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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#41

Post by drchopchop »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

They don't get force-rebooted that often, I have EC2 instances that have been up for over 365 days with no issues.

Setting up instances, managing updates, adding IAM perms is orders of magnitude faster/easier than dealing with rack-and-stack data centers.

Full downtime isn't that frequent, either. The Kinesis outage on Wednesday didn't affect any of our USE1 functionality, with the exception of maybe Cloudfront propagation.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#42

Post by yowlingcat »

nikisweeting wrote: post #38
honkycat wrote: post #17

Good luck hiring the professionals needed to run a bunch of co-located servers in 2020.

Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance? The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers…

The pieces aren't difficult in isolation, but the combined logistical total cost of operational ownership is high and includes huge tail risks. When your metal fails, it stays down until physically fixed. Depending on your business, that's either acceptable or not.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#43

Post by vonmoltke »

Rantenki wrote: post #36
z92 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did, Quote : We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up to four hours.

Read those figures again. They're such an underestimate as to be laughable, and apply only to the physical racking efforts. There is no way in the world that the only effort taken related to infrastructure is entirely encapsulated in ~ $200 per year.

> They're such an underestimate as to be laughable

If I am reading the post correctly, those are actuals, not estimates.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#44

Post by jaas »

honkycat wrote: post #17

Good luck hiring the professionals needed to run a bunch of co-located servers in 2020.

It's easy, we have no trouble at all. Training more is simple once you have one or two people with experience. No luck needed.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#45

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

If you're at the scale where a data center going down is a problem and thus you need to run in multiple coasts for disaster recovery, you're going to have to be able to handle the kinds of distributed computing issues that'll crop up in both cases.

The advantage of AWS is that in theory you can script your infrastructure. Deploy to multiple zones, add hosts, remove hosts, deploy artifact, etc. Makes all kinds of things very easy. Dedicated SQL / Cassandra / DynamoDB offerings make that a few clicks to get going.

This saves people costs, but just so happens to be more expensive in terms of hardware costs.

You can replicate all of this in your own DC or whatever. You do need to invest in tooling, hardware, etc. which is worth it at the highest scales. Or worth it if you don't need everything and thus don't need to pay for it.

Personally, I think many large organizations can optimize by running with a mix of on-prem and cloud services.

Demand may be elastic but not totally elastic, so your base load could be cheaper in house. Storage is cheaper on premise for huge datasets.

You can afford enough staff to rack servers, but you aren't dominated by the lack of servers.

You buy more EC2 instances to scale your business, letting the product team deliver the product, and deploy on-prem to squeeze out more efficiency behind them. Yes, you probably don't use the full offerings of a cloud provider, but that also means less lock in at a cost of a little lower convenience and more staff.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#46

Post by GordonS »

Some of the big benefits of major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP):

  - the sheer number of services available
  - managed services
  - high availability, within and/or across regions
  - APIs/SDKs for many of their services, for many languages
  - monitoring and alerting built-in
  - RBAC
  - means of grouping and organising resources and subscriptions
I work as an architect in the enterprise space, where those last 2 are pretty important because a lot of different teams are building/using a lot of different systems, and often multiple organisations are involved. High availability of some services is vital, because downtime can affect the bottom line, or mean an entire workforce has to down their tools.

Considering only the first 3 items, most of the non-huge systems I design - and, I would imagine, most non-enterprise/FAANG-scale systems - have only modest availability requirements, very rarely needing cross-region availability. And most of those systems only really need web apps and APIs, proxies/gateways, a database, a message queue, blob storage, and often some form of background processing (VMs, containers, serverless). OK, that's still a fairly long list, but it's a tiny fraction of what the big cloud providers have on offer, and the database is probably the only tricky thing on the list.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#47

Post by drchopchop »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Also, when it comes time to scale, it's a lot easier to bring up a relatively simple (but scalable) infrastructure on AWS than deal with: colo location, buying servers, buying spares, replacing failing hardware, imaging, setting up backups, etc etc. Those typically become concerns once you're at big scale where the cost savings are significant.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#48

Post by addicted »

munk-a wrote: post #33
anonfornoreason wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but wit…

That's true - I was comparing managing a server rack in the office building against AWS - not comparing the relatively light hardware interaction needs when it comes to co-location.

I'm pretty sure the original article is talking about Colo.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#49

Post by cft »

I host a web app that has 200KB pages and reaches 3.5Gbps peak bandwidth in two racks in an expensive datacenter. The lease plus bandwidth is about 1/5 to 1/7 the cost of AWS.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#50

Post by teh_klev »

Patrick-STH wrote: post #32
bpodgursky wrote: post #22

Even ignoring labor, none of these analyses ever consider BC/DR or backup costs. S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups. If I run a database on RDS, maybe it costs more than a bare-metal server, but I can replicate the automatic hourly backups to as many regions as I want. Incredible peace of mind o…

Those are included in our colo costs with a second data center where we have a smaller DR cluster.

It never fails to amaze me how many HN contributors don't seem to read the linked articles yet seem compelled to tell you off for things you've already accounted for, explained and justified.
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