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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

#341

Post by BirAdam »

dragonwriter wrote: post #75
fennecbutt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I didn't how that, thanks for the lesson. Tbf it just sounds...so American, so I assumed, my bad. But East India Company was involved...whew I guess that does make sense, oof.

What is unique in the US is the interaction between corporate personhood and our First Amendment and the way that our courts have applied that to limit political campaign finance laws, and a lot of “corporate personhood” controversy is really about that, not actually about corporate personhood as a broad concept.

Well, it's also what allows the executives, boards, and owners of companies to be divorced from the consequences of their actions in a legal sense much of the time.

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

#342

Post by BirAdam »

hansvm wrote: post #309

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?

You'd colo if you didn't want to use public cloud. The savings are good over time, but the upfront cost can be huge depending upon how much disk space you need. The setup/config can also be rough (many 4U boxes packed with tons of disks each, then CephFS + Rados for S3 api). You also want to have a few configured nodes on cold stand by, and many extra disks. Because of this, I've seen some companies take compute off the cloud but leave bulk data storage on the cloud.

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by MikeNotThePope »

bsenftner wrote: post #318
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…

I was a guy that built server clusters during the early 00's, for my own and others' web and other projects. When AWS really took off, it was like a spend all your money mania, and devs and companies treated my skills like dirt. I got a job writing facial recognition edge servers, with high performance many claim are impossible numbers (25M face compares per second per core) and my employer found itself a leader in t…

Do you have any blog posts or something you could share on how facial recognition works? Specifically what a "face compare" is. That sounds interesting!

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

#345

Post by zelphirkalt »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #328
sundache wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The actual hardware (or virtual these days) is not the problem, but getting the 5000-10000 services properly connected with auditing, credentials and more is more trouble than most people expect. Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so there’s a LOT of compliance that needs to happen, like segregation of duty, traceability, accountability, and other ilities. Yes, it would probably cost less to run on Hetzner (pro…

Anything that wants to adhere to GDPR should still be very careful, if not outright avoid, AWS and Azure. At most one could use an EU-isolated offspring of them, otherwise one runs into the insanity of US laws. The fact that many businesses don't care doesn't make it right.

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

#346

Post by brandall10 »

jwr wrote: post #320
cinntaile wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people writing about their revenue are online business influencers.

That seems to be quite true, as people who run a successful and enjoyable business are busy running their successful and enjoyable business :-)

"Building in public" is a reasonable marketing tactic, I wouldn't discount it entirely.

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

#347

Post by jimbokun »

fhd2 wrote: post #201
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

My pet peeves are: 1. For small stuff, AWS et al aren't that much more expensive than Hetzner, mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience. 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure i…

> mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience.

2x is the same ballpark???

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

#348

Post by mike1o1 »

I have some projects with a fairly steady load that I'm currently running on a VPS on Digital Ocean. I have some non-critical ones that I'd be interested in moving to "bare metal" for learning purposes, but having a hard time figuring out what the transition from VPS to dedicated server would look like.

Anybody have any guides or guidance on making the migration? I feel comfortable managing the VPS, but not sure what else I'd need to take on by moving to a dedicated server. I imagine hardware monitoring would be one, but what else?

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

#349

Post by psnosignaluk »

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…

Pre-cloud pets vs cattle approach. We ran a few pets, but had DC's worth of cattle thanks to PXE, TFPT and Ansible. No Terraform required, as there was no need to control the state of multiples of cloud cruft. Good times. Except when something would pack up in the middle of winter in the wee hours and it was a bollock-cracking motorbike ride to the DC to spit on the offending black box.

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

#350

Post by 1dom »

Atreiden wrote: post #21
1dom wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not agreeing/disagreeing with your core point, but this doesn't seem right: > running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. That's a medium to large homelab worth of stuff, which means it can be run by a single nerd in their spare time.

Homelab =/= Production systems The gulf between these two insofar as what approach, technologies, and due-diligences are necessary is vast.

Your production is not my production. 5 9's of businesses don't need 5 9's, and in my experience, people who talk like they do are talking from a position of managing 1 or 2 production systems in a single domain.

My experience is that the largest regulated production systems I've run have clearly been larger and more complex than my homelab, but my homelab has been significantly more resilient, featureful and robust than many of the smaller production systems I've been responsible for outside of regulated domains.

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