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AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
321–330 of 513 posts
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#322Earlier 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…
I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.
>I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.
I kinda feel like this argument could be used against programming in essentially any language. Your company, or you yourself, likely chose to develop using (whatever language it is) because that's what you knew and what your developers knew. Maybe it would have been some percentage more efficient to use another language, but then you and everyone else has to learn it.
It's the same with the cloud vs bare metal, though at least in the cloud, if your using the right services, if someone asked you tomorrow to scale 100x you likely could during the workday.
And generally speaking if your problem is at a scale where baremetal is trivial to implement, its likely we're only taking about a few hundred dollars a month being 'wasted' in AWS. Which is nothing to most companies, especially when they'd have to consider developer/devops time.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#323Microk8s has common, catastrophic performance bugs. There are also catastrophic problems with microk8s Ceph addons. So is this post true? Microk8s, for people who know stuff, is a canary for clusters / applications that don’t really work.
Source? Links?
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In all other EU countries you just show up and board, but in Spain there's the security check Just for curiosity's sake, did any other EU countries have any recent terrorist attacks involving bombs on trains in the capital, or is Spain so far alone with this experience?
Checkout Madrid 2004 terror attacks... So deadly that Spain left Afghanistan and Iraq afik.
That's exactly the event I was alluding to, good detective work :)
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#325I'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 I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.
> It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.
the companies selling Cloud are also massive IT giants with unlimited compute resources and extensive online marketing operations.
like of fucking course they're using shillbots, they run the backend shillbot infrastructure.
they literally have LLM chatbot agents as an offering, and it's trivially easy to create fake users and repost / retweet last weeks comments to create realistic looking accounts, when then shill hard for whatever their goals are.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#326As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.
I don't work in firmware at all, but I'm working next to a team now migrating an application from VMs to K8S, and they refer to the VMs as "bare metal" which I find slightly cringeworthy - but hey, whatever language works to communicate an idea.
I'm not sure I've ever heard bare metal used to refer to virtualized instances. (There were debates around Type 1 and Type 2 (hosted) hypervisors at one point but haven't heard that come up in years.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.
>I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements. I kinda feel like this argument could be used against programming in essentially any language. Your company, or you yourself, likely chose to develop using (whatever language it is) because that's w…
> if someone asked you tomorrow to scale 100x you likely could during the workday.
I've never seen a cloud setup where that was true.
For starters: Most cloud providers will impose limits on you that often means going 100x would involve pleading with account managers to have limits lifted and/or scrounding a new, previously untested, combination of instance sizes.
But secondly, you'll tend to run into unknown bottlenecks long before that.
And so, in fact, if that is a thing you actually want to be able to do, you need to actually test it.
But it's also generally not a real problem. I more often come across the opposite: Customers who've gotten hit with a crazy bill because of a problem rather than real use.
But it's also easy enough to set up a hybrid setup that will spin up cloud instances if/when you have a genuine need to be able to scale up faster than you can provision new bare metal instances. You'll typically run an orchestrator and run everything in containers on a bare metal setup too, so typically it only requires having an auto-scaling group scaled down to 0, and warm it up if load nears critical level on your bare metal environment, and then flip a switch in your load balancer to start directing traffic there. It's not a complicated thing to do.
Now, incidentally, your bare metal setup is even cheaper because you can get away with a higher load factor when you can scale into cloud to take spikes.
> And generally speaking if your problem is at a scale where baremetal is trivial to implement, its likely we're only taking about a few hundred dollars a month being 'wasted' in AWS. Which is nothing to most companies, especially when they'd have to consider developer/devops time.
Generally speaking, I only relatively rarely work on systems that cost less than in the tens of thousands per month and up, and what I consistently see with my customers is that the higher the cost, the bigger the bare-metal advantage tends to be as it allows you to readily amortise initial setup costs of more streamlined/advanced setups. The few places where cloud wins on cost is the very smallest systems, typically <$5k/month.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#328The core of this success is this, IMO: > Our workload is 24/7 steady. We were already at >90% reservation coverage; there was no idle burst capacity to “right size” away. If we had the kind of bursty compute profile many commenters referenced, the choice would be different. Which TBH applies to many, many places, even if they are not aware of it.
I'd say the core of their success is running everything in a single rack in a single datacenter at first (for months? a year?) and getting lucky. Life is simple when you don't need the costs and effort of reliability upfront.
They mentioned having a backup AWS cluster that would spin up when something happens.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
These concerns are exaggerated. I've been running on Hetzner, OVH and friends for 20 years. During that time I've had only two issues, one about 15 years ago when a PSU failed on one of the servers, and another a few years ago when an OVH data center caught fire and one of the servers went down. There have been no other hardware issues. YMMV.
They matter at scale, where 1% issues end up happening on a daily or weekly basis. For a startup with one rack in each of two data centers, it’s probably fine. You’ll end up testing failover a bit more, but you’ll need that if you scale anyway. If it’s for some back office thing that will never have any load, and must not permanently fail (eg payroll), maybe just slap it on an EC2 VM and enable off-site backup / rans…
Wasn't my product as a product manager but my long-ago company came out with an under the desk minicomputer product for distributed sites. And they didn't use ECC memory in the design. The servers didn't fail very often but multiply that fairly low error rate by a large number of servers and a system failure was happening every few days or so. The customer wasn't happy.
Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they aren't wrong about the bare metal either: Every organization ends up tied to their staff, and said staff was hired to work on the stack you are using. People end up in quite the fights because their supposed experts are more fond of uniformity and learning nothing new. Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs, and people migrated to AWS to avoid dealing w…
> Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand t…
In orgs I have seen this it is usually a symptom of the data center unit being starved of resources. It’s like they have only been given the choice of on prem but ridiculous paperwork and long lead times or pay 20x for cloud.
Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery phase to keep things going while we are waiting on things to get sized or arrive?