Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

oneuptime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 513 posts

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#301

Post by montecarl »

nik736 wrote: post #9

It's an interesting article, thanks for that. What people forget about the OVH or Hetzner comparison is that for those entry servers they are known for, think the Advance line with OVH or AX with Hetzner. Those boxes come with some drawbacks. The OVH Advance line for example comes without ECC memory, in a server, that might host databases. It's a disaster waiting to happen. There is no option to add ECC memory with t…

I can't believe how affordable Hetzner is. I just rented a bare metal 48 core AMD EPYC 9454P with 256 GB of ram and two 2 TB NVME ssds for $200/month (or $0.37 per hour). Its hard to directly compare with AWS, but I think its about 10x cheaper.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#302

Post by UltraSane »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

I'm not going to argue that AWS can be expensive but in my experience its biggest advantage is SPEED. In every company I worked for that ran their own data centers ever damn thing took FOREVER. new servers took months to buy and rack. any network change like a new VLAN took days to weeks. It was so annoying. But in AWS almost anything is just an API call and a few minutes at most from being enabled. It is so much more productive.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#303

Post by neuronflux »

carlgreene wrote: post #294

Ok so this may be a dumb question...but now do you handle ISP outages due to storms and stuff with on prem solutions? I'd imagine large datacenters have much more sophisticated and reliable internet connections than say an Xfinity business customer, but maybe that's wrong.

Much more sophisticated and reliable than Xfinity.

Good datacenters have redundant and physically separated power and communication from different providers.

Also, in case something catastrophic happens at one datacenter, the author mentions they are peered to another datacenter in a different country, as another layer of redundancy. Cloudflare handles their ingress, so such a catastrophic event wouldn't likely to be noticed by their customers.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#304

Post by yearolinuxdsktp »

yanslookup wrote: post #165

FD: I work at Amazon, I also started my career in a time where I had to submit paper requests for servers that had turn around times measured in months. I just don't see it. Given the nature of the services they offer it's just too risky not to use as much managed stuff with SLAs as possible. k8s alone is a very complicated control plane + a freaking database that is hard to keep happy if it's not completely static.…

I agree that a business should use Kubernetes only if there is a clear need for that level of infrastructure automation. It's a time and money mistake to use K8s by default.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#305

Post by rikafurude21 »

torginus wrote: post #214
thelastgallon wrote: post #175

These are the features that AWS provides (1) Massive expansion of budget (100 - 1000x) to support empire building. Instead of one minimum-wage sysadmin with 2 high-availability, maxed-out servers for 20K - 40K (and 4-hour response time from Dell/HPE), you can have 100M multi-cloud Kubernetes + Lambda + a mix-and-match of various locked-in cloud services (DB, etc.). And you can have a large army of SRE/DevOps. You get…

The problem with those 5 people, is you can't hire a 6th - your stack is custom and probably even if you find the guy, he'll need months of ramp-up. In contrast, you could throw a stone into a bush and hit an AWS guy.

If your 6th needs months to understand how the basic blocks in your system are arranged then he might not be one of the "good" guys

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#306

Post by UltraSane »

torginus wrote: post #204
fulafel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

Unfortunately it's not, and it gets more difficult the more cloud-y your app gets. You can pay for EC2+EBS+network costs, or you can have a fancy cloud native solution where you pay for Lambda, ALBs, CloudWatch, Metrics, Secret Manager, (things you assume they would just give you, like if you eat at a restaurant, you probably won't expect to pay for the parking, toilet, or paying rent for the table and seats). So clo…

I have Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini analyze our AWS bills and usage metrics once a month and they are surprisingly good at finding savings.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#307

Post by SJC_Hacker »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?

Long term yes you can save money rolling your own.

But with cloud you can get something up and running within maybe a few days, sometimes even faster. Often with built in scalability.

This is a much easier sell to the non-tech (i.e., money) people.

If the project continues, the path of least resistance is often to just continue with the cloud solution. At a certain point, there will be so much tech debt that any savings from long term costs from the traditional on-premises, co-location or managed hosting, are vastly by the cost of migration.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#308

Post by __alexs »

torginus wrote: post #222
__alexs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT no AWS service has ever had a price increase. This is nonsense.

Considering you get exponentially more compute/hardware for the same money every 2 years or so, they haven't been getting that much cheaper.

Every generation of CPU has cost more than the last one for years now.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#309

Post by whstl »

hedora wrote: post #263
jcalvinowens wrote: post #244

I have seen multiple startups paying thousands of dollars a month in AWS bills to run a tiny service which could trivially run on an $800 desktop on a residential internet connection. It's absolutely tragic.

That’s like $24K a year. Assuming they have working failover and business continuity plans, it’s actually a really good deal (vs having a 10-20% time employee deal with it).

AWS doesn't get magically expensive just because you put your website there.

You don't get to an overcomplicated AWS madness without having a few engineers already pushing complexity.

And an overcomplicated setup also means it needs maintenance. There are no personnel savings there.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#310

Post by [deleted] »

steelegbr wrote: post #81
bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists. It can work well if your product is simple and scalable. A lot of places quietly achieve this. That said, I've seen real world scenarios where complexity is up the wazoo and an opex cost focus means you're hiring under skilled…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN