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How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

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Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#171

Post by jesterson »

vasco wrote: post #50
motoxpro wrote: post #42

A lot of people in this thread should start consultancies that transition companies off the cloud. Apparently, it would be easy for them to save tens of millions, in turn making millions for the consultant.

Couldn't agree more. One only says this if they don't have a good understanding of the differences between capex & opex, the amount of money spent on tech labor & compliance projects, as well as the level of assurances AWS give you regarding durability of data. All of this in 2023 when we have almost 20 years of data showing more and more business moving to the cloud and staying in the cloud. I think anti-cloud senti…

It's just a part of natural cycle.

Cloud became a fad a while ago, companies like Amazon/Google/MSFT rushed in burning cash to provide incentives. Now said companies adjust fees to milk businesses due to high exit cost, just because they can. This will inevitably create outflow of customers, however we are far from this point currently.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#172

Post by motoxpro »

AntonCTO wrote: post #138
motoxpro wrote: post #42

A lot of people in this thread should start consultancies that transition companies off the cloud. Apparently, it would be easy for them to save tens of millions, in turn making millions for the consultant.

I do. Interested? :D On a small project, I managed to reduce costs by 70 times simply by transitioning and eliminating unnecessary features. This happened four years ago, and the project is still running smoothly. However, what I truly enjoy is providing an objective view of the actual cloud transition process to companies before they make any misguided decisions.

Just a commentary that if you could save a bunch of companies 70x then that is the easiest sell in the world. I WISH I could do something like that because I would be a billionaire haha.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#173

Post by tough »

vasco wrote: post #115
tough wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really have to be afraid of running VPS or whatever if they can't spun up a min.io instance to have their own S3 without dealing with Amazon's Bullshit

How big of a production deployment have you ran on min.io in terms of data transfer / month and total storage? Because I've done small scale and can tell you I'd run S3 in the future.

Point taken as I haven't used it in prod properly, I'll cross that bridge when I find it but Id rather keep my money and put some time into making it work. There's also cloudflare R2 now if S3 is too expensive but self-hosted is out of the question

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#174

Post by trog »

jedberg wrote: post #133
andrewstuart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> moving from AWS to onprem means you need to configure the infrastructure yourself; you save on AWS fees but you spend more on devops This is the traditional “sell” for cloud computing and I don’t buy it at all. The clouds would have you believe it doesn't make sense to run your own systems because you need too much specialist expertise to run your own systems. The clouds sales pitch is the if you go cloud then you…

When I moved reddit from on-prem to the cloud, I cut our costs by 27%. It was the same number of people managing both infrastructures, but once we moved to the cloud, I no longer spent most of my time imaging machines and driving them to a datacenter to rack and stack them. Instead I spent my time coding ways to manage machines via API, so that when I needed to double our infrastructure, I just ran a script. Cloud ma…

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever.

Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#175

Post by jedberg »

trog wrote: post #174
jedberg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I moved reddit from on-prem to the cloud, I cut our costs by 27%. It was the same number of people managing both infrastructures, but once we moved to the cloud, I no longer spent most of my time imaging machines and driving them to a datacenter to rack and stack them. Instead I spent my time coding ways to manage machines via API, so that when I needed to double our infrastructure, I just ran a script. Cloud ma…

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever. Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then.

Data Center (per month)

Servers: $6K

Cabinet (x3): $15K

Bandwidth: $2.5K

Support: N/A

Total: $23.5K

EC2 (per month)

Servers: $13K

Storage: $1.5K

Bandwidth: $1.1K

Support: $1.2K

Total: $16.8K

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#176

Post by oxfordmale »

kazen44 wrote: post #160
oxfordmale wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge any in-house team to achieve the same reliability as S3. To be fair most businesses probably don't need it, but it is worth taking into account.

the same reliability at what scale? this is a major difference. S3 has amazing reliability but is a incredible complex system with many moving parts, which incurs cost in terms of reliability. The simpler the system, the more reliable it usually is. Most bussiness do not operate at even remotely the same scale as amazon, and running a small scale cluster of S3 like functionality wouldn't be that hard.

Amazon S3 standard storage offers the following features: Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement. Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#177

Post by oxfordmale »

kazen44 wrote: post #160
oxfordmale wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge any in-house team to achieve the same reliability as S3. To be fair most businesses probably don't need it, but it is worth taking into account.

the same reliability at what scale? this is a major difference. S3 has amazing reliability but is a incredible complex system with many moving parts, which incurs cost in terms of reliability. The simpler the system, the more reliable it usually is. Most bussiness do not operate at even remotely the same scale as amazon, and running a small scale cluster of S3 like functionality wouldn't be that hard.

S3 is reliable as data isn't not stored in a single place. It reduces the risk of water leakage or some vandals ripping your storage rack apart.

However, as someone put it, put your money where your mouth is. Become a contractor offering to reduce storage costs in exchange for 10% of the savings. You should be a millionaire in no time, according to your narrative.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#178

Post by VHRanger »

avereveard wrote: post #118
VHRanger wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you measure that realistically? How durable is Backblaze or Azure? Cloudflare has been reliable on storage adjacent uses (caching) for a long time. Presumably you're more likely to be the cause of errors than R2 is by a few orders of magnitude.

well you don't measure it, you take it from their sla

What I mean is that if you have a claim for eleven 9's of durability for a product that's 3 years old you have to take their word for it.

You can't really check the SLA as being realistic

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#179

Post by trog »

jedberg wrote: post #175
trog wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever. Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then. Data Center (per month) Servers: $6K Cabinet (x3): $15K Bandwidth: $2.5K Support: N/A Total: $23.5K EC2 (per month) Servers: $13K Storage: $1.5K Bandwidth: $1.1K Support: $1.2K Total: $16.8K

Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#180

Post by jedberg »

trog wrote: post #179
jedberg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then. Data Center (per month) Servers: $6K Cabinet (x3): $15K Bandwidth: $2.5K Support: N/A Total: $23.5K EC2 (per month) Servers: $13K Storage: $1.5K Bandwidth: $1.1K Support: $1.2K Total: $16.8K

Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?

Yes, we ran Postgres on EC2. I admined it myself both in AWS and in the datacenter. RDS didn't exist at the time. :)

At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.

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