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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#161

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

JCM9 wrote: post #80

This isn’t a binary issue. I disagree with these “abandon the cloud” takes but do agree that most folks spend way way more than they should. The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit and cleaned up their de…

> The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure

Well there's no danger of that. Even with AWS telling you exactly how to save money (they have a thousand different dashboards showing you where you can save, and even support will tell you), it'll still take you months to work through all the cost optimization changes. Since it's annoying and complicated to do, most people won't do it.

Their billing really is ridiculous. We have a TAM and use a reseller, and it's virtually impossible for us to see what we actually spend each month, what with the reseller discounts, enterprise PPA, savings plans, RIs, and multiple accounts. Their support reps even built us some kinda custom BI tool just to look at costs, and it's still not right.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#162

Post by mattstainton001 »

jgb1984 wrote: post #52
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datac…

True, but I think you're touching on something important regarding value. Value is different depending on the consumer: for you, you're willing and able to manage more of the infrastructure than someone who has a more narrow skillset. Being able to move the responsibility for areas of the service on to the provider is what we're paying for, and for some, paying more money to offload more of the responsibility actually results in more value for the organization/consumer

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#163

Post by sgarland »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

First of all, if you have a dev DB that’s 12 TB, I can practically guarantee that it is tremendously unoptimized.

But also, that’s extremely easily handled with physical servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#164

Post by lblack00 »

jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

Colloquially, differences in powers of 10 would be better stated as differences of orders of magnitude.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#166

Post by DANmode »

normie3000 wrote: post #92
DANmode wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many URLs of Google et al failing to provide per instance security (leaking your files etc) to other users would you like to see?

At least one?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/google-accidentally-sent-som...

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#167

Post by throwaway106382 »

Basically it boils down to:

Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours.

If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it.

For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.

Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#168

Post by dublinben »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

12 TB is easy. https://yourdatafitsinram.net/

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#169

Post by fragmede »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #160
PaulKeeble wrote: post #59

Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a…

What is the mechanism for such services if you want to replace a component (ex. a failing hard drive or upgrade ram)?

"Remote hands" is the DC term for exactly what it sounds like. You write a list of instructions and someone hired by the DC will go over to your rack and do the thing.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#170

Post by sarchertech »

dragonwriter wrote: post #75
fennecbutt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I didn't how that, thanks for the lesson. Tbf it just sounds...so American, so I assumed, my bad. But East India Company was involved...whew I guess that does make sense, oof.

What is unique in the US is the interaction between corporate personhood and our First Amendment and the way that our courts have applied that to limit political campaign finance laws, and a lot of “corporate personhood” controversy is really about that, not actually about corporate personhood as a broad concept.

People also get confused about the Citizens United ruling. It had nothing to do with corporate personhood.

The ruling said that since a person has first amendment rights, those same rights extend to a group of people—any group—whether it’s a non profit organization, a corporation, or something else.

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