Docker operations slowing down on AWS

Our base environment (we have several) has 4 servers, 2 of whom are used for the app servers and load balancers, and 2 for data stores and queue processors.

Each server is the typical (as someone in this thread named) "8k" server (a bit more costly, actually). Generally speaking, the servers are significantly overprovisioned.

There are a couple of factors that made the conversion to AWS cheap (~20+).

The first is that the base unit of a metal server is very large (1 server). Although it's cheap to scale vertically, scaling horizontally, for HA purposes, is expensive, because it costs at least 2 units.

For example, the total power of our app servers is overprovisioned in the 20x range (CPU and memory are cheap, right?). Even with minimal speccing, a metal server still costs around 3/4k, you need 2, that's 6/8k.

In AWS, we can work with very small units. So maybe we end up paying the same amount, but we don't need that excessive power, and, crucial, we have networking for free (or almost).

The second factor is networking and hosting costs, which are not trivial. We rent managed firewalls and load balancers, which in AWS are for free or almost.

Also, it's important to spread the servers cost over the time - any metal server won't last forever. If you buy one for 9.6k, it's 100$ a month for 8 years. When it breaks, HA goes temporarily out of the window until it gets fixed (or you buy a new one, or you move services around).

The big pain point of AWS [for us] is RDS, which is madly expensive. It accounts for something like 50% of our AWS costs.

A very gross estimation of the monthly costs of each metal server could be:

- 80$: server - 80$: hosting - 80$: managed networking

For 4 servers, that's almost 1000$. Adding 20%, with a budget of 1200$, with AWS, we have a less powerful but also correspondingly less wasteful infrastructure, with lots of baked-in functionality (including, more flexible HA).

If cost is your reason for looking at a CDN, or a big part of it, CloudFront will do very little for you unless your pageviews are extremely costly in terms of compute relative to the amount of data returned, and said data is very cache-friendly.

That's very much a niche requirement. To date I've not come across a setup where CloudFront made sense cost-wise.

To be honest I rarely use external CDNs and instead "roll my own" with a variety of providers as with cloud providers + geoip enabled DNS you can get 90% of the benefit at very low rates, but in terms of "brand name recognition" MaxCDN is worth checking. It's not nearly the maximum saving you can get, but it can be substantially cheaper than CloudFront.