141–150 of 202 posts
Not on the same scale but in my previous company we observed the same thing (though the other way around since we moved from self-hosted to cloud). He had a team of 4 managing the infra for an app (82 million users, 30 million DAU) and spent around 500.000€ per year on the data centers + this team's salaries + some other expenses like travels to the datacenters, some new stuff etc..., let's say around 1.000.000€ per…
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a: - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) - Data center environment specia…
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
And by using cloud your app and data become hostages.
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
This is my experience too. I love cloud as individual developer but it seems every company has a just as many DevOps people as they had System Admins. To me advantage of cloud is easily versioned control and replicate-able environments instead of cost savings.
So ahrefs is a special case because they're literally crawling the internet and scrapping Google. Their entire service is based on having a lot of servers. It's not the same as your typical Silicon Valley CRUD app.
My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…
This is an old myth. Today you can get dedicated servers provisioned in minutes with an API call. A competent DevOps person can manage 10s if not 100s with proper automation. When you have a certain baseline usage of compute moving to dedicated can give you massive savings. And if you're a heavy user of say, RDS, the cost difference can be even more dramatic while also gaining on performance. For ephemeral workloads, testing, etc. the cloud makes sense of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home). Cloud at scale is VERY expensive. And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc.
> Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home) (...) And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc. Yeah, just don't forget the backups and monitoring, the networking setup (load balancing between your two servers or workstations at the very least), patching, moving to new servers/workstations when you outgrow the curren…
Was there a specific kind of startup that you had in mind for this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.
So much kubernetes is just overkill. A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.
My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…
> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. Just let [cloud services company] handle it for you until you reach that point. This is an old myth. Today you can get dedicated servers provisioned in minutes with an API call. A competent DevOps person can manage 10s if not 100s with proper automation. When you have a c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You need them in both environments if you're serious about security. Unless you somehow believe that being in the "cloud" grants you some kind of security by default? I don't disagree that you need a security focused person in cloud. However, the scope of security is drastically different in cloud vs data center (and varies depending on what your data center setup is). > What does this even mean? What happens if yo…
> What happens if your server is overheating? As I said, this is usually provided by data center itself, however you have to still have to vet the vendor. It's 2023. Hardware operates within spec 99.99% of the time, unless the data center is literally on fire. AWS/GCP has outages too, btw. > Yes, AND Nagios, Solarwinds, Cisco, IBM, VMWare, etc. etc. and every one of their subsidiaries that have esoteric needs. If you…
>> Again, if that's your use case, then we're not talking about 1 cloud engineer vs 3 non-cloud engineers.
At my company we operate a setup like this on AWS with about 8 people total (5 infra engineers and 3 security engineers, I suppose we could also count their 2 managers), and that's not even their full job.