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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#251

Post by dijit »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #241
t_mahmood wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

Without understanding the architecture and use case better, at first read, my gut says that isn’t an AWS problem - it sounds like a solutions architecture problem. There are cheaper ways of building that use case on AWS. Most AWS sticker shock I’ve seen results from someone who doesn’t really understand cloud trying to build on the cloud. Cost has to be designed in from the start (in addition to security, operational…

Sounds like we need a specialist.

I guess those promises about needing fewer expensive people never materialised.

tbh, aside from the really anaemic use-cases where everything actually manages to scale to zero and has very low load: I have genuinely never seen an AWS project (outside of free credits of course) that works out cheaper than what came before.

That's TCO from PNLs, not a "gut feeling". We have a decade of evidence now.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#252

Post by wild_egg »

vanviegen wrote: post #157
ozozozd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or use SQLite and your backups are literally a copy of a file. You can abuse git for it if you really want to cut corners.

Only if you can freeze your application for that long, in which case your statement is true for all non-broken databases.

It only freezes your application if you've misconfigured it.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#253

Post by SatvikBeri »

vidarh wrote: post #108
SatvikBeri wrote: post #96

A lot of these articles look at on-demand pricing for AWS. But you're rarely paying on-demand prices 24/7. If you have a stable workload, you probably buy reserved instances or a compute savings plan. At larger scales, you use third party services to get better deals with more flexibility. A while back I looked into renting hardware, and found that we would save about 20% compared to what we actually paid AWS – in pa…

This is usually only true of you lift and shift your AWS setup exactly as-is, instead of looking at what hardware will run your setup most efficiently. The biggest cost with AWS also isn't compute, but egress - for bandwidth heavy setups you can sometimes finance the entirety of the servers from a fraction of the savings in egress. I cost optimize setups with guaranteed caps at a proportion of savings a lot of the ti…

I'd definitely be curious to hear how you'd approach our overall situation. We don't have significant egress costs, nor has any place I've worked with before. Our AWS costs are about 80% EC2 and Fargate, with the rest scattered over various services. Roughly half our spend is on 24/7 reserved instances, while the other half is in bursty analytics workloads.

Our workloads are primarily memory-bound, and AWS offers pretty good options there, e.g. x2gd instances have 16gb RAM/cpu, while most rental options we found were much more CPU focused (and charged for it.)

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#254

Post by uhura »

I’ve been having those discussions with friends for the last 3 or 4 years. The downside of having local infra is pretty much having someone that has the experience to do it right. While this article covered the higher end, the math on the lower end tends to work out at 1 year of ownership depending on what you already have because you will probably already have a small rack and some networking gear.

My main concern is that at the current cloud premiums rates, I will be better off even if I need to hire someone specifically for managing the local infra.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#255

Post by wild_egg »

immibis wrote: post #98
andersmurphy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running on a single machine then you'll get way more performance with something like sqlite (instead of postgres/MySQL) which also makes managing the database quite trivial.

SQLite has serious concurrency concerns which have to be evaluated. You should consider running postgres or mysql/mariadb even if it's on the same server. SQLite uses one reader/writer lock over the whole database. When any thread is writing the database, no other thread is reading it. If one thread is waiting to write, new reads can't begin. Additionally, every read transaction starts by checking if the database has…

You know, it's ok to say that you're out of your element and don't have direct experience with the thing you're commenting on.

SQLite is easily the best scaling DB tech I've used. I've moved all my postgres workloads over to it and the gains have been incredible.

It's not a panacea and not the best in all cases but it's a very sane default that I recommend everyone start with and only complicate their stack with an external DB when they they start hitting real limits (often never happens)

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#256

Post by LamaOfRuin »

t_mahmood wrote: post #208
3shv wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?

I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well. Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?

Linode was bought by Akamai. They immediately raised prices, and they have been, if anything, less reliable.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#257

Post by immibis »

wild_egg wrote: post #255
immibis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite has serious concurrency concerns which have to be evaluated. You should consider running postgres or mysql/mariadb even if it's on the same server. SQLite uses one reader/writer lock over the whole database. When any thread is writing the database, no other thread is reading it. If one thread is waiting to write, new reads can't begin. Additionally, every read transaction starts by checking if the database has…

You know, it's ok to say that you're out of your element and don't have direct experience with the thing you're commenting on. SQLite is easily the best scaling DB tech I've used. I've moved all my postgres workloads over to it and the gains have been incredible. It's not a panacea and not the best in all cases but it's a very sane default that I recommend everyone start with and only complicate their stack with an e…

> You know, it's ok to say that you're out of your element and don't have direct experience with the thing you're commenting on.

I moved several projects from sqlite to postgres because sqlite didn't scale enough for any of them.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#258

Post by immibis »

1dom wrote: post #163
immibis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk. But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times . For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy .

> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk. A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk. The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread…

Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#259

Post by Demiurge »

benterix wrote: post #206
Demiurge wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s the other way around. I’m a huge fan of Hetzner for small sites with a few users. However, for bigger projects, the cloud seems to offer a complete lack of constraints. For projects that can pay for my time, $200/m or $2000/m in hosting costs is a negligible difference. What’s the development cost difference between AWS CDK / Terraform + GitHub Actions vs. Docker / K8s / Ansible + any CI pipeline? I don’…

> I’m a huge fan of Hetzner ... I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time. I think you confuse Heztner with bare metal. Hetzner has Hetzner Cloud which is like AWS EC2 but much cheaper. (They also have bare metal servers which are even cheaper.) With Heztner Cloud, you can use Terraform, Github Actions and whatever else you mentioned.

Yeah, I do confuse it, because I've been using Hetzner long before they had "cloud".

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#260

Post by runako »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #131
troupo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get alot of stuff inside that $200/mo EC2 device. The product is more than the VM. What are you getting, and do you need it?

Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy proje…

> Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting

Do people really use the bare CloudWatch logs as an answer for log search? I find it terrible and pretty much always recommend something like DataDog or Splunk or New Relic.

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