151–160 of 343 posts
I mean yeah, AWS is a 10-100x markup over running your own stuff. 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 completel…
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> LightSail isn't any cheaper than the EC2 instance types backing it. Sure it is: Lightsail includes plenty of transfer with its price. At the $10 tier you get 3tb thrown in. If you're doing anything that burns even a modest amount of transfer, the price difference will be sizable.
Ahh very true, I was just assuming that most people are not operating under these conditions. Those are also areas where AWS will negotiate on price with an enterprise though. If you're small, you can certainly save money with LightSail. EC2 gives you better pricing options when you commit to spend though (even if you aren't an enterprise...).
I have been able to get pretty mind blowing discounts on everything other than transfer.
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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.
We used this with Azure. We contracted a firm to write a stack for eCommerce sites we were spinning up left and right. It passed through ITIL and was approved all over the chain. After that - security was happy, ops was happy, everyone was happy. Everything was just deploying an application - be it an application making millions of dollars per instance across many brands. It enabled the branding/marketing teams to la…
You have a mature product, with a proven market and known scalability demands.
The exact opposite of how this thread started and somehow this is a good anecdote refuting it!
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I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but wit…
You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great! This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora. Once you have expertise…
I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing.
To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwidth cost.
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…
Someone will snarkily mention that Amazon services go down from time to time across an availability zone or even a whole region, and presumably this never happens on prem (I guess the idea is that Amazon engineers are well-below average?) simply because you rarely hear about it when $MomAndPopCRUDShop goes down. On that note, in my experience, customers are really sympathetic when an Amazon outage brings you down (because half of the Internet is also down) but not very sympathetic when it’s just your site that’s down.
You don't even need to buy a new EPYC or Xeon Scalable system. A 20 core Xeon v3/v4 system with 128gb of ram can be had off lease for $1000. Psychz.net provides 1u colocation with 1/Gbs link (10/Gbs burst) for $80/mo. Equivalent EC2 is $300-600/month with no better reliability. Plus you have to deal with noisy neighbors and bandwidth overages. Build your baseline usage in colo and burst into AWS unless you like buyin…
Where's the most affordable to buy an off-lease server?
I currently have a stock scanning project that I'd like to take online where I'd need 128gb RAM+, 2TB+ drive space, and 20-60 cores (more the better).
AWS gains is like a bell curve, the value is highest in the middle. If you're very small, you probably don't need it, and DigitalOcean without surprise costs should do. When you start getting large enough, AWS starts paying off, as you get really huge, then it might be cheaper to colocate and hire your own admins. However, I think Netflix shows you can't be too big tho for AWS. Their hybrid approach is probably best.…
I have my own 1/2 cab, AS number, ARIN allocated IP4 and IP6 space. It costs about $500/mo. It took maybe 100 hours to set up the basics and $6000 for the way I built the hw (which is similar to servethehome's rack). I run everything on FreeBSD. I get to directly talk BGP and get bandwidth at .12c/gbit. Nothing else can come close to this level of low cost, control, learning, and autonomy.
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…
Self hosting being cheaper is obvious. It's just a nightmare to manage reliability. With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical acce…
This is so often repeated, but at my previous company, the amount of internal outages was smaller than the amount of outages on AWS or GCP. We then migrated to AWS for some stupid reason (we didn't need scalability, that's for sure) and we had a problem with redis nodes: the instances they were running on were too small and an upgrade went wrong. We waited until the next shift for the fix. The irony.
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…
I agree that scalability is rarely an appropriate reason to go in on AWS; however, “managed services” is a really good reason. You don’t have to operate your own equivalent services, but rather you pay for Amazon engineers to operate them on your behalf. Of course, there are some people for whom running their own services is the more appropriate scenario, but I think this is not a good default for anything more compl…
My IT team is not going to break something on the most important day of the month for my business. Sometimes even when I want to do something mundane on the network, it's "eh, let's wait until not (insert key date here), just in case". Amazon does not care what day is important to my business, they're Amazon and they do what they want.
You are going to pay IT staff either way, if it's your own hires (or an MSP), or you are paying via AWS fees. If you're going to pay for IT, why wouldn't you pay for IT that takes orders from you and cares about your business?
The other thing is, Amazon's maintenance and upgrades is based around Amazon's need to remain competitive and turn a profit, and to support businesses other than yours which may have larger needs. (The rollout of a new feature that causes an outage for you might not have any benefit to you anyways.)
Similarly, a single patched Exchange server running on a single VM on a VM host with a UPS backup on it is generally speaking, more reliable and has better uptime than Office 365. Hilariously, Office 365 also costs a lot more.