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

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

#211

Post by vpShane »

cornfieldlabs wrote: post #85
ndhandala wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running k8s cluster. Check out cloudnative pg. That thing is a beast.

We have hosted on everything on a tiny Hetzner. The site barely has any users apart from our friends:) :( Info noted

Worth checking out the different server hosts. You can get a cheap OVH server with 64GB of RAM, 4-6cores with 2TB of disk space from OVH for $30, better servers for $70 with 1gbps - 2gbps bandwidth.

Setting up a DB isn't hard, using an LLM to ask questions will guide you to the right places. I'm always talking with Gemini because I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 42 server and things are slightly different here and there.

But, different server hosts offer DB-ready OS's so all you have to do is load the OS on the server and you'll be ready to go.

The joy of Linux is getting everything _just right_ and so much _just right_ that you can launch a second server and set it up that way _just right_ within minutes.

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

#212

Post by dimitrios1 »

One thing I can say definitively, as someone who is definitely not an AI zealot (more of an AI pragmatist): GPT language models have reduced the barrier of running your own bare metal server. AWS salesfolk have long often used the boogeyman of the costs (opportunity, actual, maintenance) of running your own server as the reason you should pick AWS (not realizing you are trading one set of boogeymen for another), but AI has reduced a lot of that burden.

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

#213

Post by kijin »

baq wrote: post #135
dangus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of engineers who remember the bare metal days have legitimate qualms about going back to the way that world used to work especially before containerization/Kubernetes. I imagine a lot of people who use Linux/AWS now started out with bare metal Microsoft/VMWare/Oracle type of environments where AWS services seemed like a massive breath of fresh air.

I remember having to put in orders for pallets of servers which then ended up storage somewhere because there were not enough people to carry and wire them up and/or there wasn't enough rack space to install them. Having an ability to spin up a server or a vm when you need it without having to ask a single question is very liberating. Sometimes such elasticity is exactly what's needed. OTOH other people's servers are…

That's the beauty of VMs.

Luckily, Amazon is far from the only VM provider out there, so this discussion doesn't need to be polarized between "AWS everything" and "on-premise everything". You can rent VMs elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. There are many places that will rent you bare metal servers by the hour, just as if they were VMs. You can even mix VMs and bare metal servers in the same datacenter.

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

#214

Post by torginus »

thelastgallon wrote: post #175

These are the features that AWS provides (1) Massive expansion of budget (100 - 1000x) to support empire building. Instead of one minimum-wage sysadmin with 2 high-availability, maxed-out servers for 20K - 40K (and 4-hour response time from Dell/HPE), you can have 100M multi-cloud Kubernetes + Lambda + a mix-and-match of various locked-in cloud services (DB, etc.). And you can have a large army of SRE/DevOps. You get…

The problem with those 5 people, is you can't hire a 6th - your stack is custom and probably even if you find the guy, he'll need months of ramp-up.

In contrast, you could throw a stone into a bush and hit an AWS guy.

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

#215

Post by marcosdumay »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #114
steelegbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists. It can work well if your product is simple and scalable. A lot of places quietly achieve this. That said, I've seen real world scenarios where complexity is up the wazoo and an opex cost focus means you're hiring under skilled…

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".

Nobody is hiring generalists nowadays.

At the same time, the incredible complexity of the software infrastructure is making specialists more and more useless. To the point that almost every successful specialist out there is just some disguised generalist that decided to focus their presentation in a single area.

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

#216

Post by whstl »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #83
JCM9 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. When AWS was 10 solid core services it made sense and was exciting. It’s now a bloated mess of 200+ services (many of which almost nobody uses) with all that complexity starting to create headaches and cracks. AWS needs to stop trying to have a half-arsed solution to every possible use case and instead focus on doing a few basic things really well.

(Real question, not meant to be sarcastic or challenging!) -- What are the challenges in trying to use just the ~10 core services you want/need and ignoring the others? What problems do the others you don't use cause with this use case?

The early services were mostly self-contained.

A lot of newer stuff that actually scales (so Lightsail doesn't count) is entangled with "security", "observability" and "network" services. So if you just want to run EC2 + RDS today, you also have to deal with VPC, Subnets, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc.

Since security and logs are not optional, you have very limited choice.

Having that many required additional services means lots of hidden charges, complexity and problems. And you need a team if you're not doing small-scale stuff.

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

#217

Post by sema4hacker »

Anycast, Argo Rollouts, Aurora Serverless, AWS, BGP, Ceph, ClickHouse, Cloudflare, CloudFront, DWDM, Flux, Frankfurt, Glacier, Helm, Kinesis, Kubernetes, Metabase, MicroK8s, NVMe, OneUptime, OpenTelemetry Collector, Paris, Postgres, Posthog, PXE, Redis, Step Functions, Supermicro, Talos, Terraform, Tinkerbell, VM's.

I wish you started out by telling me how many customers you have to serve, how many transactions they generate, how much I/O there is.

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

#218

Post by rossdavidh »

I had a problem figuring out why the place I was working wanted to move from in-house to AWS; their workload was easily handled by a few servers, they had no big bursts of traffic, and they didn't need any of the specialized features of AWS.

Eventually, I realized that it was because the devs wanted to put "AWS" on their resumes. I wondered how long it would take management to catch on that they were being used as a place to spruce up your resume before moving on to catch bigger fish.

But not long after, I realized that the management was doing the same thing. "Led a team migration to AWS" looked good on their resume, also, and they also intended to move on/up. Shortly after I left, the place got bought and the building it was in is empty now.

I wonder, now that Amazon is having layoffs and Big Tech generally is not as many people's target employer, will "migrated off of AWS to in-house servers" be what devs (and management) want on their resume?

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

#219

Post by faxmeyourcode »

ecshafer wrote: post #99

AWS is extremely expensive, and I think I have to agree with DHH's assessment that many developers are afraid of computers. AWS is taking advantage of that fear of actually just setting up linux and configuring a computer. However to steelman AWS use. Many businesses are STILL running mainframes. Many run terrible setups like Access as a production database. In 2025 there are large companies with no CICD platforms or…

I worked at a company like this, I was an intern with wide eyes seeing the migration to git via bitbucket in the year ... 2018? What a sight to see.

That company had its own data center, tape archives, etc. It had been running largely the same way continuously since the 90s. When I left for a better job, the company had split into two camps. The old curmudgeonly on-prem activists and the over-optimistic cloud native AWS/GCP certified evangelist with no real experience in the cloud (because they worked at a company with no cloud presence). I'm humble enough to admit that I was part of the second camp and I didn't know shit, I was cargo culting.

This migration is still not complete as far as I'm aware. Hopefully the teams that resisted this long and never left for the cloud get to settle in for another decade of on-prem superiority lol.

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

#220

Post by gtr »

embedding-shape wrote: post #197
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…

> 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?

London had the tube bombings, but there is no security scanning there.
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