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How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

highscalability.com

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Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#191

Post by emodendroket »

toong wrote: post #146
emodendroket wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a small org with relatively small volume self-hosting doesn't make sense.

Can you elaborate why not ? You can get some cheap dedicated hosting (ex: [1]) for a fraction of the price. It's so cheap compared to AWS you can order a few spare ones and still come out cheaper than your one beefy AWS instance ? The only way it doesn't make sense is, if you need to scale up and down very fast ? [1] 60 euro/month: Quad-Core Haswell, 32 GB (non-ECC) RAM, 240Gb SSD @ https://www.hetzner.de

Because if your sysadmins are all moonlighting developers having them not develop stuff to do subpar system work is more expensive than just paying the cloud premium.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#192

Post by emodendroket »

berkay wrote: post #175
toong wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why not ? You can get some cheap dedicated hosting (ex: [1]) for a fraction of the price. It's so cheap compared to AWS you can order a few spare ones and still come out cheaper than your one beefy AWS instance ? The only way it doesn't make sense is, if you need to scale up and down very fast ? [1] 60 euro/month: Quad-Core Haswell, 32 GB (non-ECC) RAM, 240Gb SSD @ https://www.hetzner.de

The cost of the systems is almost irrelevant. The time of qualified people is far more expensive. Sot it's not just the elasticity. You have to look everything from the time perspective as well. What additional knowledge will I need? Will I need to learn load balancers, how to make them highly available? will I have to learn about SSL certificates and termination? Will I need to learn how to implement and operate a s…

Don't forget the quality of the work. Frankly, if I'm administering servers I'm not going to do as good a job of it as someone whose whole job is that and I'm not going to do as good a job as Azure or AWS or whoever else either. Platform as a service is the way to go.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#193

Post by brongondwana »

jzawodn wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting coming at it from the other side, I get hit up all the time to move my infrastructure to the cloud, I give them the specs and what I pay per month, tell them that if they can beat it I'll switch. The closest anyone has come has been about 4x the cost I'm currently paying. But I note that I have a unique case that isn't covered by the cloud "architecture" (crawling the web and indexing it). Explainin…

Yeah, it's always fun when I tell someone at we're 100% self-hosted too. They never stop to think that traffic, load, and usage patterns on craigslist are pretty well understood at this point. Plus it's certainly cheaper than paying someone else to run all your hardware. You get to pick your peers, pick your hardware, and allocate as you see fit.

We run into this at FastMail all the time as well. For the one customer who needed "their own gear" we built out on SoftLayer for much the same reasons as the article - real hardware where you need it.

But our operations costs are so much lower than renting that we could replace all our hardware every year and still break even.

(yeah, we could get SoftLayer to refresh our hardware every year as well, but we don't need it refreshed that fast, and at the end we still own the hardware)

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