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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#291

Post by rualca »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #223
Zelphyr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've mentioned this elsewhere but; I'm not arguing co-location over cloud. I'm arguing inexpensive cloud like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail over a complex AWS configuration designed to scale with near infinite flexibility. Why does a product that gets 100 visitors a day need that? $5-10/month serves them just fine.

The cynical answer is "resume-driven-development". The slightly more charitable answer is that having your infrastructure automatically scale and adapt to the workload, and watching it take off is a really fun and exciting moment, and people want to experience that, and in the rare event that it does happen and you suddenly need to handle 10-100x more traffic, having things auto-scale up and then back down means you…

> (...) in the rare event that it does happen and you suddenly need to handle 10-100x more traffic, having things auto-scale up and then back down means you (in an ideal world) get to watch it excitedly, instead of furiously running around spinning things up and putting out fires that arise when you start operating at larger scales.

Emphasis on "rare".

And also, AWS is not the only cloud provider which offers autk-scaling. I've used an european cloud provider which even offered Kubernetes with node autk-scaling, and there are even scripts in the wild that implement autk-scaling for small cloud providers such as Hetzner.

I'm starting to believe AWS only benefits from bandwagon effect and resume-driven development. None of AWS's value propositions are ever mentioned in these discussions, which is telling .

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#292

Post by rualca »

busterarm wrote: post #244
ldng wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in smaller places time is of the essence I we don't have enough to learn the full extent of AWS and I'll save my time and money by using a droplet. Learning AWS does have a cost. Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

> Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems. That's where Terraform comes in.

> That's where Terraform comes in.

...and CloudFormation, and SAM, and CDK, and...

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#293

Post by brtkdotse »

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…

I agree. I’m a contractor and my client is running Azure. Having the possibility to snap my fingers and have a Redis cache appear ready to go is a no brainer - it costs per month what I cost per hour.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#295

Post by rualca »

User23 wrote: post #206
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

Amazon itself used to be that environment. Before AWS was adopted internally, which it wasn't for some time, to say nothing of the many years before it was created, getting capacity involved a weeks or even months long political game with the infrastructure team. Even infrastructure devs had to struggle to find resources. Hiring managers would literally horse trade their spare capacity.

> Amazon itself used to be that environment. Before AWS was adopted internally, which it wasn't for some time, to say nothing of the many years before it was created, getting capacity involved a weeks or even months long political game with the infrastructure team.

It's my understanding that you're describing how Amazon worked in the 90s. It's my understanding that Amazon afterwards moved to an internal cloud provider, and afterwards spun off AWS which worked in parallel with Amazon's internal cloud provider.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#296

Post by dijit »

unethical_ban wrote: post #73
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always nonplussed by the "additional FTE" argument, its obscenely overestimated - """We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up t…

About 7 years ago we brought in the ELK stack for security log ingestion and basic analytics. It took at least three FTEs to maintain the cluster, along with constant issues of queries crashing clusters, or provisioning/building/repairing the dozens of servers and storage units to handle the several terabytes per day of ingest. To be able to throw that behind an infinite, horizontally scalable mechanism would have sa…

About 7 years ago I did the same. 2 engineers, 2,500~ physical machines (6 were elastic search nodes).

We were highly effective, sure, but like, it’s not as hard as people seem to claim as long as you’re paying for the datacenter space already.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#297

Post by anaganisk »

jeffbee wrote: post #34

I have a feeling you could host that site on a PC at home for even less. It looks like their forum gets < 100 posts per day. I can't imagine they're hitting much more than 1 QPS.

Its not always an option, because of Dynamic IPs, power outages etc. Solving them reliably comes at a cosr and also not so easy.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#298

Post by fomine3 »

jjav wrote: post #213
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

> It's freedom. Being locked in to AWS (or GCP, or..) when costs are rising out of control is what I consider the opposite of freedom. I was with one startup that went full-in on AWS features, so it was very difficult to migrate. Sure, we got started real quick, that was nice. I argued early on that we need to be careful of not getting locked in to AWS in case we need to jump away once we have some customer growth, b…

Just curious, what's the primary cost in the case? I suspect bandwidth.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#299

Post by fomine3 »

nmfisher wrote: post #263
cultofmetatron wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firebase is probably the most hyped and overused tech I've seen. I've run into far too many startups that went to firebase because they wanted to scale fast and didn't realize how limited firebase was for queries. If you're starting a startup, use postgres for your database. it will handle damn near anything and you can spawn off functionality into microservices as they become bottle necks as you scale. Hell, postgre…

Two reasons I use Firebase for my app (although with an admittedly trivial schema/data): a) I have a thousand things to do that are higher priority than configuring/hosting a Postgres server. b) Integration with Firebase Auth is a godsend. I doubt people choose Firebase for technical or scaling reasons. More likely they choose it because it's trivial to integrate, so you can spend the limited hours you have in each d…

a) You can choose managed PostgreSQL services.

b) Fine but it's too small reason to choose database for serious service, isn't it?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#300

Post by busterarm »

rualca wrote: post #292
busterarm wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems. That's where Terraform comes in.

> That's where Terraform comes in. ...and CloudFormation, and SAM, and CDK, and...

Terraform works with everything, everywhere.

CDK gives you a TypeScript/JavaScript/Python/Java dependency.

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