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We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

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Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#301

Post by lossolo »

nagyf wrote: post #292
wooque wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prerender as I can see is founded by Hungarian and most employees are Hungarian. Even if he hired 2 FTEs in Hungary to maintain (which I doubt), it would eat 200k at most (probably much less), so they still saved 600k. For 800k he could probably hire 10 more people, to improve development, sales, marketing, support, and that would be better investment instead of burning money on AWS.

I’m from Hungary, and I have to tell you, you are WAY off with those salaries. As a senior software engineer, you can make maybe $35k a year, before taxes, if you are good. You can make it $50k if you are very good. 2 years ago I was making $23k (yearly, before taxes), before I moved to Canada and started working at Amazon for $170k usd. Europe, especially the eastern parts of europe has an extremely cheap workforce.

> As a senior software engineer, you can make maybe $35k a year, before taxes, if you are good. > ..especially the eastern parts of europe has an extremely cheap workforce.

You can make that amount normally in Eastern Europe when working on local market, you do not need to be good, average is enough. If you are good then you can make 60k+ USD. And if you are really good you can make easily 100k+ USD working for US based company remotely.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#302

Post by dijit »

icedchai wrote: post #300
doctor_eval wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - I used to be the sysadm on a single machine in a medical laboratory in the 90s. It was a DG Aviion and with the storage unit took up a whole room. Maybe 300 people used it simultaneously. The idea that I would need to automate the installation of an OS and applications on a fleet of machines was never contemplated because it didn’t make sense. I had one machine and OS upgrades arrived in the post every 6 mo…

The places I'm talking about were mid 90's, dozens of AlphaServers, Sun Sparcs, HP/UX systems, IBM AIX machines, etc. It was more than a single machine, but less than 50. There was shocking little automation. Everything was a pet, with crazy NFS mounts all over the place, custom scripts in /usr/local/etc not in version control, etc. If there was ever a power loss, it was a pain getting everything back up.

I think we’re talking passed each other by talking different eras.

I worked in the mid-00s and it wasn’t a lot better in the dev space. People passing USB keys to each other was pretty common, SVN and CVS were around but there was a lot of developer code outside of it and peer review was going to someone’s desk and walking through the new code, nothing at all like what we have today for processing change requests.

You’re talking about systems administration when it was going from pets to cattle, the primordial period where people were automating but not applying software development practices on themselves yet because even the software development practices weren’t well defined.

Sysadmin was always lagging 5y behind development w.r.t. programming practises. The same is true today of devops.

tell me how many terraform repositories have unit tests or infra scripts for that matter which would be much simpler.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#303

Post by floatinglotus »

Melatonic wrote: post #273
floatinglotus wrote: post #45

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there. My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure. Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you woul…

Very interested - you need people?

Absolutely! We’re hiring for a number of spots including dev/systest/kernel-dev/k8s.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#304

Post by floatinglotus »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #164
floatinglotus wrote: post #45

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there. My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure. Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you woul…

Damn that's really interesting thanks for sharing. Do you have like an authorative link on this paradox? I've been getting by on like 80$/month hetzner servers (Like ancient 10 year old pizza box machines) for my businesses for a long while. Never did the cloud thing, I can run like three or four websites on one of those bad boys. I guess stuff like AWS makes sense if your computational workload happens in bursts or…

Having an issue pasting at the moment! Just search Trillion Dollar Paradox Casado.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#305

Post by icedchai »

dijit wrote: post #302
icedchai wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The places I'm talking about were mid 90's, dozens of AlphaServers, Sun Sparcs, HP/UX systems, IBM AIX machines, etc. It was more than a single machine, but less than 50. There was shocking little automation. Everything was a pet, with crazy NFS mounts all over the place, custom scripts in /usr/local/etc not in version control, etc. If there was ever a power loss, it was a pain getting everything back up.

I think we’re talking passed each other by talking different eras. I worked in the mid-00s and it wasn’t a lot better in the dev space. People passing USB keys to each other was pretty common, SVN and CVS were around but there was a lot of developer code outside of it and peer review was going to someone’s desk and walking through the new code, nothing at all like what we have today for processing change requests. Yo…

Yes, I think you are right. The era I'm recounting is from roughly 1995 to 2001-ish at various local ISPs and medium size dev shops.

I did know some fantastic sysadmins at a local university around that time period. They had huge labs of Alphas and Suns and automated everything! Unfortunately, those folks didn't go into industry.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#306

Post by floatinglotus »

no_identd wrote: post #84
floatinglotus wrote: post #45

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there. My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure. Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you woul…

What does your product offer over what Sovereign Cloud Stack (See https://scs.community/ ) already offers? (And before anyone falsely claims no commercial offers for this exist yet: https://www.plusserver.com/en/products/pluscloud-open [no affiliation])

Our solution targets the physical network in off-cloud, edge and distributed cloud use cases.

The physical network is most likely the absolute root of trust and attestation. Physical devices gain their personalities from what network they are connected to.

Physical networking is still the biggest impediment to operating on-prem infrastructure. You need to hire very expensive engineers, deal with a bizarre purchasing paradigm dictated by a few large companies (Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc) and the management of these devices is pretty close to being from the Stone Age.

So we’re looking to fix all of that with a pure open source play, using components that everyone is familiar with.

The end goal is that a Devops person with basic network skills should be able to build their own physical network for modern cloud native applications, with very low levels of friction but similar cost efficiencies as cloud operators like AWS, Azure, GCP.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#307

Post by emacdona »

guhidalg wrote: post #170
joshstrange wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. > It is the same story as with SQL. Trying to use frameworks to keep your app DBMS-agnostic but then nobody ever migrates their apps to another DBMS. I agree, I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to keeps something (theoretically) cloud or DBMS agnostic, how many problems it's caused, and at the end of the day we could never "easily" move to a diffe…

But why would you try to build something cloud-agnostic to run on the most cloud-aware tier: serverless? Computers don't come forth from the ether, your code is always running _somewhere_ and serverless means your provider makes a ton of choices for you. The lowest common denominator across clouds is a VM. If you can run your applications and your databases on VMs, you can run them on any cloud AND on-premises. If yo…

Agree that lowest common denominator is a VM.

But... I'm curious: has anyone here made an attempt to go "cloud-agnostic" by targeting managed kubernetes offerings? (GKE, EKS, AKS).

Just curious how much pain I'd be causing myself if I ever attempted it ;-)

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#308

Post by moonchrome »

acdha wrote: post #211
moonchrome wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I work with cloud the more I see this 'saves time on infrastructure' being a half-truth at best - we still have overwhelmed DevOps people who, unlike managing on-prem services, have 0 insight or control over what goes on inside AWS. And the services require a decent amount of hand holding, proprietary know how, etc. In the end you replaced sysadmin with DevOps and got up charged multiples.

It's certainly possible to overspend on cloud services but in most cases when I see comparisons people tend to forget to fully include their true costs for things like staff time, infrastructure, etc. and especially things like opportunity cost for the delays caused by provisioning infrastructure, less capable interfaces (e.g. if you're swapping Terraform for a Jira ticket), or the technical decisions people make bec…

But that's the part that I'm not getting - it's either AWS or building storage shelters and tape robots.

There are hosting providers like Hetzner that will rent you bare metal machines so you don't have to deal with actual hardware, their networking is basically unmetered (last I checked), they will also sell you spot VMs, blob storage service, etc. The pricing difference is in integer multiples and much less "gotchas" or lock-in (they are usually dumbed down).

They won't sell you fancy SAAS - but the ammount of fiddling required to get most of AWS services working in practice and debugging it - you're not very far off from using the OSS solution they are reselling - chances are your devops/sysadmin team can do that as well.

And there's plenty cloud agnostic SAAS as well.

I mean if you're a big corp that can accept the inefficiency for the sake of having one bill to pay at the end of the month, SLA you can use to cover your ass to higher ups and have the "nobody got fired for picking AWS" mentality I get it. But for startups and small companies ? All this "magical simplicity" that AWS/Azure/GCP is supposedly brining to the table - I'm not seeing it. Real redundancy (across AZ) is still really hard and requires extensive planning - no magic there. Dynamic scaling "savings" is often offset by being multiples more expensive to begin with and I have to deal with warmup issues, and the pricing is sneaky/unpredictable, easy to fuck up. Lambda architecture is pushing towards distributed microservices by default - the hardest thing to debug in practice.

So end of the day, I'm forced to work around arbitrary pricing models rather then technical limitations, debugging opaque black box services, not being "big enough" to get actual support, overly generic/complex systems built as "one size fits all" solutions, or get sold in to practically abandoned "service" because it's available etc.

And it's not like being first party service is any indication of quality - as soon as you move off of the most used stuff you get to see some really shit services in my experience.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#309

Post by senectus1 »

mabbo wrote: post #118

I'll always celebrate stories like this, but I also don't take some kind of anti-AWS lesson from it. This company saved $800k/year. Perfect time to go in-house with this solution. But when they were 1/10th this size, they'd only have saved $80k/year. Does that cover the cost of the engineering to build and maintain this system? Maybe not. And when they were 1/100th the size, it would have been laughable to go in-hous…

this point is even more poignant when taking into account scalability and elasticity. Our usage of Azure/O365/AWS saved us a lot of time staff and money during our make it or break it growth period. now we're a lot bigger and more stable we're having to reconsider allowing MS/Amazon bending us over the barrel quite so much.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#310

Post by AtlasBarfed »

hotpotamus wrote: post #25
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's bandwidth charges are highway robbery. It's my impression that AWS competes with the EC2 instance cost (as it that's what new customers look at), and the bandwidth/storage only becomes apparent when you are locked in. Really what AWS should be is one or two phases of service maturity: dev infrastructure and experimentation is phase one, phase two would be the "its a couple servers" production, BUT: with a scale…

I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. I assumed phase 3 was where AWS started giving you massive discounts because you represent so much business for them, but I've never been at a place big enough to swing that stick at them.

I have, but the technical service still sucks even at "20-30% discount" tier.

I think you should have multicloud strategy just to improve your bargaining position. They know when you're locked in.

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