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

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

#311

Post by comprev »

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 on a Platform team of They've never used tools like Ansible (or Anaconda) or been in situations where they couldn't destroy the container and start afresh instantly.

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

#312

Post by dilyevsky »

kyledrake wrote: post #278

The article mentions Equinix Metal but if you look it up they are shutting down the service https://docs.equinix.com/metal/hardware/standard-servers Doesn't make me want to be a Equinix customer when they just randomly shut down critical hosting services. I'm pretty sure that it's just the post-merger name for Packet which was an incredible provider that even had BYO IP with an anycast community. Really a shame that…

Fwiw equinix metal was an acquisition (Packet). Seems like it didnt go too well

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

#313

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

It depends upon how many resources your software needs. At 20 servers we spend almost zero time managing our servers, and with modern hardware 20 servers can get you a lot.

Its easier than ever to do this but people are doing it less and less.

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

#314

Post by b112 »

calgoo wrote: post #61
vb-8448 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? It's a way to "commoditize" engineers. You can run on premise or mixed infra better and cheaper, but only if you know what you are doing. This requires experienced guys and doesn't work with new grad hired by big cons and sold ad "cloud experts".

Also, when something breaks, you are responsible. If you put it in AWS like everyone else and it breaks, then its their problem not yours. We will still implement workarounds and fixes when it happens, but we are not responsible. Basic enterprise rules these days is to always pay someone else to be responsible.

It's always your problem. The difference is, if you control things, you can fix it, work around it, resolve it.

If not, you're at the mercy of others.

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

#315

Post by eek2121 »

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 once moved a small site from AWS to Digital Ocean + Cloudflare.

$100-$300 on AWS -> $35/mo for DO + CF. Coincidentally, AWS had an outage soon after, which was avoided thanks to the move.

I have used DO for both clients and myself, and have not had any huge problems with them.

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

#316

Post by torginus »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #305
torginus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really a hardcore infra guy, but on the coding side, I know companies with products that have codebases in the multi million LoC range written over decades, one of my friends interned there and told me they didn't even let him work on the core product for months, they put him on some custom testing framework they had for it, just so he could get familiar enough with the core code to be able to contribute meaningfully.

He told me that before they started doing that, there were incidents like teams writing entire modules they didn't know already existed - now there were 2 pieces of code doing basically the same thing, that were just incompatible enough to not be possible to merge them.

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

#317

Post by rdtsc »

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.

Basic rationalization. People will go to extraordinary lengths to justify and defend the choices they made. It's a defense mechanism: if they spent millions on AWS they are not going to sit idly while HN discusses saving hundreds of thousands with everyone nodding and agreeing. It's important for their own sanity to defend the choice they made.

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

#318

Post by Joeboy »

embedding-shape wrote: post #185
Joeboy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you look up "bare metal" it goes to the page about actual bare metal (aka "bare machines" or whatever). Can we stop this now? Please?

> Yes, but if you look up "bare metal" it goes to the page about actual bare metal (or bare machines or whatever). Fix it then, if you think it's incorrect. Otherwise, link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal_(disambiguation) like any normal and charitable commentator would do. > Can we stop this now? Please? Sure, feel free to stop at any point you want to.

There is nothing that needs fixing? Both my link and yours give the same "primary" definition for "bare metal". Which is not unequivocally the correct definition, but it's the one I and the person I was replying to favour.

I thought my link made the point a bit better. I think maybe you've misunderstood something about how Wikipedia works, or about what I'm saying, or something. Which is OK, but maybe you could try to be a bit more polite about it? Or charitable, to use your own word?

Edit: In case this part isn't obvious, Wikipedia redirects are managed by Wikipedia editors, just like the rest of Wikipedia. Where the redirect goes is as much an indication of the collective will of Wikipedia editors as eg. a disambiguation page. I don't decide where a request for the "bare metal" page goes, that's Wikipedia.

Edit2: Unless you're suggesting I edited the redirect page? The redirect looks to have been created in 2013, and hasn't been changed since.

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

#319

Post by torginus »

jmaker wrote: post #276
torginus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We run regular FinOps meetings within departments, so everyone’s aware. I think everyone should. But it’s a lot of overhead of course. So a dev is concerned not only with DevOps anymore but with DevSecFinOps. Not everyone can cope with so many aspects at once. There’s a lot of complexity creep in that.

Yeah, AWS has the billing panel, that's where I usually discover that after I make a rough estimate on how much the thing I'm building should cost by studying the relevant tables, I end up with stuff costing twice as much, because on top of the expected items there's always a ton of miscellaneous stuff I never thought about.

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

#320

Post by j45 »

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…

The cloud is incredibly profitable for the efficiencies and improvements its introduced and held onto.

Easy to push back against what is now the unknown (bare metal), when the layers extending bare metal to cloud service have become better and better, as well as more accessible.

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