A million-dollar engineering problem • Hacker News Board

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#261

Post by djchen » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #92

djchen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those providers you mentioned aren't as reliable and scalable as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. That isn't an apples to apples comparison. I would not want to host my business on So You Start, Kimsufi, Hetzner, and especially not Joe's Data Center. I have personally used Joes DC and they have had numerous outages in the past. Hetzner is known for terminating you for any sort of "DOS" like traffic, including h…

Reliability wise, do you actually use these services, as in my experience that's a complete myth. One of my clients on a dedicated server has never gone down. The site is blazingly fast, barely touches 5% CPU and pages have sub 50ms response times. Deploys take 10 seconds or so, I could make it faster but it's not really worth the cost/benefit. My client on Azure, with a significantly lower visitor count, pays 3-10 t…

I have used AWS at a couple work places and I personally use Google App Engine. My sites on App Engine have less than 5 minutes of downtime per year as measured by Pingdom. Deploys to App Engine take a few seconds (though it can depend on your app).

You can choose to run your DB servers on top of generic compute instances in Azure or any other cloud provider. You aren't stuck using their database services.

> The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated.

This is true, I don't think anyone will dispute that.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#262

Post by rdtsc » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 3:13 AM UTC

QuinnyPig wrote: post #258

rdtsc wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I consult full time on AWS cost optimization / reduction / understanding. Curious, have you ever consulted a client not to use AWS? As in "your cost optimization is going to be not using AWS and using $x instead"?

Absolutely. Great example: container workloads without high data volumes. Slap those into GCP if you can-- or arbitrage between different cloud providers / regions / on-prem if you have them. That said, clients who come to me already have a significant investment with AWS. Getting rid of that is a high bar in terms of engineering effort. That said, I've no financial incentive to recommend one provider over another. M…

Makes total sense. Thank you for responding!

We've pushed clients to competitors' products a few times, I was young and thought that was silly. However those clients spread the word about us and we didn't even have much of a marketing department, it was all word of mouth. Gaining their trust was gold and a really good long term investment.

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#263

Post by phamilton » Tue, Mar 21, 2017, 2:18 AM UTC

dexterdog wrote: post #230

phamilton wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The variable workload has been a little less important with reserved instances. They used to have a "light/heavy utilization" pricing structure but now it's basically cheaper to reserve the instance than it is to scale it up and down, unless you need the extra capacity less than 60% of the time.

That's going between 1 and 0 servers for an instance. Real scaling needs are met in a setup going from 3-50+ servers throughout the week.

I think you misunderstand me. Doing 100 servers for 16 hours and scaling down to 30 servers for 8 hours a day is more expensive than running 100 reserved instances for 24 hours a day. (100 reserved instances == average of 60 on demand instances).

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#264

Post by deesix » Thu, Mar 23, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #137

Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

A friend of mine was annoyed that a small service he liked was shutting down. He contacted the developer who said that they were shutting it down because the server costs were higher than the money they were making. They were spending 5k a month on AWS crap and claimed it was impossible to get any lower. He helped them consolidate everything onto a single rented dedicated server costing 400 a month. Now the service i…

The company I work for is backed by a bunch of data in a MySQL database, scripts to aggregate and process more data into that database, and simple internal webapp to both manage inventory, track tasks and run lots of reporting on the aggregated data. We made do for quite a while on a single colocated database with 32 GB of RAM and a few fast SSDs (for the time, which was about 6 years ago), and a few multi-TB archiva…

Quick question. Which version of MySQL were you running? 5.6 is single thread on the slave and falls behind more easily. 5.7 gives you multiple threads and does a better job of keeping up.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and Cloud SQL

Re: A million-dollar engineering problem

#265

Post by kbenson » Thu, Mar 23, 2017, 8:16 PM UTC

deesix wrote: post #264

kbenson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for is backed by a bunch of data in a MySQL database, scripts to aggregate and process more data into that database, and simple internal webapp to both manage inventory, track tasks and run lots of reporting on the aggregated data. We made do for quite a while on a single colocated database with 32 GB of RAM and a few fast SSDs (for the time, which was about 6 years ago), and a few multi-TB archiva…

Quick question. Which version of MySQL were you running? 5.6 is single thread on the slave and falls behind more easily. 5.7 gives you multiple threads and does a better job of keeping up. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and Cloud SQL

Whichever the highest version offered in the second generation Google Cloud SQL offering as of November/December 2016. If 5.7 was available, I would have chosen that. I don't specifically recall though.