Live data from Hacker News

Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

squeaky.ai

31–40 of 140 posts

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#31

I found graviton to be a mixed bag. It was certainly extremely fast when using the very high end instances and I tested it successfully using a Rust based message queue system I was writing and it got some ridiculously fast number like 8 million messages a second, from memory, using the fastest possible graviton instance (this was about 18 months ago). I did try to switch some of my database servers to it a couple of…

I'd argue just find a different cloud provider.

GCP, Azure, Supabase, Cloudflare etc if you want managed services.

If you want a mix of managed services and raw compute, look more at Fly.io, Linode, Digital Ocean perhaps?

I have found AWS being the "cheapest" or even "reasonable" in the cost department to be slimmer every year.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#32
post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

Because ARM perf was far far from being on part with Intel / AMD, also you need to be able to compile on that arch.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#33
FYI https://squeaky.ai/legal/gdpr I believe using Amazon AWS already disqualifies you from being fully GDPR-compliant. Same issue as Shopify has with using US CDNs: https://lsww.de/shopify-illegal/

Since your core sales feature is "privacy friendly" which will surely be appreciated in the EU, it might make sense to offer local hosting or self-hosting.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#34
post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

Agree, I've gone to Graviton instances by default for RDS and ElastiCache (run and own a DevOps consulting company). The big problem that I continue to deal with is native arm64 Docker containers (if you a cool kid running containers / Kubernetes). For example, the very popular Bitnami charts don't support arm builds even though the community has been screaming for support.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#35
post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

If I started to build today I'd build and host my own servers, or go with servers from ionos. Cloud is very expensive.

I just worked on a massive "optimised" cloud migration like you've never seen. We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are. We were realistically expecting 2x which gave us some regional agility and was expected but the unconstrained growth and misunderstanding of the cost model was terrible. It's designed to be so convoluted that you can't possibly estimate costs until you get the first bill at which point you are committed on a multi-month or year project. On top of that the assumption at the time of development is the cost is someone else's so the sprawl since the migration is dangerous which means we cannot leave ever now we've embraced the PaaS options.

The whole proposition relies on the idea of a sunk cost being accepted.

So yes, back to servers please. IaaS should be the maximal offering that is accepted by a business from a risk perspective unless the tool or technology is disposable in a 6 month window. There is space there for gains. PaaS hell no.

Edit: worth mentioning that AWS support is somewhere near dire. We've had issues with multiple services and despite being a VERY high roller with enterprise support we can't get anything fixed in any reasonable time. It's just someone else's crap you're using and they aren't any better at it than you are, just adding lead time to any issues. In some cases I've had to actually call out complete bad implementations that break function guarantees provided by open source projects (I can't logically warn people away from services as it's pretty obvious who I am if I do). One rule I've developed is that if it's not a core project: S3, EC2, EBS, ALB etc then it's probably a commercial liability in some way. There are no people working or with any knowledge on some major bits of AWS infra.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's currently in beta, I've tried it and apparently I can't create more than a few instances because my account is "too new", without a clear way to remove that limit so you're right, can't have a large bill if you can't even create 10 instances.

Did you try writing them and asking them to increase the limit? No cloud provider will give you the option to create as many instances as there are available ones, they all have limits from the get-go. Usually you have to write them/fill out some form if you want to go above the standard limit, Hetzner Cloud as well.

I haven't, mainly because of this warning on their Limits page:

> Your account is too new to request a limit increase. Please note that we generally do not answer questions regarding limit increase on the telephone.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#37
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main reason is "I want to run the same binaries locally that I run in the cloud," and it's a pretty valid one. However, it's also an expensive one sometimes.

Anecdotally, this is starting to shift with M1 MacBooks, Graviton is looking more attractive for precisely that architecture parity reason for teams using majority M1 devices.

That’s the transition we went through. Our dependencies are / were pretty weird so the transition took a bit of effort - I suspect more complicated than many people would have to go through.

We all use Macs at work so we knew it was a matter of time before we were on ARM. I’m glad we made the transition. M1 airs are a delight to work with and Graviton machines are great bang for buck.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#38
I'm interested in hearing more about their switching to Graviton with Clickhouse.

We've been testing Clickhouse on Graviton and the performance isn't there due to a variety of reasons, most notably it seems because Clickhouse for arm64 is cross-complied and JIT isn't enabled like it is for amd64[1].

1. https://fosstodon.org/@manish/109397948927679076

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#39
post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

If I started to build today I'd build and host my own servers, or go with servers from ionos. Cloud is very expensive.

Rent servers: yes. Host your own: maybe. You can run a whole-ass company on 2 $70/mo servers from Hetzner (and some B2 for durable storage) while you figure out whether you have a market or not.

Like there's just no point in coloing when you're small because either all non-server bits will cost you for no reason or you're using something managed which is just cloud but more annoying.

Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill

#40
post #2

Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.

Completely agree... the only exception I've run into is that for small operations build tooling often doesn't work well with arm64.

EG: GitHub actions can build a container in a few minutes in x64 or 35 minutes in arm64... likewise aws-cdk literally could not run an arm64 fargate ecs deployment for months after support was added (They simply did not support the required attribute in the container definition).

I would love to see this change as I've had nothing but great experiences with graviton for virtually anything arm supported.

Post reply on HN