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

AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

wblinks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 152 posts

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#21

Post by AaronBBrown »

dangrossman wrote: post #15
AaronBBrown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS makes a lot of sense in a 24/7 environment, particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.

They don't have to make any purchasing decisions. They can rent servers from companies like Softlayer and Rackspace (#3 and #4 behind AWS for YC startups), or spin up much cheaper VPS's (Linode's #2). We're talking $120/month commitments, not buying hardware and driving to a data center to install it. Deploying to a freshly imaged physical server is the same as deploying to EC2, and they can be provisioned for you in…

As someone who has worked w/ AWS (and Rackspace) for several years with multiple startups...

Unless they have dramatically improved their offering in the last couple years, an hour or two from "I need a new server" to delivery is 1) not an accurate timeframe for physical servers from Rackspace and 2) even if it was realistic, that's an eternity when you are trying to iterate quickly. I can have a new server in 30 seconds with AWS and in the course of an hour could have tested my automation tools half a dozen times or more vs reimaging a server over and over again.

I'm not saying it's always the right choice or that it's cheaper, but that flexibility combined with some of the pre-canned tools (ELB, RDS, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS) has tremendous value even when you aren't autoscaling.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#22

Post by dangrossman »

AaronBBrown wrote: post #21
dangrossman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to make any purchasing decisions. They can rent servers from companies like Softlayer and Rackspace (#3 and #4 behind AWS for YC startups), or spin up much cheaper VPS's (Linode's #2). We're talking $120/month commitments, not buying hardware and driving to a data center to install it. Deploying to a freshly imaged physical server is the same as deploying to EC2, and they can be provisioned for you in…

As someone who has worked w/ AWS (and Rackspace) for several years with multiple startups... Unless they have dramatically improved their offering in the last couple years, an hour or two from "I need a new server" to delivery is 1) not an accurate timeframe for physical servers from Rackspace and 2) even if it was realistic, that's an eternity when you are trying to iterate quickly. I can have a new server in 30 sec…

You've completely moved the goalposts; "testing automation tools" where your servers live for a few minutes then get destroyed is not the same as "a 24/7 environment". I didn't suggest renting servers to do ephemeral testing.

I only have experience renting physical hardware from Softlayer. They have built and imaged new servers for me in under 2 hours a dozen times, day and night. They also have a "xpress servers" line with guaranteed also let you reimage your servers through their control panel or API; you don't need to have a new one built just to get a fresh disk image.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#23

Post by TillE »

AaronBBrown wrote: post #21
dangrossman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to make any purchasing decisions. They can rent servers from companies like Softlayer and Rackspace (#3 and #4 behind AWS for YC startups), or spin up much cheaper VPS's (Linode's #2). We're talking $120/month commitments, not buying hardware and driving to a data center to install it. Deploying to a freshly imaged physical server is the same as deploying to EC2, and they can be provisioned for you in…

As someone who has worked w/ AWS (and Rackspace) for several years with multiple startups... Unless they have dramatically improved their offering in the last couple years, an hour or two from "I need a new server" to delivery is 1) not an accurate timeframe for physical servers from Rackspace and 2) even if it was realistic, that's an eternity when you are trying to iterate quickly. I can have a new server in 30 sec…

So use AWS or Linode for that specific use case. Great, that's its strength.

Once it's clear that the new server will be needed long-term, transition to dedicated hardware to save money and get better performance.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#25

Post by tburch »

q3k wrote: post #24
5ersi wrote: post #18

Aww man, my head hurts just looking at this list. Just go with a PaaS, like Heroku or AppEngine, and forget about this sysadmin crap.

> sysadmin crap Without this “sysadmin crap” you would not have your precious PaaS.

>> sysadmin crap

>Without this “sysadmin crap” you would not have your precious PaaS.

The difference being that I don't have to deal with the “sysadmin crap”.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#26

Post by _zen »

AaronBBrown wrote: post #13
mbreese wrote: post #11

I'd also add to the list - make sure that AWS is right for your workload. If you don't have an elastic workload and are keeping all of your servers online 24/7, then you should investigate dedicated hardware from another provider. AWS really only makes sense ($$) when you can take advantage of the ability to spin up and spin down your instances as needed.

AWS makes a lot of sense in a 24/7 environment, particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.

> particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.

I doubt there are many founders who are technically informed enough to know about Amazon Web Services, but don't know about the other big 3 (Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace). If you truly don't, then you must not be a tech company, and I have a hard time believing a non-tech company without any technical founders would even know about AWS.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#27

Post by q3k »

tburch wrote: post #25
q3k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sysadmin crap Without this “sysadmin crap” you would not have your precious PaaS.

>> sysadmin crap >Without this “sysadmin crap” you would not have your precious PaaS. The difference being that I don't have to deal with the “sysadmin crap”.

Sure, but there's no reason to call it crap - have some respect for your fellow ops ;).

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#28

Post by tedivm »

tyw wrote: post #12
PhilipA wrote: post #10

Really useful article, though I don't agree with not using a CDN instead of S3. There are multiple articles which proves the performance of S3 being quite bad, and not useful for serving assets, comparing to CloudFront.

also the outbound bandwidth cost of S3 is very high. it would cost us several times what we're paying for s3+cloudfront to serve our content straight from s3.

Even cloudfront is ridiculously overpriced for a CDN. If you're pushing anything close to real bandwidth you could do a lot better elsewhere.

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#29

Post by rkalla »

Fantastic list with much more depth than I expected. Some surprises that others might be interested in from this article and comments below:

  [1] Keeping buckets locked down and allowing direct client -> S3 uploads
  [2] Using ALIAS records for easier redirection to core AWS resources instead of CNAMES.
  [3] What's an ALIAS?
  [-] Using IAM Roles
  [4] Benefits of using a VPC
  [-] Use '-' instead of '.' in S3 bucket names that will be accessed via HTTPS.
  [-] Automatic security auditing (damn, entire section was eye-opening)
  [-] Disable SSH in security groups to force you to get automation right.
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/PresignedUrlU...

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Cre...

[3] http://blog.dnsimple.com/2011/11/introducing-alias-record/

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5hsL-JNY4

Re: AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started

#30

Post by mbreese »

_zen wrote: post #26
AaronBBrown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS makes a lot of sense in a 24/7 environment, particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases.

> particularly when you are a new startup and don't have enough information (or capital!) to make educated server purchases. I doubt there are many founders who are technically informed enough to know about Amazon Web Services, but don't know about the other big 3 (Digital Ocean, Linode, Rackspace). If you truly don't, then you must not be a tech company, and I have a hard time believing a non-tech company without an…

I've seen places where they had an Amazon instance up 24/7 just sitting there idle, while they paid hundreds a month. Just because they occasionally needed a server for data processing. Someone told them that it was fast to spin up an AWS instance, so they did. But no one told them how to manage it, and the people doing the work were not very competent at system administration. So, they wasted thousands on idle time, just because no one told them how to snapshot their EBS volumes and terminate an instance.

More people know about AWS than you may realize.

Post reply on HN