Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

oneuptime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 513 posts

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#191

Post by Edman274 »

hibikir wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

Well, they aren't wrong about the bare metal either: Every organization ends up tied to their staff, and said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using. People end up in quite the fights because their supposed experts are more fond of uniformity and learning nothing new. Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs, and people migrated to AWS to avoid dealing w…

The entire value proposition of AWS vs running one's own server is basically this: is it easier to ask for permission, or forgiveness? You're asking for permission to get a million dollars worth of servers / hardware / power upgrades now, or you're asking for forgiveness for spending five million dollars in AWS after 10 months. Which will be easy: permission or forgiveness?

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#192

Post by AndroTux »

yanslookup wrote: post #165

FD: I work at Amazon, I also started my career in a time where I had to submit paper requests for servers that had turn around times measured in months. I just don't see it. Given the nature of the services they offer it's just too risky not to use as much managed stuff with SLAs as possible. k8s alone is a very complicated control plane + a freaking database that is hard to keep happy if it's not completely static.…

Managing a complex environment is hard, no matter whether that’s deployed on AWS or on prem. You always need skilled workers. On one platform you need k8s experts. On the other platform you need AWS experts. Let’s not pretend like AWS is a simple one-click fire and forget solution.

And let’s be very real here: if your cloud service goes down for a few hours because you screwed something up, or because AWS deployed some bad DNS rules again, the world moves on. At the end of the day, nobody gives a shit.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#193

Post by embedding-shape »

hibikir wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

Well, they aren't wrong about the bare metal either: Every organization ends up tied to their staff, and said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using. People end up in quite the fights because their supposed experts are more fond of uniformity and learning nothing new. Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs, and people migrated to AWS to avoid dealing w…

> said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using

Looking back at doing various hiring decisions at various levels of organizations, this is probably the single biggest mistake I've done multiple times, hiring specific people using specific technology because we were specifically using that.

You'll end up with a team unwilling to change, because "you hired me for this, even if it's best for the business with something else, this is what I do".

Once I and the organizations shifted our mindset to hiring people who are more flexible, even if they have expertise in one or two specific technologies, they won't put their head in the sand whenever changes come up, and everything became a lot easier.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#194

Post by snovv_crash »

kleiba wrote: post #174
anal_reactor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My manager wants me to make this silly AWS certification. Let me go on a tangent about trains. In Spain before you board a high-speed train you need to go though full security check, like on an airport. In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check. The problem is that even though the security check is an expensive, inefficient theatre, just in case something does blow…

How does Spain deal with trains that come in from a neighboring country?

French trains come in without any security checks.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#195

Post by ghaff »

wredcoll wrote: post #186
maccard wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a small company owned by a huge company. We are entirely independent except for purchasing, IT, and budget approval. We run our CI on AWS, and it’s slow and flaky for a variety of reasons (compiling large c++ projects combined with instance type pressure). It’s also expensive. We planned a migration to move from 4OD instances to one on prem machine and we guessed we’d save $1000/mo, our builds would be fas…

This is the root success of aws, it lets internal teams bypass sysadmin departments.

Working around official IT was certainly a significant factor early on. I'm less convinced it is nearly as big a driver (or a downside depending on your perspective) today.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#196

Post by wredcoll »

speleding wrote: post #144
PenguinCoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most businesses really don't need that complexity. They think they do. Premature optimization.

If your database has a hardware failure then you could loose all sales and customer data since your last backup, plus cost of the down time while you restore. I struggle to think of a business where that is acceptable.

That's not the same as a "high availibility hot swap redundant multi region database".

Running mysqldump to a usb disk in the office once a day is pretty cheap.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#197

Post by embedding-shape »

anal_reactor wrote: post #143
fulafel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

My manager wants me to make this silly AWS certification. Let me go on a tangent about trains. In Spain before you board a high-speed train you need to go though full security check, like on an airport. In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check. The problem is that even though the security check is an expensive, inefficient theatre, just in case something does blow…

> In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check

Just for curiosity's sake, did any other EU countries have any recent terrorist attacks involving bombs on trains in the capital, or is Spain so far alone with this experience?

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#198

Post by danhor »

speleding wrote: post #144
PenguinCoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most businesses really don't need that complexity. They think they do. Premature optimization.

If your database has a hardware failure then you could loose all sales and customer data since your last backup, plus cost of the down time while you restore. I struggle to think of a business where that is acceptable.

My "Homeserver" with its database running on an old laptop has less downtime than AWS.

I expect most, if not 99%, of all businesses can cope with a hardware failure and the associated downtime while restoring to a different server, judging from the impact of the recent AWS outage and the collective shrug in response. With a proper raid setup, data loss should be quite rare, if more is required a primary + secondary setup with a manual failover isn't hard.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#199

Post by hndc »

DrewADesign wrote: post #172
Aurornis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. I see more comments in favor than pushing back. The problem I have with these stories is the confirmation bias that comes with them. Going self-hosted or on-premises does make sense in some carefully selected use cases, but I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into…

> The shared theme of all of the failure stories is missing the true cost of self-hosting: The hours spent getting the servers just right, managing the hosting, debating the best way to run things, and dealing with little issues add up but are easily lost in the noise if you’re not looking closely. What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes.…

> DevOps was a reaction to the fact that even outsourcing ops to AWS doesn’t entirely solve all of your ops problems

DevOps, conceptually, goes back to the 90s. I was using the term in 2001. If memory serves, AWS didn't really start to take off until the mid/late aughts, or at least not until they launched S3.

DevOps was a reaction to the software lifecycle problem and didn't have anything to do with AWS. If anything it's the other way around: AWS and cloud hosting gained popularity in part due to DevOps culture.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#200

Post by hedora »

whstl wrote: post #168
PenguinCoder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm proudly 100% on prem Linux sys admin. There are not openings for my skills and they do not pay as well as whatever cloud hotness is "needed".

That's the crazy thing. Most AWS-only Ops engineers I know are making bank and in high demand, and Ops teams are always HUGE in terms of headcount outside of startups. The "AWS is cheaper" thing is the biggest grift in our industry.

I wonder how vibe coding will impact this.

You can easily get your service up by asking claude code or whatever to just do it

It produces aws yaml that’s better than many devops people I’ve worked with. In other words, it absolutely should not be trusted with trivial tasks, but you could easily blow $100K’s per year for worse.

Post reply on HN