191–200 of 355 posts
We've just finished moving servers from AWS to https://hetzner.com - and saved 10X with servers of double the capability. A great experience so far.
I heard they are very stubborn to increase the per user limit of cloud instances.
Also how did you deal with S3? Did you switch to another provider ? Like B2?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for bringing up the engineering cost. People always look at this as just AWS > Bare metal or whatever, but there's so much more to it than that. If they saved $800k per year, and they have to hire four additional ops engineers to run it at a cost of $400k per year, then they actually saved $400k. Which is still substantial and, all else being equal, sounds worthwhile. If they saved $800k per year, and they…
Hiring a person to do 'docker compose up' for you is orders of magnitude cheaper than whatever AWS-specific knowldege is needed to not have AWS crap its bed.
They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…
For example backblaze B2 offers free egress through Cloudflare, Fastly, BunnyCDN.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...
There is no way this figure is accurate. The annual spend cited of $1,000,000 is purely hypothetical, as admitted here: "However, all this data and processes need to happen on a server and, of course, we used AWS for it. A few years of growth later, we’re handling over 70,000 pages per minute, storing around 560 million pages, and paying well over $1,000,000 per year. Or at least we would be paying that much if we st…
> There is no way this figure is accurate. You've got the FUD covered, but you also need to add at least some substance to your claim. How do you know this figure would not be accurate? Why is your (hypothetical, not offered) estimate better than the author's?
> After testing whether Prerender pages could be cached in both S3 and minio, we slowly diverted traffic away from AWS S3 and towards minio.
if they served directly from s3 that would be, stupid?
> In the last four weeks, we moved most of the cache workload from AWS S3 to our own Cassandra cluster.
is also strange. it misses a lot of detail but it does not look like they just migrated away from s3...
(looks like their new hoster is hetzner, from service.prerender.io )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
EC2 is vastly more cost efficient than using all of those managed services unless you only have tiny on-demand usage scenarios.
Maybe if you ignore the costs associated with operating EC2 or if you have a steady, predictable workload. Or perhaps if you have enormous (on the order of FAANG) scale to absorb those operational costs.
The real target customer IMO for these big public clouds are non-technical corporations whose primary revenue and personnel competencies aren't derived from mastery of software but primarily around other verticals like agriculture, manufacturing, etc. Insert Werner Vogels' criticism of the HBR article emphasizing focusing upon core competencies and outsourcing non-core competencies like IT (read: because technology is so important to every business at scale now).
We've just finished moving servers from AWS to https://hetzner.com - and saved 10X with servers of double the capability. A great experience so far.
How did you get them to approve a large amount of Cloud instances / dedicated servers? I heard they are very stubborn to increase the per user limit of cloud instances. Also how did you deal with S3? Did you switch to another provider ? Like B2?
AWS seems ideal to me because it would let us easily scale up and down as our usage varies. But some of the anti-AWS sentiment in this article has given me pause. Any reason not to do this? Any alternatives I've missed?
Our storage and transfer usage will be negligible; it's all compute.
I'll always celebrate stories like this, but I also don't take some kind of anti-AWS lesson from it. This company saved $800k/year. Perfect time to go in-house with this solution. But when they were 1/10th this size, they'd only have saved $80k/year. Does that cover the cost of the engineering to build and maintain this system? Maybe not. And when they were 1/100th the size, it would have been laughable to go in-hous…