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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#21

Post by hangonhn »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

I think your sort of thinking requires a certain level of maturity and experience. I see the opposite with with some engineers who always have this illusion that the first or even second version of their project will be the final one for all times so they build it to scale (which actually doesn't even really scale because they don't know where the real bottlenecks are) and highly configurable. I've seen way, way more projects bite the dust because of poor product design or product market fit than the inability to scale. I've definitely seen projects that can't scale but at least from an engineering point of view, those problems are way more tractable than people not wanting or needing what you've created. As I've gotten more experienced, I've realized one of the great skills a good engineer has is the ability to change/fix/scale a project once it is up and running and while people are using it.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#22

Post by bpodgursky »

Even ignoring labor, none of these analyses ever consider BC/DR or backup costs.

S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups.

If I run a database on RDS, maybe it costs more than a bare-metal server, but I can replicate the automatic hourly backups to as many regions as I want. Incredible peace of mind over a self-managed facility.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#23

Post by shiftpgdn »

Rantenki wrote: post #14
shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$. Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down. Yes, y…

99.9% of colo facilities offer 24/7 remote hands. With the extreme cost savings of colo you could build in very significant redundancy, which is to say nothing of how infrequently modern server hardware fails.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#24

Post by heipei »

riku_iki wrote: post #13
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

It also depends on how computationally intensive your application is, AWS premium can be higher than labor cost if you need large scale data crunching.

Or if you need to egress a lot of data to the Internet. Or send a lot of data between different AZs. Or between Regions. Or anywhere really. Plus now you have to get a PhD in AWS Billing first: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1155838435065655296/pho... and https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1172239124251709449/pho...

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#25

Post by rootsudo »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Very true,

Running something on the open Internet is super annoying. If you properly subnet, or restrict to VPN, I can see it as useful but then you have a whole other host of problems to conquer.

If you're doing a static page or such, no issue, but the second you're hosting a webapp or need to have a database, yeah.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#26

Post by Rantenki »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

I have extensive infrastructure running across 3 separate org accounts for blast radius, with multiple separate VPCs per org, RDS databases across multiple AZs, and a large variety of instances.

Everything is built up and torn down via Terraform, and ZERO maintenance tasks are done via the console. Changes to infrastructure configuration are managed via CAB which approves PRs on Github which are automatically deployed via TF cloud.

We do monthly disaster simulations where we replace a _production_ environment.

I'll agree that AWS paints a very rosy picture of their own services, but there is substance underneath that PR.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#27

Post by anonfornoreason »

Rantenki wrote: post #14
shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$. Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down. Yes, y…

I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but with the correct planning and setup, physical infrastructure isn't that big of a deal for most web businesses.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#28

Post by jedberg »

These calculations never account for capital overhead of having spares on hand. That cost is part of what you pay for on Amazon. If the hardware breaks on Amazon, you just switch hardware.

If hardware breaks in your datacenter, it's an emergency and you better have spare capacity or extra hardware laying around.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#29

Post by nicoburns »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

The system I inherited at my current job was built with "scalability" in mind. That meant use of the Firebase databases and splitting everything out into lots of microservices. Ironically this actually caused scaling issues (even with the very small scale we have at the moment) because the lack of query flexibility in the database meant downloading entire collections in order to provide the necessary functionality.

We've since moved (almost) everything over to postgres and merged a lot of the microservice together. And while we're still running on heroku, we could probably run on Raspberry Pi if we needed to.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#30

Post by draw_down »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Really? You often see developers saying "we need to go with AWS"?
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