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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

#231

Post by ecshafer »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #219
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…

I was a at a company that was doing their SVN/Jenkins migration to Git/Bitbucket/Bamboo around 2016/2018. But they were using source control and a build system already, so you have to hand it to them. But I have an associate that was at one of the large health insurance companies in 2024, complaining that he couldn't get them to use git and stop deploying via FTP to a server. There is danger with being too much on the cargo cult side, but also danger with being too resistant to change. I don't know how you can look at source control, a CICD pipeline, artifacts, IaC, and say "This looks like a bad idea".

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

#232

Post by whstl »

rossdavidh wrote: post #218

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…

Devs wanting to put AWS on their resume push for it, then the next wave you hire only knows AWS.

And then discussions on how to move forward are held between people that only know AWS and people who want to use other stuff, but only one side is transparent about it.

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

#233

Post by ecshafer »

BirAdam wrote: post #128
esskay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

I'm not either. I used to do fully managed hosting solutions at a datacenter. I had to do everything from hardware through debugging customer applications. Now, people pay me to do the same but on cloud platforms and the occasional on-prem stuff. In general, the younger people I've come across have no idea how to set anything up. They've always just used awscli, the AWS Console, or terraform. I've even been ridiculed…

I think in 5-10 years there is going to be very profitable consulting on setting up data center infrastructure, and de-clouding for companies.

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

#234

Post by marcosdumay »

Aurornis wrote: post #159
dev_l1x_be wrote: post #147

> AWS is extremely expensive. I really like how people throw around these baseless accusations. S3 is one of the cheapest storage solutions ever created. The last 10 years I have migrated roughly 10-20PB worth of data to AWS S3 and it resulted in significant cost saving every single time. If you do not know how to use cloud computing than yes, AWS can be really expensive.

The implicit claims are more misleading, in my opinion: The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain. The real cost of self-hosting, in my direct experience with multiple startup teams trying it, is the endless small tasks, decisions, debates, and little changes that add up over time to more overhead than anyone would have expected. Everyone thinks it’s going to be a…

> The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain.

Free? No, it's not free. It only costs less engineering time than AWS.

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

#235

Post by ecshafer »

jsiepkes wrote: post #39
jagged-chisel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

This is exactly the rhetoric Microsoft used in the 00's with it's "Get the facts" marketing campaign against Linux and open-source: "Never mind the costs, think about the people hours you are saving!". It wasn't as simple as that then, at it's still not as simple as that now.

This is true, but also really funny considering that even today the average windows sysadmin can still barely use powershell and relies on console clicking and batch scripts. A good unix admin can easily admin 10-100x the machines as a windows admin, and this was more true back in the early 00s. So the marketing on getting the facts was absolutely false.

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

#236

Post by hedora »

yanslookup wrote: post #165

FD: I work at Amazon, I also started my career in a time where I had to submit paper requests for servers that had turn around times measured in months. I just don't see it. Given the nature of the services they offer it's just too risky not to use as much managed stuff with SLAs as possible. k8s alone is a very complicated control plane + a freaking database that is hard to keep happy if it's not completely static.…

At another big-4 hyperscaler, we ended up with substantial downtime and a lossy migration because they didn’t know how to manage kubernetes.

Microk8s doesn’t use etcd (they have their own, simpler thing), which seems like a good tradeoff at single rack scale: https://benbrougher.tech/posts/microk8s-6-months-later/

The article’s deployment has a spare rack in a second DC and they do a monthly cutover to AWS in case the colo provider has a two site issue.

Spending time on that would make me sleep much better than hardening a deployment of etcd running inside a single point of failure.

What other problems do you see with the article? (Their monthly time estimates seem too low to me - they’re all 10x better than I’ve seen for well-run public cloud infrastructure that is comparable to their setup).

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

#238

Post by iso1631 »

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…

I spin up a VM on my xen vm estate whenever I want it with just some clickops or teraform (depending on the environment)

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

#239

Post by torginus »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #169
dev_l1x_be wrote: post #147

> AWS is extremely expensive. I really like how people throw around these baseless accusations. S3 is one of the cheapest storage solutions ever created. The last 10 years I have migrated roughly 10-20PB worth of data to AWS S3 and it resulted in significant cost saving every single time. If you do not know how to use cloud computing than yes, AWS can be really expensive.

Assuming those 20PB are hot/warm storage, S3 costs roughly $0.015/GB/month (50:50 average of S3 standard/infrequent access). That comes out to roughly $3.6M/year, before taking into account egress/retrieval costs. Does it really cost that much to maintain your own 20PB storage cluster? If those 20PB are deep archive, the S3 Glacier bill comes out to around $235k/year, which also seems ludicrous: it does not cost six…

How the heck does anyone have that much data? I once built myself a compressed plaintext library from one of those data-hoarder sources that had almost every fiction book in existence, and that was like 4TB compressed (but would've been much less if I bothered hunting for duplicates and dropped non-English).

I suspect the only way you could have 20PB is if you have metrics you don't aggregate or keep ancient logs (why do you need to know your auth service had a transient timeout a year ago?)

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

#240

Post by electroly »

I put our company onto a hybrid AWS-colocation setup to attempt to get the best of both worlds. We have cheap fiddly/bursty things and expensive stable things and nothing in between. Obviously, put the fiddly/bursty things in AWS and put the stable things in colocation. Direct Connect keeps latency and egress costs down; we are 1 millisecond away from us-east-1 and for egress we pay 2¢/GB instead of the regular 9¢/GB. The database is on the colo side so database-to-AWS reads are all free ingress instead of egress, and database-to-server traffic on the colo side doesn't transit to AWS at all. The savings on the HA pair of SQL Server instances is shocking and pays for the entire colo setup, and then some. I'm surprised hybrids are not more common. We are able to manage it with our existing (small) staff, and in absolute terms we don't spend much time on it--that was the point of putting the fiddly stuff in AWS.

The biggest downside I see? We had to sign a 3 year contract with the colocation facility up front, and any time we want to change something they want a new commitment. On AWS you don't commit to spending until after you've got it working, and even then it's your choice.

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