.

What's your Hetzner setup look like? 98% cost savings makes me curious...

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#134

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

lijok wrote: post #109

ttul wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetence. Take my friend’s company for instance. They were frustrated paying $60K/mo to Amazon so their brilliant sysadmin bought $600K of servers and moved them into a cheap colo. Over Christmas, everything died, and the brilliant sysadmin was on holiday. Nobody could get things going again for many days and so their entire SaaS business was failing. They lost a lot of business and trust as a result. The sysadmi…

No key person risk management -> no risk register -> no management. Your friends company will fail regardless of poor sysadmin decision making or not. They need to hire competent management ASAP.

This is basically the logic of people who say the cloud is too expensive, you have to ignore so many things to make being on premise logical. Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft can, because if you can you are just making huge sacrifices somewhere (usually time, which is why reddit sysadmins complain about how much work they have while defending being on-premise because they couldn't possibly be wrong).

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#135

Post by Aissen » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #97

unclebucknasty wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is virtually free The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle. So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?

That's why I said 'virtually'. Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month. Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.

And at scale, AWS does not pay the HE price. So add another factor 3 to 10 there.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#136

Post by OrvalWintermute » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

ttul wrote: post #107

qvrjuec wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab What does this mean? They steal company resources for themselves, or just configure things incompetently?

Incompetence. Take my friend’s company for instance. They were frustrated paying $60K/mo to Amazon so their brilliant sysadmin bought $600K of servers and moved them into a cheap colo. Over Christmas, everything died, and the brilliant sysadmin was on holiday. Nobody could get things going again for many days and so their entire SaaS business was failing. They lost a lot of business and trust as a result. The sysadmi…

> brilliant sysadmin was on holiday

> entire SaaS business

> [ Unmentioned - Single Point of Failure Service dependent on a single admin ]

If you are fully accounting for vacation, training, sleep etc then you need a minimum of 5 admins for mission critical services. Now, you can engineer around this to reduce your staffing requirement but I wouldn't recommend going under 2 ever because accidents happen.

This business seemed one below that, without the engineering, and I would point to the mgmt, not the brilliant admin as the problem.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#137

Post by falserum » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

dzikimarian wrote: post #113

overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

Apparently we're doing the impossible for over 12 years now. Who knew? Some people act like it's some kind of black magic. It's not. We've some customers in our DC and some on AWS for various reasons. AWS isn't less problematic. AWS is about 10x more expensive. Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper. Only meaningful problem is that on-prem requires some up f…

Cloud clearly makes sense for:

- small business with at least some reliability expectation, and little to none IT expertise

- huge workload requirement volatility

- having someone else to blame

- solution is already working in cloud, with teams being very comfortable there, and perceiving on-prem as “enemy” (analogy: forcing devs to rewrite stuff from haskell to java)

- that extra cost is small budget line for you

On the other hand, it does not make sense to go cloud, if you are sufficiently big and already have on prem solution and expertise in house. (Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller)

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#138

Post by chongli » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

dzikimarian wrote: post #113

overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

Apparently we're doing the impossible for over 12 years now. Who knew? Some people act like it's some kind of black magic. It's not. We've some customers in our DC and some on AWS for various reasons. AWS isn't less problematic. AWS is about 10x more expensive. Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper. Only meaningful problem is that on-prem requires some up f…

Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper.

I think the real story is a bit sordid: office politics. On-prem and cloud are different skillsets. Companies that have been around for a while can end up with both on-prem and cloud experts who end up competing with each other, often on separate teams. Throw in some slick consultants from Amazon who are able to bend the ear of the VP and you've got a real problem. From what I've seen it doesn't end well for the on-prem team!

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#139

Post by sebazzz » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #36

ownagefool wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so. But taking a step away from that, it's really about self-service. When the alternative is logging a ticket for someone to manually misconfigure a VM and then fail to send you the login credentials, then your delivery is s…

> I think a lot of orgs move to cloud simply because it's popular and gartner told them so. Nah, I think it's mostly about the second part of your comment. Everyone hates waiting for months to get a VM or a database or a firewall rule because the infrastructure/DBA teams are stuck ten years in the past and take pride in their artisanal infrastructure building. So moving to the cloud eliminates a useless layer of time…

That time wasting is back in the same form or another. For instance, at my side they enable *all* the Azure Application Gateway, even those rules that Microsoft says not to enable - causing even simple OpenID redirects from Microsoft AzureID (Microsoft login) to the application to get captured in AAG and fail.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#140

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

qvrjuec wrote: post #104

overstay8930 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go bac…

>someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab What does this mean? They steal company resources for themselves, or just configure things incompetently?

Non-scalable incompetence or basically pretending that the datacenter will never go down. Any high schooler with an iPhone can set up and maintain a datacenter full of servers.

But if you want something reliable that I can spend 30 seconds writing some terraform for, it will take an entire infra team to set up and maintain it, not to mention an entire procurement process and now having to integrate a new supply chain just for a basic multi-az setup (probably without things like backups and still without basic features the cloud gives you automatically).