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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#251

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

> very small business services

Which accounts for almost all hosting and startups. Most startups will never see more than a handful of users and yet microservices, lamdba, nosql etc must be deployed because ‘scaling and failover’, wasting their own and investers’ money for nothing. Only a small % will ever need any scaling and failover.

If aws were truly cheaper, we would be using it for everything; currently we mix which is far cheaper. Anything not fail critical that benefits from fixed price cpu/gpu, bandwidth and storage we host traditionally. We and our clients saved fortunes over the years. And for clients or projects that do not need such heavy lifting as aws, we simply host traditionally completely.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#252

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sokoloff wrote: post #189
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Amazon has worse engineers: They have great engineers. The difference is they are Amazon's engineers, not your engineers. My IT team is not going to break something on the most important day of the month for my business. Sometimes even when I want to do something mundane on the network, it's "eh, let's wait until not (insert key date here), just in case". Amazon does not care what day is important to my…

O365 had a couple of bad years, earning the nickname "Office 360" for a while. This year, I can only recall a single outage and we've been overall happy with it. O365 costs more than an Exchange server only in part because it comes bundled with all of MS-Office.

If you bundle Exchange + CALs + Office Professional Plus, over a three-year version upgrade cycle, versus three years of Office 365, Office 365 costs about twice as much, last I checked.

And, since Microsoft supports it's software for ten years, you can skip one or two versions of Exchange/Office and still get security updates, and pay a quarter or a sixth of what it costs to go with Office 365.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#253

Post by t_sawyer »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #45
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

If you're at the scale where a data center going down is a problem and thus you need to run in multiple coasts for disaster recovery, you're going to have to be able to handle the kinds of distributed computing issues that'll crop up in both cases. The advantage of AWS is that in theory you can script your infrastructure. Deploy to multiple zones, add hosts, remove hosts, deploy artifact, etc. Makes all kinds of thin…

Idk why this take isn’t more popular.

Nothing is stopping you from spinning up ec2s for massive spikes in traffic just because your app is currently on-prem.

Nothing is stopping you from scaling first to AWS, realizing oh this is normal now, and then procuring hardware.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#254

Post by EdwardDiego »

ldng wrote: post #247
EdwardDiego wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither k8s nor Kafta are clouds. They are tools you can use on premises or on droplets if you wish to.

Sure, but they are managed products provided by cloud providers, and far simpler to administer than their bare metal counterparts.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#255

Post by busterarm »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #155
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…

I agree that scalability is rarely an appropriate reason to go in on AWS; however, “managed services” is a really good reason. You don’t have to operate your own equivalent services, but rather you pay for Amazon engineers to operate them on your behalf. Of course, there are some people for whom running their own services is the more appropriate scenario, but I think this is not a good default for anything more compl…

> and presumably this never happens on prem

Heh, let me tell you about the time a truck drove into the sidewall of one of our datacenters and took out _both_ power sources to the facility...

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#256

Post by busterarm »

chmod775 wrote: post #149
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…

Running my site on dedicated servers costs me $500 a month, running it on AWS would cost me about $20,000 a month (probably just for the egress traffic alone). I could hire four system administrators for that money to look after each of my four dedicated servers full time. On top of that you first need to learn AWS. That thing is complicated - but I can set up a dedicated server in minutes because it's indistinguisha…

How much of that egress traffic would be saved by using a CDN?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#257

Post by yellowapple »

dcolkitt wrote: post #125
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…

> 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. Here's the thing though. For most startups, 99% of the value comes from the long right-tail of that 1% chance of explosive viral growth out of left-field. You're right, most companies aren't ever going to need that kind of overnight scalability. But most of those s…

> Without that possibility it's not worth showing up at the table.

I'd argue this mentality is exactly why so many startups fail, and fail hard. They over-optimize for being one of the "lucky few" and under-optimize for actual sustainability.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#258

Post by busterarm »

mattbeckman wrote: post #212

Our small team spends roughly $40-50k/mo at AWS. If you're just hosting a website with a SQL database (glorified LAMP stack), you're probably in it for the wrong reasons. Stick to a dedicated box or DigitalOcean etc. AWS is like co-locating your hardware, and then the data center having 1000s of employees offering highly reliable services you can access from your infrastructure that lets you move WAY faster for thing…

I think the point that you're making here is subtle and that people are missing it.

Your small team can _comfortably manage_ 50k/mo worth of AWS resources. That's _INCREDIBLE_.

I think people mistakenly think that cloud costs only go up exponentially and that costs are an unmanageable mess.

I've worked with teams with hundreds of engineers serving a major enterprise and only an AWS bill 3-5x yours. And they only had a small team managing it all. Comfortably.

To do similar with physical servers requires a massive stack of people and salaries. The ongoing recruiting costs to maintain staffing would dwarf what the AWS bill is.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#259

Post by calvinmorrison »

busterarm wrote: post #195
calvinmorrison wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can generalize the infrastructure to run 99% of businesses needs and write that Terraform code only once. You can bring that with you everywhere and take care of the basics in seconds and you can sleep at night easily without a pager going off. To quote my parent. That's what we did and it worked for us.

It was in an almost exactly similar situation to yours where I learned to do this and I've been able to scale it up to companies with 1000x more demanding infrastructure. The funnier thing in my case was that three years after I left, the infrastructure was humming along fine with nobody actively looking at it. They never hired anyone to look after it because it never gave them any problems and they would have been f…

Funnily I'm in a different position at a different company and in house is a huge win for us over aws/azure due to very specific hardware requirements. There's a time and a place for everything - but the days of colocation are gone for people who don't actually need it

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#260

Post by ldng »

therealx wrote: post #232
johnklos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is SO myopic. You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server? This is incredibly naive.

I agree with you, but I can't find a good way to communicate this to the other camp. I wonder if you can't clearly see this without having been a "sysadmin" long before "devops" was a title.

It's just that they have a vested interest in not understanding or even acknowledge your arguments.

Scalability is the thing and AWS its Viagra. Whoever has the biggest scalability get to pat itself in the back.

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