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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#191

Post by tracker1 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

I have to agree... I think DO is pretty good as a starter ground... found dokku because of the DO startup option, and it's pretty much my go to for spinning something up to play with and/or tear down.

Create an app with a Dockerfile in the root of the project, and it's a git push away from deployed. The LE extension adds https, and it pretty much just works. Connecting to DO hosted databases and object storage is pretty smooth as well.

It doesn't auto-scale like FaaS options, or offer a lot of the other bits one may want/need, but it does good for a lot of the one-off things I'll play with.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#192

Post by jacob019 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #183
shiftpgdn wrote: post #4

You don't even need to buy a new EPYC or Xeon Scalable system. A 20 core Xeon v3/v4 system with 128gb of ram can be had off lease for $1000. Psychz.net provides 1u colocation with 1/Gbs link (10/Gbs burst) for $80/mo. Equivalent EC2 is $300-600/month with no better reliability. Plus you have to deal with noisy neighbors and bandwidth overages. Build your baseline usage in colo and burst into AWS unless you like buyin…

> Psychz.net lol I don't think I've ever had a non-dodgy packet arrive from Psychz network.

So true. I had to block their entire address space on our mailservers.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#193

Post by MattGaiser »

chmod775 wrote: post #146

I mean yeah, AWS is a 10-100x markup over running your own stuff. I run a file hosting site that serves >500TB of data to about 2 million monthly users on a bunch of dedicated servers that cost me about $500 a month. If I ran this on AWS it would cost me more than $20,000 every month . I could hire four system administrators to do nothing but look after each of my four dedicated servers for that money. It's completel…

Isn't transfer a huge cost for AWS? I know of some people who have gone with Oracle because it supposedly has much lower pricing on that.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#194

Post by dheera »

tpxl wrote: post #159
dheera wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosting being cheaper is obvious. It's just a nightmare to manage reliability. With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical acce…

>With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. This is so often repeated, but at my previous company, the amount of internal outages was smaller than the amount of outages on AWS or GCP. We then migrated to AWS for some stupid reason (we didn't need scalability, that's for sure) and we had a probl…

That's great, but when you're a startup and your only option is Comcast, outages are a very real thing.

Our first real office also had internet access run by these 2 dudes in the basement and outages every few weeks for a couple hours.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#195

Post by busterarm »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #164
mattmanser wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth has this got to do with the scenario being discussed? You have a mature product, with a proven market and known scalability demands. The exact opposite of how this thread started and somehow this is a good anecdote refuting it!

> You can generalize the infrastructure to run 99% of businesses needs and write that Terraform code only once. You can bring that with you everywhere and take care of the basics in seconds and you can sleep at night easily without a pager going off. To quote my parent. That's what we did and it worked for us.

It was in an almost exactly similar situation to yours where I learned to do this and I've been able to scale it up to companies with 1000x more demanding infrastructure.

The funnier thing in my case was that three years after I left, the infrastructure was humming along fine with nobody actively looking at it. They never hired anyone to look after it because it never gave them any problems and they would have been fine to keep paying me to be there and do little/nothing.

I've staked my whole career on this way of doing things and I'm never looking back.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#196

Post by busterarm »

amerkhalid wrote: post #170
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

I know corps and teams where they need approvals for each cloud resource they instantiate. That is a culture problem. On other hand, when we were using simple VPSes at various companies, at some companies, I could just send email saying I provisioned a new server and at the others, they wanted a ticket with justification for it. But we always had enough test servers to try out and experiment. Cloud is great in many w…

Fair. I've seen shops like that and I feel bad for them, but that's an organizational limitation, not one imposed by the cloud provider.

If you want to buy server hardware, there is always the spec, testing and sales process no matter what. Hardware buying eats so much time...but at least the fancy dinners are kinda nice. And there's a proper way to do the accounting for it as a depreciating asset vs buying cloud (and most public orgs actually prefer the former).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#197

Post by wolco2 »

busterarm wrote: post #188
wolco2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Linode is frequently the target of massive global DDOS. I remember well a few years ago the Christmas Eve Linode DDOS because I had to work 20 hours that day." Those sound like some of the weakest reasons. Is your information still upto date? Are they still experiencing major outages? The truth is it would save you money to use a digitalocean instance over aws, regardless of your edge cases where some network proper…

I can't really get into specifics, but the particular issue that we have with DO (and it really is specific to DO/droplets) makes it a complete no-go for our new product architecture. It doesn't save us money if we can't use it. As for my reasons being weak, you might have read other places in this thread where I've mentioned that I'm responsible for a) a multi-million dollar infrastructure, b) across clouds and on-p…

You are probably an expert in your area but the original poster was talking about much smaller shops. That's the point being missed for every multi-million dollar spender there are thousands of smaller projects paying 10x the cost because they think they will be you one day and it is cheaper to build on that stack from day one.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#198

Post by merb »

Zelphyr wrote: post #87
tnolet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t go for AWS for EC2. You go for AWS because in half a day you can whip up a secure, managed and auto scaling app using their proprietary services like SQS, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, Dynamo etc.

Right, but my argument is that most products--especially when the company is a startup--doesn't need that kind of scalability and won't for quite some time, if ever. They all start out starry-eyed thinking they're the next unicorn and oh-my-gawd what if we start getting the kind of traffic Facebook gets tomorrow?! That's just not a reality. Facebook themselves didn't get that traffic for several years.

the biggest thing in the cloud is storage and managed databases. replacing a dead server with s3 is super easy. managing a database server can be challening aswell.

if you have one node you still need to do backups and s3 is just way easier. also when you abstract your storage your application has a way better structure. I already refactored tons of applications where System.IO or java.io were all over the place. with object storage from the start, you barely run into that problem.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#199

Post by xfitm3 »

Having previously performed an extensive TCO calculation (2010) it was substantially cheaper for on-prem vs AWS. We had You have to know your business and you need people with facilities skills. Investing in cold aisle containment reduced our PUE quite a bit. You also have to become an expert in logistics to run your own facility, where just almost anyone can click away in AWS and spend money.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#200

Post by busterarm »

wolco2 wrote: post #197
busterarm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really get into specifics, but the particular issue that we have with DO (and it really is specific to DO/droplets) makes it a complete no-go for our new product architecture. It doesn't save us money if we can't use it. As for my reasons being weak, you might have read other places in this thread where I've mentioned that I'm responsible for a) a multi-million dollar infrastructure, b) across clouds and on-p…

You are probably an expert in your area but the original poster was talking about much smaller shops. That's the point being missed for every multi-million dollar spender there are thousands of smaller projects paying 10x the cost because they think they will be you one day and it is cheaper to build on that stack from day one.

Yeah, I'm saying that you can use this cost effectively at smaller places too.

When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basically the same here.

The way the cost balloons out of control for most companies is for things like S3 access (applications that HEAD the bucket every 60 seconds and hit the API request cash register), or managed services like EKS, Amazon ElasticSearch, etc. It's in the "oh I don't have to learn how to manage X application" where cloud gets expensive.

Smaller providers solve that problem by not even giving you that option. It's not that AWS is expensive, it's that they give you rope to hang yourself with.

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