141–150 of 343 posts
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Labor is included and discussed both for my time as well as remote hands we pay for. It is very low at this point.
Are you including having someone on call who can drive to the colo on a moment's notice? Unless your hardware is redundant and remotely swappable then you need to be ready for physical disaster response. Cloud providers abstract this away for a price.
So, 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…
If I move this out of AWS, I need that data replicated for redundancy. I need some meaty servers set up, and I need to maintain the boxes that run the storage and database software. I need to build out the observability software that I get for almost free with Cloudwatch. My database instances need to failover appropriately, which doesn't happen automatically. I need to monitor disk usage and add capacity as the databases grow. I need to set up and manage whatever firewall setup I otherwise get for free with VPCs and security groups.
Managing my own email infrastructure is almost laughable. Spending more than about two and a half minutes on it each month outweighs the benefit of just running it on AWS.
My time isn't free. I either need to hire someone to build this, I need to learn it and apply it correctly, or find some magic docker stuff that does it for me.
Where is the cost savings of moving out of the cloud for me? If I'm spending all of my time in a SSH session installing kernel updates or diagnosing why my storage cluster is misbehaving, when am I supposed to actually build my product?
If I'm reading the source html pages of "servethehome.com" correctly, it's a Wordpress site and that's what Patrick is basing hosting cost comparisons on. I've mentioned before[0] that AWS too expensive and overkill for Wordpress sites (especially simpler non-ecommerce ones). I don't think this conclusion is controversial. Simpler hosting requirements is why Patrick only has to spend 4 hours of labor in 1 year to upg…
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It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…
I didn't even mention the best part about hosting projects in cloud providers. You can generalize the infrastructure to run 99% of businesses needs and write that Terraform code only once. You can bring that with you everywhere and take care of the basics in seconds and you can sleep at night easily without a pager going off.
It enabled the branding/marketing teams to launch sites without waiting for months of tech backlog. it was beautiful
I 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…
The system I inherited at my current job was built with "scalability" in mind. That meant use of the Firebase databases and splitting everything out into lots of microservices. Ironically this actually caused scaling issues (even with the very small scale we have at the moment) because the lack of query flexibility in the database meant downloading entire collections in order to provide the necessary functionality. W…
I am far from a database expert, but the fact that I have been able to implement without much effort efficient systems that have high bandwidth and reliability requirements, balancing and low latency speaks eons of the current state of affairs.
I run a file hosting site that serves >500TB of data to about 2 million monthly users on a bunch of dedicated servers that cost me about $500 a month.
If I ran this on AWS it would cost me more than $20,000 every month.
I could hire four system administrators to do nothing but look after each of my four dedicated servers for that money.
It's completely ridiculous.
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Classical web hosting still exists. Probably even has less vendor lock-in and is less likely to bankrupt you if someone posts the small utility web app on HN.
Lambda is $0.20 per 1M requests, + $0.0000000021 per ms of runtime (assuming the "small utility" takes 128 MB RAM or less). So by my estimates, even if the small utility is #1 on HN for a whole day, it's not going to cost more than a dollar. Maybe there are more hidden costs, or maybe the small utility uses a lot of runtime though, so you could be right in the right circumstances.
Taking the statistics from some old Ask HN thread [0] (which is probably an underestimate?) you would need to render your site in less than 2ms to stay below 1$ for that day. And serve less than 51kB of data per page view to stay in the free 1GB of traffic region (this part should be pretty doable if you don't include any large images).
Of course assuming you don't have any existing VM or web hosting you could reuse for that.
Edit: Ups.. Used per-second billing instead of per-ms by accident. So even up to >1s per request it's below 1$ for that actually. So only leaves significant more traffic and lots of bandwidth usage as possible sore points for tiny web services.
I 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…
Cause when I think AWS, I think of using Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, Kinesis, Redshift, Elastic search, etc.
All these managed services arn't just about cost or scale, a lot of it is about convenience and development speed and flexibility, as well as reduced maintainance and operational burden.
TIL: 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…
I could hire four system administrators for that money to look after each of my four dedicated servers full time.
On top of that you first need to learn AWS. That thing is complicated - but I can set up a dedicated server in minutes because it's indistinguishable from my development environment.
I joke that dedicated servers are only expensive if your time and money are worthless. Because AWS is going to eat both.
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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…
About 7 years ago we brought in the ELK stack for security log ingestion and basic analytics. It took at least three FTEs to maintain the cluster, along with constant issues of queries crashing clusters, or provisioning/building/repairing the dozens of servers and storage units to handle the several terabytes per day of ingest. To be able to throw that behind an infinite, horizontally scalable mechanism would have sa…
Also, dozens of servers is past the point we're talking about, I think.
Bare metal and your own infrastructure makes a lot of sense really small (a few servers); and it may start to make sense again at some point really large.