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AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

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Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#131

Post by chasd00 »

calgoo wrote: post #61
vb-8448 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? It's a way to "commoditize" engineers. You can run on premise or mixed infra better and cheaper, but only if you know what you are doing. This requires experienced guys and doesn't work with new grad hired by big cons and sold ad "cloud experts".

Also, when something breaks, you are responsible. If you put it in AWS like everyone else and it breaks, then its their problem not yours. We will still implement workarounds and fixes when it happens, but we are not responsible. Basic enterprise rules these days is to always pay someone else to be responsible.

> then its their problem not yours

this is the main advantage of cloud, no one cares if the site/service/app is down as long as it's someone else's fault and responsibility.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#132

Post by ghaff »

7thaccount wrote: post #76
esskay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

I think some of that is a certain group of people will do anything to play with the new shiny stuff. In my org it's cloud and now GPU. The cloud stuff is extremely expensive and doesn't work any better than our existing solutions. Like a commentator said below, it's insidious as your entire organization later becomes dependent on that. If you buy a cloud solution, you're also stuck with the vendor deciding to double…

Resume-driven development. It's probably pretty much always been a thing.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#133

Post by baq »

hibikir wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

Well, they aren't wrong about the bare metal either: Every organization ends up tied to their staff, and said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using. People end up in quite the fights because their supposed experts are more fond of uniformity and learning nothing new. Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs, and people migrated to AWS to avoid dealing w…

> Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs

I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand this, or they'll give you budget targets which can only mean ossification.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#134

Post by rcxdude »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

I really dislike the fallacy that just because you're buying something it means that you're not building anything. In practice this is never true: there's always some people-in-your-org time cost of buying something just as much as there's some giving-money-to-other-orgs cost to building something. So often organisations wind up buying something and spending way more time in the process than it would cost for them to build it themselves.

With AWS I think this tradeoff is very weak in most cases: the tasks that you are paying AWS for are relatively cheap in time-of-people-in-your-org, and AWS also takes up a significant amount of that time with new tasks as well. Of the organisations I'm personally aware of, the ones who hosted on-prem spent less money on their compute and had smaller teams managing it, with more effective results than those who were cloud-based (to various degrees of egregousness from 'well, I can kinda see how it's worth it because they're growing quickly' to 'holy shit they're setting money on fire and compromising their product because they can't just buy some used tower PCs and plug them in in a closet in the office')

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#135

Post by baq »

dangus wrote: post #108
Spooky23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail. AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS. Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently.…

I think a lot of engineers who remember the bare metal days have legitimate qualms about going back to the way that world used to work especially before containerization/Kubernetes. I imagine a lot of people who use Linux/AWS now started out with bare metal Microsoft/VMWare/Oracle type of environments where AWS services seemed like a massive breath of fresh air.

I remember having to put in orders for pallets of servers which then ended up storage somewhere because there were not enough people to carry and wire them up and/or there wasn't enough rack space to install them.

Having an ability to spin up a server or a vm when you need it without having to ask a single question is very liberating. Sometimes such elasticity is exactly what's needed. OTOH other people's servers aren't always the wise choice, but you have to know both environments to make the right choice, and nowadays I feel most people don't really know anything about bare metal.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#136

Post by ghaff »

foldr wrote: post #87
jsiepkes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the rhetoric Microsoft used in the 00's with it's "Get the facts" marketing campaign against Linux and open-source: "Never mind the costs, think about the people hours you are saving!". It wasn't as simple as that then, at it's still not as simple as that now.

In fairness to Microsoft, this argument should have been correct. It ought to be possible for Microsoft to offer products with better polish and better support than open source alternatives, and that ought to more than compensate for any licensing costs. Whether Microsoft actually managed to do this is debatable, but the principle is sound enough.

It sort of was especially with respect to desktop software. The licensing costs associated with Microsoft Office etc. were probably not really that much compared to the disruption with switching offices of people who just wanted to do their job to open source alternatives.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#137

Post by base698 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

Until you factor in the legions of devops writing terraform, iam, and cicd scripts.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#138

Post by ed_mercer »

Talos is great until it's not. We ran into Ceph IO speed bottlenecks and found it was impossible to debug ("talosctl cgroups —preset=io" is a mess) because the devs didn't want to add an SSH escape hatch into their black box OS. Our Talos nodes would also randomly become unhealthy and you have no way of knowing why. Switched to PXE booted Alpine linux with vanille k8s, and we had a much more stable experience with no surprises, and the ability to SSH whenever we want has been hugely helpful.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#139

Post by everfrustrated »

hibikir wrote: post #123
steelegbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists. It can work well if your product is simple and scalable. A lot of places quietly achieve this. That said, I've seen real world scenarios where complexity is up the wazoo and an opex cost focus means you're hiring under skilled…

And don't forget the real crux of the problem: Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not? Hiring experts is really difficult if you don't have the skill in the topic, and if you do, you either not need an expert, or you will be biased towards those that agree with you. It's not even limited to sysadmins, or in tech. How do you know whether a mechanic is very good, or iffy? Is a financial advisor giving you g…

This only gets worse as you go higher in management. How does a technical founder know what good sales or marketing looks like? They are often swayed by people who can talk a good talk and deliver nothing.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#140

Post by canucktrash669 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

Ultimately these owners hire me to cut their 6-figure AWS bill by 50%. It's mostly rearchitecting mistakes. Amongst them is taking AWS blog propaganda at face value. Those savings could be 80% if they chose managed bare metal (no racking and stacking).
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