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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

#161

Post by gizzlon »

marcinzm wrote: post #62

They were running for a long time (months? over a year?) on a single rack in a single datacenter. Eventually they scaled out but the word is eventually. I think that summarizes both sides of this debate in a nutshell. You can move off of AWS but unless you invest a lot you will take on increased risk. Maybe you'll get lucky and your one rack won't burn down. Maybe you won't. They did get lucky.

Hm.. I wonder what the risk of a rack going offline is? Maybe 5% in a given year? Less? More?

Compared to all the other things that can and will go wrong, this risk seems pretty small, but I have no data to back that up.

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

#162

Post by whstl »

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…

Sure but I have seen the exact same thing happen with AWS.

In a large company I worked the Ops team that had the keys to AWS was taking literal months to push things to the cloud, causing problems with bonuses and promotions. Security measures were not in place so there were cyberattacks. Passwords of critical services lapsed because they were not paying attention.

At some point it got so bad that the entire team was demoted, lost privileges, and contractors had to jump in. The CTO was almost fired.

It took months to recover and even to get to an acceptable state, because nothing was really documented.

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

#163

Post by zjaffee »

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…

AWS (along with the vast majority of B2B services in the software development industry) is good because it allows you to focus on building your product or business without needing to worry about managing servers nearly as much.

The problems here are no different than using SaaS anywhere else in a business, you can also run all your sales tracking through excel, it's just that once you have more than a few people doing sales that becomes a major bottleneck the same way not having an easier to manage infrastructure system.

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

#164

Post by Joeboy »

embedding-shape wrote: post #146
Joeboy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia still thinks it means the thing I (and presumably you) do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal Edit: For clarity, wikipedia does also have pages with other meanings of "bare metal", including "bare metal server". The above link is what you get if you just look up "bare metal". I do aim to be some combination of clear, accurate and succinct, but I very often seem to end up in these HN pissing matches so…

Seems there is a difference between "Bare Metal" and "Bare Machine". I'm not sure what you did, but when you go to that Wikipedia article, it redirects to "Bare Machine", and the article contents is about "Bare Machine". Clicking the link you have sends you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine So it seems like you almost intentionally shared the article that redirects, instead of linking to the proper page?

I indeed deliberately pasted a link that shows what happens when you try to go to the Wikipedia page for "bare metal".

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

#165

Post by yanslookup »

FD: I work at Amazon, I also started my career in a time where I had to submit paper requests for servers that had turn around times measured in months.

I just don't see it. Given the nature of the services they offer it's just too risky not to use as much managed stuff with SLAs as possible. k8s alone is a very complicated control plane + a freaking database that is hard to keep happy if it's not completely static. In a prior life I went very deep on k8s, including self managing clusters and it's just too fragile, I literally had to contribute patches to etcd and I'm not a db engineer. I kept reading the post and seeing future failure point after future failure point.

The other aspect is there doesn't seem to be an honest assessment of the tradeoffs. It's all peaches and cream, no downsides, no tradeoffs, no risk assessment etc.

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

#166

Post by JCM9 »

tyingq wrote: post #58
JCM9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the author points out AWS can provide a few things that you wouldn’t want to try and replicate (like CloudFront) but for most other things you’re very much correct. AWS is ultimately very expensive for what it is. The complicated billing that’s full of surprises also makes cost management a head-banging experience.

Fair, though using AWS solely for CloudFront would mean you should compare to Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, etc. I'm not sure if the value prop for it looks so great if you don't include the "integrated with your other AWS stuff" benefit.

Agree, CloudFront isn’t super competitive with CDN focused vendors. It’s basically the “well you’re already on AWS so may as well just use this” play.

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

#167

Post by maccard »

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…

I work for a small company owned by a huge company. We are entirely independent except for purchasing, IT, and budget approval. We run our CI on AWS, and it’s slow and flaky for a variety of reasons (compiling large c++ projects combined with instance type pressure). It’s also expensive.

We planned a migration to move from 4OD instances to one on prem machine and we guessed we’d save $1000/mo, our builds would be faster and we’d have less failures due to capacity issues. We even had a spare workstation and a rack in the office that so the capex was 0.

I plugged the machine into the rack and no internet connectivity. Put in an IT ticket which took 2 days for a reply, only to be told that this was an unauthorised machine and needed to be imaged by IT. The back and forth took 4 weeks, multiple meetings and multiple approvals. My guess is that 4 people spent probably 10 hours arguing whether we should do this or not.

On AWS I can write a python script and have a running windows instance in 15 minutes.

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

#168

Post by whstl »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #114
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…

I'm proudly 100% on prem Linux sys admin. There are not openings for my skills and they do not pay as well as whatever cloud hotness is "needed".

That's the crazy thing.

Most AWS-only Ops engineers I know are making bank and in high demand, and Ops teams are always HUGE in terms of headcount outside of startups.

The "AWS is cheaper" thing is the biggest grift in our industry.

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

#169

Post by MontyCarloHall »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #147

> AWS is extremely expensive. I really like how people throw around these baseless accusations. S3 is one of the cheapest storage solutions ever created. The last 10 years I have migrated roughly 10-20PB worth of data to AWS S3 and it resulted in significant cost saving every single time. If you do not know how to use cloud computing than yes, AWS can be really expensive.

Assuming those 20PB are hot/warm storage, S3 costs roughly $0.015/GB/month (50:50 average of S3 standard/infrequent access). That comes out to roughly $3.6M/year, before taking into account egress/retrieval costs. Does it really cost that much to maintain your own 20PB storage cluster?

If those 20PB are deep archive, the S3 Glacier bill comes out to around $235k/year, which also seems ludicrous: it does not cost six figures a year to maintain your own tape archive. That's the equivalent of a full-time sysadmin (~$150k/year) plus $100k in hardware amortization/overhead.

The real advantage of S3 here is flexibility and ease-of-use. It's trivial to migrate objects between storage classes, and trivial to get efficient access to any S3 object anywhere in the world. Avoiding the headache of rolling this functionality yourself could well be worth $3.6M/year, but if this flexibility is not necessary, I doubt S3 is cheaper in any sense of the word.

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

#170

Post by rsav »

anal_reactor wrote: post #143
fulafel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

My manager wants me to make this silly AWS certification. Let me go on a tangent about trains. In Spain before you board a high-speed train you need to go though full security check, like on an airport. In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check. The problem is that even though the security check is an expensive, inefficient theatre, just in case something does blow…

Nobody gets fired for buying IB^H^H AWS
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