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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#301

Post by 8fingerlouie »

amrocha wrote: post #238
sofixa wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tricky networking though. And data storage/locality/consistency.

Databases are rarely the bottleneck during access volume spikes in my experience. It’s really impressive how far some beefy servers and a read copy can take you. But if that is your bottleneck you should be upgrading your DB system regardless of whether you’re on cloud or bare metal.

But if your one source of truth is a single huge database, maybe on a mainframe, as is often the case with finance, and eventual consistency is a huge no go, the mainframe can become a limit regardless when you're being "hammered" by 3+ million users all wanting to check their account balance.

Yes, you can solve the problem with sharding and other tricks, but for many banks, the mainframe is still their main data storage, and it has 60+ years of legacy code on it that is not easily or quickly migrated to modern architecture.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#302

Post by sundache »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #297
zelphirkalt wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if one is willing to spend that much. More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios and the server will be ready to handle that with lower hardware specs.

There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the middle of the month, as in factor 10+. People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier. Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million customers or more, the load is not really insignificant. Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual consis…

But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an argument why you have to use the cloud.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#303

Post by fluoridation »

piokoch wrote: post #292
jwr wrote: post #281

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun…

This is all true. But... But if you manage your own server, as the author advice, you need to figure out a lot of stuff and remember about a lot of stuff. Are ulimits set correctly? Shall I turn on syn cookies or turn them off because of performance? What are the things I should know but I don't and Chat GPT has not told me them, as this is more than some intro tutorial on how to run VPS on DO, so it was never indexe…

>What if I need to send emails? These days doing this ourselves is a dark art by itself (IP/domain address warming up, checking if my domain has not ended on some spam list, etc.).

AFAIK, everyone sending automated emails just uses one of the paid services, like sendmail.

>What if I need to follow some regulations, like European Union GDPR compliance? Have I done everything what is needed to store personal data as GDPR requires? Is my DB password stored in a compliant way or I will face a fine up to 10% of my incomes.

What does this have to do with cloud vs non-cloud? You'll need to manage your data correctly either way.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#304

Post by Blahagun »

piokoch wrote: post #292
jwr wrote: post #281

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun…

This is all true. But... But if you manage your own server, as the author advice, you need to figure out a lot of stuff and remember about a lot of stuff. Are ulimits set correctly? Shall I turn on syn cookies or turn them off because of performance? What are the things I should know but I don't and Chat GPT has not told me them, as this is more than some intro tutorial on how to run VPS on DO, so it was never indexe…

Setting up the email server is the only thing I couldn't do with my own home hosted setup because you're at the mercy of your internet provider to give you the PTR record in their network, and lately many providers outright refuse to do it for "your own and their own safety" reasons. This thing alone could be the difference between deciding to host yourself or use a cloud service.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#305

Post by brodouevencode »

As with everything, the real answer as to whether or not the cloud is cheaper is "it depends". These simplistic one-sided tirades (intentionally?) leave out a lot of detail, use simple rage-bait titles, and are generally not very thoughtful or coherent.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#306

Post by happymellon »

darkwater wrote: post #271
happymellon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 75 clicks Well 2 commands... aws rds export-task create \ --source-arn \ --s3-bucket-name \ --iam-role-arn Then copy it down aws s3 cp \ \ --recursive The biggest effort would be then running the Apache Parquet to CSV tool on it.

Plus the s3 bucket creation and definition commands, and the IAM role and attached policy commands. If you do all in the webUI it's not going to be 75 clicks either but 30 for sure.

It could easily be 30 clicks.

But creating an S3 bucket, an IAM role and attaching policies isn't 30 commands.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#307

Post by cess11 »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

My friends run hundreds of TB:s serviced onto the Internet for hobby and pleasure reasons.

It's not all HA, NVMe, web scale stuff, but it's not like a few hundred TB:s is a huge undertaking even for individual nerds with a bit of money to spend or connections at corporations that monotonically decommission hardware and is happy to not have to spend resources getting rid of it.

This summer I bought a used server for 200 euros from an acquaintance, I plan on shoving 140 TB in it and expect some of my future databases to exceed 10 TB in size.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#308

Post by yobbo »

icameron wrote: post #177
busterarm wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5 servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where you need to be. Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades of fast and loose development by immature software engineers...and having components in the stack that did the same. If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect today's computing reali…

You have over a 100,000 servers? How is this? This is wild to ponder. I can only guess your monthly bill is in the millions. Are you able to say the company?

"100.000 servers" sounds like the entirety of 2008-era Google, but with today's 10-100x performance per server. It could be bigger than Dropbox or Netflix.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#309

Post by hansvm »

Jumping away from the article slightly, where would you go if you needed a ton of vanilla disk space, the ability to do compute near to that disk, and for it to be accessible with a reasonable pipe to the public internet?

As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are there other options?

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#310

Post by ratsimihah »

I'm not sold because:

1. "It’s difficult to say these things without coming across as arrogant, but I’ve been managing servers since 2006."

You have experience manager servers, so for you it's not a big deal. But maybe software developers who aren't devops don't want to worry about it and just want to write code and ship a project?

2. If you're launching a new product as a solo developer, isn't it faster to just build an MVP on the cloud, validate the idea, get some traction, and eventually migrate to cheaper hosting if you do become the x% that gets product/market fit and do need to scale?

3. "Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point."

What's with the tone? Is it supposed to be funny? Does it help getting the point across?

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