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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

#391

Post by thelastgallon »

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.

Why would you need more people? Don't treat the 5 people like shit.

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

#392

Post by axegon_ »

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 am not - I hate AWS(and cloud in general) with a passion - overpriced, you are getting locked in by a closed ecosystem the moment you say "hey this feature is neat it will save me so much work", only to realize that you are stuck paying for it for years if you decide to move away from it. But people are inclined to jump on a hype train and become evangelists for life. Truth is AWS(or GCP or Azure or anything else) is a viable option in two cases:

1. You are making a product with 3 friends on evenings and you want to ship asap without having the capacity to invest and setup infrastructure. 2. You are a huge corporation with tens of thousands of employees and hardware needs that you simply cannot source yourself easily or sort out the collocation of the hardware.

Everyone else - get a dozen second-hand servers, shove them in a rack in a data center and you will own the hardware and everything associated with it at half the price of what you'd be paying AWS in a year.

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

#393

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

vidarh wrote: post #71
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…

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 only work at companies that are using cloud because I hate administering systems and I hate dealing with system administrators when I need resources.

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

#394

Post by spwa4 »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #120
spwa4 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high availability MySQL server on AWS is about the same difficulty as on your own kubernetes instance (I've got a play one on one of those $100 N100 machines, got one with 16G mem). Then: helm repo add mariadb-operator https://mariadb-operator.github.io/mariadb-operator helm install mariadb-operator mariadb-operator/mariadb-operator And then you can just provision MariaDB "kind", ie. you kubectl apply with somethin…

Dont you need ECC in your db nodes?

N100 is my homelab, for playing. For instance I have a kubernetes cluster running KubeVirt, which runs 5 VMs, which ... have a kubernetes installation (so I have multiple worker nodes doing a "distributed filesystem" all of which is resharing disks from the same SSD). My production servers are generally older Xeons with ECC ram, which are also running kubernetes.

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

#395

Post by agoodusername63 »

Slothrop99 wrote: post #377
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…

> one minimum-wage sysadmin The internet assures me there are loads of these underemployed Unix/networking experts just sitting around waiting to set up your infrastructure. But in my experience, these people are actually really difficult to hire, and not at all cheap. (Possibly the sharp ones have 'sold out' and gone the SRE route and are now one of those '3000' people.) So I wonder if there's a certain amount of wi…

Yeah I'm one of them. Started as an on-site Linux sysadmin. Moved to cloud SRE because remote is plentiful and it pays better.

I get crap recruiters in my inbox and LinkedIn every other week with the worst offers to go back to on-site bare metal admin. 30% less pay, on-site requirements, and it's a contracted position?

I need that Futurama "oh you're serious, let me laugh harder" gif

If companies want to whine that good Linux datacenter ops doesn't exist anymore, laugh in their faces.

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

#396

Post by guax »

_ea1k wrote: post #380
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.. Same, this trend towards "AWS all the things" has really amazed me. We've all mocked small companies copying big companies by trying to make their app super-duper scalable from the very start. After all, everyone things they are the next google, despite their 5 total users right now. But this is really the opposite. AWS is phenomenal for the startup that wou…

Opex looks nicer on the sheets than capex for large deployments. Incredible high investment from AWS on luring in C level with "white-papers" and promises of cost and governance magical revolutions. I've heard the promise of cheaper, faster where you can focus on "innovation". I am yet to see any of it become a reality.

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

#397

Post by Hikikomori »

mk89 wrote: post #388
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…

How would you do multi-region deployments with your own DC? This is an issue for several companies that start small and within 5 years they find the need to expand abroad. Be it for data sovereignty or so, which is becoming more important than ever in the last 10 years. Duplicating a region is "a few clicks away" on AWS. This is what the provider enables you to do. This and a lot of other things. And for such things,…

I mean its not that complicated. Rent space in another location, get separate fibers/wavelength between them, redundant internet connection.

But if you're in a growth/startup phase it doesn't make much sense to spend engineering time on this, not that multi region setups in Aws is one button either. Once you're past that and paying aws a million per week or so I think it can make sense to offload expensive services to your own hardware.

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

#398

Post by ericd »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
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…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

You can just set up your own cloud on leased machines, and pocket the huge difference in cost. Devops languages are pretty easy to learn, IME, and the infra stuff takes less maintenance than the AWS proponents seem to think. I guess it depends on your usage profile, but like bandwidth especially is ruinously expensive compared to what you get with leased machines.

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

#399

Post by guax »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #382
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…

> (2) OpEx instead of CapEx Someone please explain to me why this matters. I'd think that expenditures are expenditures, and that if the outright purchase of hardware would see an RoI compared to renting it in the cloud in under a year, it'd be a no-brainer to just buy the hardware.

OpEx means that if demand for your service goes down, cost goes down, your hardware does not become a capital liability since it depreciate fast. Way easier to justify changes to it too, you don't need a purchase project to get new instances, you're already "approved" and the contract was already signed with fluctuating costs. Needs more hardware? press a button, no need to research vendors, get contract negotiations in place.

AWS makes the life of finance and leadership a lot easier because they spend a lot of money justifying their superiority in ways that you don't have to think too hard to use and be taken seriously. They're to CTOs what think tanks and lobbyist are for lawmakers.

"No one got fired for buying ibm" for the new era.

There is a lot of truth in AWS propaganda, they're great for many things. But some of it is built on lies, cost being one, performance another.

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

#400

Post by marcosdumay »

snoman wrote: post #354
marcosdumay wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the big name companies always refuse to take responsibility, and have worse reliability metrics than the lean alternatives... but somehow that is never a problem.

This fired of some warning bells in my head. Is the data available to actually make a verifiable claim regarding those reliability metrics like you are.

Microsoft and Oracle were on the vanguard of suing people that published metrics about them into bankruptcy... So, do you trust the metrics they publish?

IBM is older, and it's incredibly well documented how mainframes are more expensive to run than normal servers.

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