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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#211

Post by joana035 »

didibus wrote: post #148
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…

When you say AWS? You mean EC2? Cause when I think AWS, I think of using Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, Kinesis, Redshift, Elastic search, etc. All these managed services arn't just about cost or scale, a lot of it is about convenience and development speed and flexibility, as well as reduced maintainance and operational burden.

"maintenance and operational burden" in the cloud is way higher than renting a box somewhere and forgetting about it.

I can't understand why people keep using this as an argument against anything else other than cloud while playing catch-up with the rain of changes and suffering from fomo of last week's new stuff from cloud.

Heck, when did infrastructure became like js landscape?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#212

Post by mattbeckman »

Our small team spends roughly $40-50k/mo at AWS. If you're just hosting a website with a SQL database (glorified LAMP stack), you're probably in it for the wrong reasons. Stick to a dedicated box or DigitalOcean etc.

AWS is like co-locating your hardware, and then the data center having 1000s of employees offering highly reliable services you can access from your infrastructure that lets you move WAY faster for things that are hard to do.

e.g. Discussion today was increasing log retention. 10 years ago I would have run the numbers, extended some SAN volumes, considered procuring more NetApp shelves, etc.

Today it's simply a cost question: is it worth it to us to store those logs for 10x longer? Sure? Ok, done.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#213

Post by jjav »

busterarm wrote: post #51
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…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

> It's freedom.

Being locked in to AWS (or GCP, or..) when costs are rising out of control is what I consider the opposite of freedom.

I was with one startup that went full-in on AWS features, so it was very difficult to migrate. Sure, we got started real quick, that was nice. I argued early on that we need to be careful of not getting locked in to AWS in case we need to jump away once we have some customer growth, but everyone else thought that was silly.

Fast forward two years and our AWS bill was about $2500 per year per customer. Revenue per customer, certainly nowhere near that. Burning VC money gets you far but only so far. Yes we ran out of money.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#214

Post by nikisweeting »

mekster wrote: post #167
nikisweeting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance? The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers…

For those generations of people who grew up by being able to spin up servers with a few mouse clicks, doing that manually seems like a whole level of professional skills.

I feel almost the opposite. The AWS console seems so chaotic and needlessly complex to me compared to the simple familiarity of plugging in a hardware server. Maybe I'm an old geezer already but I'm not even that old!

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#215

Post by jacobsenscott »

drchopchop wrote: post #47
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…

Also, when it comes time to scale, it's a lot easier to bring up a relatively simple (but scalable) infrastructure on AWS than deal with: colo location, buying servers, buying spares, replacing failing hardware, imaging, setting up backups, etc etc. Those typically become concerns once you're at big scale where the cost savings are significant.

But for most companies it never "comes time to scale". Especially if you have 100% dedicated hardware and you can start out with a 64 core db server with 120GB of memory and a matching web server pretty much for free.

You need to "scale" early in a cloud environment because you are allocated a fraction of the hardware and someone else on that same hardware is using all the resources. AWS/DO etc boost their margins by packing as many vps's onto one physical box as they can. That's why on a VPS your 95th percentile response time is 1000x your 50% response time. All you can do is "scale" and pray enough of your connections are hitting the boxes that nobody else is using right now.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#216

Post by nikisweeting »

dageshi wrote: post #172
nikisweeting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance? The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers…

When you can effectively spawn a new server with a command line you've got saved in your notes... it kinda feels a bit inefficient to be physically building and deploying them yourself. It's also really pretty amazing to be able to spin up instances or services to test with for however many hours you need and then simply release them again. Once you've got used to that level of freedom and convenience it's hard to go…

But I have a beefy server with capacity for many extra VMs for a fraction of the price, so I can still spin them up on a whim. The power use is proportional to system load so I'm not paying much continuous overhead, just the up-front cost of having a larger server.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#217

Post by collsni »

busterarm wrote: post #51
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…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

As a security architect, I hate you. I get the freedom but I don't want our corporate data floating on a insecure elastic search cluster. Thanks

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#218

Post by teh_klev »

mekster wrote: post #169
teh_klev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never fails to amaze me how many HN contributors don't seem to read the linked articles yet seem compelled to tell you off for things you've already accounted for, explained and justified.

It's because comments are usually far more intelligent and interesting to read and I set my app to open up comments than the story by default. I don't blame the others doing the same.

So how can you comment on, or have a critical thought about an article, if you're just reading a bunch of other comments likely left by others who also likely didn't read the article?

I find that genuinely baffling, and somewhat worrying, especially on more serious topics.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#219

Post by jjav »

amerkhalid wrote: post #170
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

I know corps and teams where they need approvals for each cloud resource they instantiate. That is a culture problem. On other hand, when we were using simple VPSes at various companies, at some companies, I could just send email saying I provisioned a new server and at the others, they wanted a ticket with justification for it. But we always had enough test servers to try out and experiment. Cloud is great in many w…

> I know corps and teams where they need approvals for each cloud resource they instantiate. That is a culture problem.

I'm on the software side so I want my compute resources in the next 30 seconds like anyone, but.. at a larger company there needs to be controls in place or things can go bad quick. At one company I'm aware of, finance really started banging on doors when the cloud bill went over $1M/month and nobody really knew very clearly what any of it was being spent on or what products or customers each expense was associated with.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#220

Post by joana035 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #142
Slartie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hadn't tethered your software to proprietary AWS services in the first place, you wouldn't have the problem to "replicate" all of that on your own infrastructure. You would simply "have" that stuff - or better said: you'd have the parts that you actually need (having a giant grab bag of ready-to-use cloud services at your disposal tends to entice developers to use them, regardless of actual need, especially in…

I run a business on AWS. I have a few terabytes of data on S3. It costs like $30/mo. I have about a half terabyte of data in RDS. That's about $40/mo, plus a couple thousand a year for the RIs. I run the company myself. I run SES for less than a dollar a month to handle all my transactional emails. If I move this out of AWS, I need that data replicated for redundancy. I need some meaty servers set up, and I need to m…

> If I'm spending all of my time in a SSH session installing kernel updates...

Who does that? Just use a stable kernel, enable unattended upgrades and forget about it.

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