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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

#171

Post by CyberDildonics »

busterarm wrote: post #156
koito17 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell PowerEdge R840). However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA; namely, that your personal and side projects are not scaling to a 12 TB database. With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O performance is "good enough" for streaming video and BitTorrent seeding. However, I am not sure what yo…

Still missing the point. This is just one server and just in the dev enviornment? How many pets do you want to be tending to? I have 10^5 servers I'm responsible for... The quantity and methods the cloud affords me allow me to operate the same infrastructure with 1/10th as much labor. At the extreme ends of scale this isn't a benefit, but for large companies in the middle this is the only move that makes any sense. 9…

Why do people think it takes "labor" to have a server up and running?

Multiple millions in the cloud per month?

You could build a room full of giant servers and pay multiple people for a year just on your monthly server bill.

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

#172

Post by presentation »

mcmcmc wrote: post #47
winddude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai

Whoa, an acquisition made things worse for everyone but the people who cashed out? Crazy, who could have seen that coming

Guess you came for the hot take without actually using the service or participating in any intelligent conversation. All the sibling comments observe that nothing you are talking about happened.

Snarky ignorant comments like yours ruin Hacker News and the internet as a whole. Please reconsider your mindset for the good of us all.

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

#173

Post by mattmanser »

pfix wrote: post #28

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs. On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin. Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted…

I've never had a server go down. Most companies don't need a hot server because it's never going to be needed.

AWS + Azure have both gone down with major outages indivudually more over the last 10 years than any of the servers in companies I worked with in the 10 years before that.

And in comparable periods, not a single server failed or disk failed or whatever.

So I get SOME companies need hot standby servers, almost no company, no SaaS, no startup, actually does.

Because if it's that mission critical, then they would have already had to move off the cloud due to how frequently AWs/Azure/etc. have gone down over the last 10 years, often for 1/2 day or so,

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

#174

Post by natertux »

After a few months of experimenting on AWS, I got scared seeing how fast small side projects could turn into expensive monthly bills.

I built my own DIY cloud, a minimal self-hosted setup that lets me deploy apps, databases, and backups on cheap VPS or bare-metal servers. At first I just wanted to save money, but I realized that managing it can easily become a full-time SRE job.

Still, for small, experimental, or hobby projects, this setup works perfectly. It keeps costs predictable and gives full control without needing large-scale infrastructure.

https://diy-cloud.remikeat.com

Would love to hear from others who tried leaving managed clouds behind.

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

#175

Post by throwaway201606 »

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…

Answers here

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-frame...

TL;DR version - its about money and business balance sheets, not about technology.

For businesses past a certain size, going to cloud is a decision ALWAYS made by business, not by technology.

From a business perspective, having a "relatively fixed" ongoing cost (which is an operational expense ie OpEx ) even if it is significantly higher than what it would cost to do things with internal buy and build out (which is a capital expense cost ie CapEx), make financial planning, taxes and managing EBITDA much easier.

Note that no one on the business really cares what the tech implications are as long at "tech still sorta runs mostly OK".

It also, via financial wizardry, makes tech cost "much less" on a quarter over quarter and year over year basis.

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

#176

Post by ufmace »

I don't particularly like this article, mostly because he seems to have spent the great majority of it ranting about people on the internet supposedly yelling at him about not being "on the cloud" and semantics about exactly what constitutes "the cloud". I'd be much more interested in reading exactly what he was spending that money on at AWS and how he moved it all onto one or a few bare-metal boxes.

I don't think AWS is particularly expensive at all. In fact, it's rather cheap at quite a few things if you know what you're doing and use the right services. I've got all my server backups going to S3, for which I pay a whopping penny a month. I also host a handful of Docker images on ECR for 7 cents a month - way cheaper than any other private hosting service I know of.

Now RDS, and the equivalent at every other hosting provider I know of, gets quite pricey indeed. IMO, you shouldn't bother unless you have pretty serious needs for reliability and speed. Apt install your DB server of choice on bare metal goes quite far. Or possibly pull a container of it into whatever you're using to manage containers.

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

#177

Post by icameron »

busterarm wrote: post #131
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…

Exactly this. We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5 servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where you need to be. Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades of fast and loose development by immature software engineers...and having components in the stack that did the same. If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect today's computing reali…

You have over a 100,000 servers? How is this? This is wild to ponder. I can only guess your monthly bill is in the millions. Are you able to say the company?

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

#178

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by rowanG077 »

busterarm wrote: post #156
koito17 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell PowerEdge R840). However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA; namely, that your personal and side projects are not scaling to a 12 TB database. With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O performance is "good enough" for streaming video and BitTorrent seeding. However, I am not sure what yo…

Still missing the point. This is just one server and just in the dev enviornment? How many pets do you want to be tending to? I have 10^5 servers I'm responsible for... The quantity and methods the cloud affords me allow me to operate the same infrastructure with 1/10th as much labor. At the extreme ends of scale this isn't a benefit, but for large companies in the middle this is the only move that makes any sense. 9…

What is this ridiculous bait and switch. First you talk about a 12 TB dev databases and "How could I not use the cloud?". And you rightfully get challenged on that and then suddenly it's about the number of servers you have to manage and you don't have the energy to do that with your team. Those two have nothing to do with each other.

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

#180

Post by normie3000 »

DANmode wrote: post #166
normie3000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one?

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

So security's too hard for Google.

But if this happens at work and we're using Google Cloud, I say "sorry boss, Google messed up".

If we're running our own servers, who do I blame?

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