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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#221

Post by mekster »

segmondy wrote: post #209
mekster wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like netflix wants to put liability off its shoulders and wants someone to blame at. Very different demand than most.

I don't buy that, liability to who? If Netflix goes down, I'm gonna cry and tweet about it, I'm not going to cancel my account. Their catalog is unmatched. colocating across the world is not easy, they also have scale that goes up and down based on time of day, and say holidays where they really need to scale up. Cloud is great for that, the elastic part is great, place the core on there and scale up and down as need…

I don't mean they'll make excuses toward customers but say they can simply blame AWS toward content providers when something happens to the infrastructure instead of begging them to wait while they prepare for a damage report on their custom infrastructure.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#222

Post by anonfornoreason »

kroolik wrote: post #108
anonfornoreason wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great! This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora. Once you have expertise…

This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while.

I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website.

Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#223

Post by FridgeSeal »

Zelphyr wrote: post #95
busterarm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware. For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking th…

I've mentioned this elsewhere but; I'm not arguing co-location over cloud. I'm arguing inexpensive cloud like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail over a complex AWS configuration designed to scale with near infinite flexibility. Why does a product that gets 100 visitors a day need that? $5-10/month serves them just fine.

The cynical answer is "resume-driven-development".

The slightly more charitable answer is that having your infrastructure automatically scale and adapt to the workload, and watching it take off is a really fun and exciting moment, and people want to experience that, and in the rare event that it does happen and you suddenly need to handle 10-100x more traffic, having things auto-scale up and then back down means you (in an ideal world) get to watch it excitedly, instead of furiously running around spinning things up and putting out fires that arise when you start operating at larger scales.

Is it overkill to build your business like that from the get-go? Almost certainly (precluding the situation where you have some kind of guarantee of incoming load), but people (want to) do it anyway.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#224

Post by ericpauley »

welterde wrote: post #207
ericpauley wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. In the article remote hands refers to actual hours of maintenance performed ($640 for 4 hours). The cost of having a human on call to solve hardware problems is far higher than that.

There is no need to have anyone on call yourself to drive to the colo, since any decent colocation provider will have staff on-site 24/7 to perform any physical intervention required. Part of that you pay through your colocation bill and part you pay by the hour (depending on your contract/provider).

They're doing their own routing. Will the colo tech fix their iptables if they mess them up and can't ssh?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#225

Post by philliphaydon »

joana035 wrote: post #211
didibus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Renting a box and forgetting about it is how you get hacked. There is more maintenance and operational burden with self hosting vs cloud. But going cloud doesn't mean there's no longer any burden.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#226

Post by EdwardDiego »

joana035 wrote: post #211
didibus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I disagree, managed K8s and managed Kafka are both far nicer to work with than doing it yourself.

Of course, you have to accept the costs and the limitations to use it.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#227

Post by dragonsh »

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.

AWS or any cloud service is anything but freedom. So please use the word freedom judiciously. If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon. You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers. You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services because just by a single notice from a government agency your account will be blocked without access to your own data or compute resources. It has happened and will continue to happen because for government approaching single cloud provider is much easier than going over the process of getting it for company or an individual (more costly and difficult given different jurisdiction across country and state lines).

In terms of technical freedom you will have less of it and will be tied into proprietary extensions, API and services offered by those cloud providers.

On the other hand for self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules. So it is more freedom than a cloud can offer.

In our organization we need to go extra mile and put extra engineering efforts to make sure our apps can work on different clouds with different services (e.g. using apache libcloud, avoiding proprietary API's).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#228

Post by ngcc_hk »

Only use cloud provider like digital ocean with a limit on financial outlay. You prepay. Not for large corporations. But for micro firm ops, the worry of a big bill is there.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#229

Post by pensatoio »

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…

Despite the naysayers, you're completely correct. The effort required to build and maintain AWS is so much lower than on-prem. The only time this isn't true is when you have highly optimized, calculated needs where investing in that specialized infrastructure will pay off.

I want my team focused on building stuff that makes us money.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#230

Post by cwyers »

Zelphyr wrote: post #95
busterarm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware. For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking th…

I've mentioned this elsewhere but; I'm not arguing co-location over cloud. I'm arguing inexpensive cloud like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail over a complex AWS configuration designed to scale with near infinite flexibility. Why does a product that gets 100 visitors a day need that? $5-10/month serves them just fine.

There are a lot of great parts of AWS that aren't in LightSail, even for small projects. S3. RDS (with or without Aurora). ECS and ECR. It takes and manages a lot of complexity for you.

(DigitalOcean, to its credit, has offerings in those spaces -- they have an object store, they have hosted databases, they have a container service. And I use DigitalOcean for some personal products. But you can actually run a Postgres DB on AWS Aurora Serverless for cheaper than you can run one on DigitalOcean, depending on your workload. It's not obvious that DigitalOcean is a better choice there.)

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