Slashing data transfer costs in AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#141

Post by coredog64 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

falserum wrote: post #137

dzikimarian wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#142

Post by fabian2k » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

overstay8930 wrote: post #131

holoduke wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

People have been running real businesses before the cloud providers existed. Of course you can run a business with rented dedicated servers.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#143

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #105

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…

You act like these problems are especially hard. Active-active, five nines, fault tolerance. Hard stuff. But managing on-prem is no harder. This is what we're paid for.

"this is what we're paid for" Nope, it's what YOU'RE paid for.

I am paid to relax on my holidays because I know my team and I don't have to drive to a colo to swap out a failing line card since I realized time is worth money and people quit jobs that take up too much of their time. I can A/B test (something on-prem guys NEVER get the luxury to do) so outages just don't happen at all (fingers crossed).

I have rarely met someone happy with their on-prem DC deployments, but after I moved to the AWS world it's just crazy how backwards it is to be anywhere but the cloud.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#144

Post by hirako2000 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #138

dzikimarian wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I concur. Many VPs bend ears so easily you got to wonder. do they also get invited to some private dinner by those so called slick consultants, who pay the bill in a rush and leaves after forgetting some thick envelope on the table.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#145

Post by no_wizard » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:50 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…

In many organizations the biggest appeal of services like AWS or GCP isn’t simply cost, it’s that the service is approved and therefore all the services of that service are approved and I no longer have to justify spinning up more compute or leveraging one of their more bespoke services like SQS (or wherever equivalent). It’s all just there, ready to be used.

It may not be true for you and where you work but this is a very real thing in a lot of organizations, where development teams want a quicker turn around on booting up services they need as the product evolves and having some control over how they act with each other. It (sometimes to negative results) opens up more architectural possibilities to solve problems

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#146

Post by sebazzz » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

Offtopic but related: Has anyone noticed transient AWS routing issues as of late?

I’ve on three or four occasions the last three months notices that I got served a completely different SSL certificate than the domain I was visiting, of a domain that often could not be reached on publicly - probably pointing to some organizations internal OTA environment. In all occasions the URL I wanted to visit and the DNS of the site I was then actually visiting were located in AWS. Then less than a minute elapsed the issue is resolved.

I first thought it must be my side, my DNS server malfunctioning or something, but the served sites could not be accessed publicly anyway, and I had the issue on two separate networks with two separate clients and separate DNS servers. I’ve had it with polar.co internal environment, bank of ireland (iirc), multiple times with download.mozilla.org and a few other occassions.

I contacted AWS on Twitter about it, but just got some generic pointless response I should make an incident - but I’m just some random user, I’m not an AWS client. Somehow I could not get it clear to the AWS support on the other side of Twitter.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#147

Post by no_wizard » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #141

falserum wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”

This is a quirk of the business that is Amazon and AWS, as they started by selling excess compute and expertise, due to how Amazon was built as API first internally it was almost natural.

It’s in no way the norm for a smaller business.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#148

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #141

falserum wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”

Is that really a fair comparison though? AWS is a very weird argument to make because you could say that AWS is kind of “on premise” for Amazons purposes. Internally Amazon.com does not pay retail pricing or have the same level of support as third party end users. A better example would be looking at Jet.com/Walmart and asking if it runs on AWS.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#149

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #142

overstay8930 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 y…

People have been running real businesses before the cloud providers existed. Of course you can run a business with rented dedicated servers.

Of course you can run your business on it, you will just suffer because there is practically 0 automation to it. I guess if you are a small business but we are very obviously not talking about mom and pop shops who need a web and email server.

Re: Slashing data transfer costs in AWS

#150

Post by overstay8930 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 6:06 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #148

coredog64 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”

Is that really a fair comparison though? AWS is a very weird argument to make because you could say that AWS is kind of “on premise” for Amazons purposes. Internally Amazon.com does not pay retail pricing or have the same level of support as third party end users. A better example would be looking at Jet.com/Walmart and asking if it runs on AWS.

Nobody who is big is paying retail prices, that's why saying "on premise is cheaper" is total copium.

As soon as you start factoring in discounts (i.e. bandwidth is nearly free at some point), the math of being on premise completely falls apart to the point you are paying more for licensing and support for the hardware than you are the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure in the cloud. It's just that bad to do it yourself.