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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your performance to 5-10x your normal idle load. If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days. With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, an…

You can use the cloud to dynamically scale when needed while still running most of your own infra, best of both worlds. Tricky networking though.

> Tricky networking though.

And data storage/locality/consistency.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#232

I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB. I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity. The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no be…

Multiple small boxes is actually better than one giant box, for a whole lot of reasons. Scaling isn't the issue.

This needs some context. I can think of several cases where this wouldn’t be the be right.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few clicks. Getting through AWS documentation can be fairly time consuming.

And learning TypeScript and CDK, if we're comparing scripted, repeatable setups which you should be doing from the start.

> repeatable setups which you should be doing from the start

Yes, but not with

> TypeScript and CDK

Unless your business includes managing infrastructure with your product, for whatever reason (like you provision EC2 instances for your customers and that's all you do), there is no reason to shoot yourself in the foot with a fully fledged programming language for something that needs to be as stable as infrastructure. The saying is Infrastructure as Code, not with code. Even assuming you need to learn Terraform from scratch but already know Typescript, you would still save you time compared to learning CDK, figuring out what is possisble with it, and debugging issues down the line.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#234
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time consuming. apt install automysqlbackup autopostgresqlbackup Though if you have proper filesystem snapshots then they should always see your database as consistent, right? So you can even skip database tools and just learn to make and download snapshots.

nah filesystem snapshots may not lead to consistent DB backups. DB backup software usually use a plugin to tell the DB to coalesce data before taking a snapshot.

> filesystem snapshots may not lead to consistent DB backups

Only if your database files are split across multiple file systems, which is atypical.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#236
post #201
post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

My pet peeves are: 1. For small stuff, AWS et al aren't that much more expensive than Hetzner, mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience. 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure i…

> 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure it out and modify it in no time.

If you're at an early/smaller stage you're not doing anything too fancy either way. Even self hosted, it will probably be easy enough to understand that you're just deploying a rails instance for example.

It only becomes trickier if you're handling a ton of traffic or apply a ton of optimizations and end up already in a state where a team of sysadmin should be needed while you're doing it alone and ad-hoc. IMHO the important part would be to properly realize when things will get complicated and move on to a proper org or stack before you're stuck.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#237
I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.

Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;

Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".

It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#238
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the cloud to dynamically scale when needed while still running most of your own infra, best of both worlds. Tricky networking though.

> Tricky networking though. And data storage/locality/consistency.

Databases are rarely the bottleneck during access volume spikes in my experience. It’s really impressive how far some beefy servers and a read copy can take you.

But if that is your bottleneck you should be upgrading your DB system regardless of whether you’re on cloud or bare metal.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#239
> To them, it’s way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it solves their problem, but it’s also a shiny object. It’s technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other devs, it creates dependencies and lock-in effects so they’re not easily replaceable as employees, and most importantly – being on the cloud yields them a fat paycheck at the end of the month.

I recently read a fantastic comment or article on how developers, and IT workers in general, will be the first to be automated away, and groups like lawyers and doctors the last, entirely unrelated to how good LLMs and other AI models are at the specific tasks of each. Reason being that developers fall over themselves to prove how productive they are, happy to use all these tools. Anywhere else is concerned with job protection first and foremost. Metrics like SLOC having come from devs themselves in the chase of a raise.

This paragraph reminds me of that so much. Calling out those who push the cloud for job security. In basically every other sector - where this kind of behavior is 10x more prevalent - no one calls this out, there's a sense of solidarity and mutual understanding that this kind of thing is necessary.

This isn't judging one or the other to be good or bad. But it's going to cost devs very dearly.

I don't remember where I read it, they put it much better than I can - if anyone here recognizes it please drop a link.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

12TB is $960/month in gp3 storage alone. You can buy 12TB of NVMe storage for less than $960, and it will be orders of magnitude faster than AWS.

Your use case is the _worst_ use case for the cloud.

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