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A million-dollar engineering problem

segment.com

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Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#221

Post by funkyy »

Curious42 wrote: post #212
edanm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is this gross? They're giving people what is essentially a loan, which they are uniquely able to give, to help them start a business, in the hopes that this will be an even bigger business. This is almost the definition of a win-win. Customers are free to leave at any time or work with other providers, but they choose AWS because they give them more value.

Wouldn't it irritate AWS if startups left once they got big, despite receiving special care services from AWS? How do they deal with that?

It's open market, they can do nothing.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#222

Post by teh »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #138
teh wrote: post #6

I've been joking with friends that my next job will be AWS efficiency guru. I've somewhat optimized our own use, but I think I could use similar, simple rules to get 20% out of a 500k / month budget. Give me what I save you in 2 months and I'll have a good business :)

Like many others, I'm interested, do you have a preferred way to contact you?

Hi, drop me a line at tom@wearewizards.io :)

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#223

Post by Lazare »

daurnimator wrote: post #190
brianwawok wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a DB guy if you host it on your server or AWSs? You have a DB either way. You can have a guy if you want or not... Physical location means nothing.

DB guy to tune the instance the database runs on + figure out your streaming backups etc. It's not a full time job, but it's a couple of days a week; and completely taken care of if you use RDS

I think your estimate is off by a factor of about 40. RDS is great at what it does, but it doesn't do that much. Getting the stuff RDS gives you for "free" might take a a few days to set up, but after that, your automated backups are going to take just as much of your time as the ones RDS gives you, ie, none.

If RDS saves you 30 minutes a week I'd be surprised.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#224

Post by jaredklewis »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

A friend of mine was annoyed that a small service he liked was shutting down. He contacted the developer who said that they were shutting it down because the server costs were higher than the money they were making. They were spending 5k a month on AWS crap and claimed it was impossible to get any lower. He helped them consolidate everything onto a single rented dedicated server costing 400 a month. Now the service i…

Well, it seems obvious that if you want scalable, redundant, no downtime infrastructure, it will cost more than non-redundant, non-scalable infrastructure.

While it was obviously a good trade off for this company, it seems silly to then extrapolate that all companies would benefit by getting rid of redundancy and scalability.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#225

Post by user5994461 »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #129
user5994461 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The savings are too miserable to pay a consultant. Remember that he has to charge at least $1000 a day. He's more expensive than your entire bill.

Right. Surprisingly, the comment you're responding to resembles some of my clients. This is a business problem. In this case it's not "save us a few grand" that they're asking for-- the real ask is "help us analyze and forecast our spend as we continue to grow." Identify the knobs and dials that impact infrastructure costs, devise a costing model that states "each additional user costs $X to service," identify what m…

Agreed, consulting is more than just lowering the bill once.

That doesn't change that they don't have the funds to pay the fees though.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#226

Post by user5994461 »

gkop wrote: post #141
user5994461 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-looks at this datacenter- Well, actually it doesn't. RAM and Xeons are expensive.

So how many does it buy?

Let's say 1 Rack of 42 * 1U servers.

That's about the upfront costs of servers ONLY.

Ignoring cooling, all personal costs, electricity, networking gear, network storage and future maintenance.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#227

Post by brianwawok »

hueving wrote: post #201
daurnimator wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DB guy to tune the instance the database runs on + figure out your streaming backups etc. It's not a full time job, but it's a couple of days a week; and completely taken care of if you use RDS

A couple of days a week? That's ridiculous, once you have established procedures the only thing left is regular OS maintenance tasks which are the same as the rest of your servers.

Indeed. RDS saves like 1 day setup. No ongoing difference.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#228

Post by pc86 »

Curious42 wrote: post #212
edanm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is this gross? They're giving people what is essentially a loan, which they are uniquely able to give, to help them start a business, in the hopes that this will be an even bigger business. This is almost the definition of a win-win. Customers are free to leave at any time or work with other providers, but they choose AWS because they give them more value.

Wouldn't it irritate AWS if startups left once they got big, despite receiving special care services from AWS? How do they deal with that?

> How do they deal with that?

By pricing it in to the discounts in the first place. So smaller discounts. And by making sure their offerings are priced competitively to comparable products.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#229

Post by bpicolo »

abalone wrote: post #204
bpicolo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is just having a compute pool where you don't have to care at all where things are actually running. It definitely depends on the use case, but I could imagine more, smaller units allowing for more granular (and therefore a bit more cost-effective) scaling.

But isn't that actually less granular that one container that can size itself optimally? I.e. it could use as little or a much resources available on the machine. And it would eliminate any redundancies among the containers of the same type.

If that's the case you would hit separate containers fighting over resource usage though, no? Seems better to give them a specific block they can use all of.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#230

Post by dexterdog »

phamilton wrote: post #205
YZF wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a more or less fixed workload then AWS ends up being a lot more expensive. If you have a highly variable workload and you have a bunch of servers sitting idle most of the time then it becomes more competitive. AWS lets a small startup go from one server to 10K servers without breaking sweat, at least in theory, but it's not for everyone. At the same time not everyone wants to build DCs with thousands of s…

The variable workload has been a little less important with reserved instances. They used to have a "light/heavy utilization" pricing structure but now it's basically cheaper to reserve the instance than it is to scale it up and down, unless you need the extra capacity less than 60% of the time.

That's going between 1 and 0 servers for an instance. Real scaling needs are met in a setup going from 3-50+ servers throughout the week.
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