Imagine how much they'd save by not using AWS in the first place
Nothing, because they would have bought legacy servers and would be stuck with Intel for another decade
There is a world between using AWS and buying your own servers
Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
41–50 of 140 posts
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#42Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.
First graviton is not magic. We switched our main service, which is a nodejs monolith, and did not get any cost improvement (we had to add more instances to handle the same workload, which ended up being equivalent cost wise). There are certainly use cases when it's better, but it doesn't seem to be the only and obvious choice for all use cases.
Second our laptops and our CI are amd64 machines, and being able to run the same docker images in prod and locally is nice, and not having to build the image with qemu on the CI is also good.
I don't mind cloud-ARM, but there definitely are good reasons not to use it (which of course don't apply to everyone)
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#43I found graviton to be a mixed bag. It was certainly extremely fast when using the very high end instances and I tested it successfully using a Rust based message queue system I was writing and it got some ridiculously fast number like 8 million messages a second, from memory, using the fastest possible graviton instance (this was about 18 months ago). I did try to switch some of my database servers to it a couple of…
I'd argue just find a different cloud provider. GCP, Azure, Supabase, Cloudflare etc if you want managed services. If you want a mix of managed services and raw compute, look more at Fly.io, Linode, Digital Ocean perhaps? I have found AWS being the "cheapest" or even "reasonable" in the cost department to be slimmer every year.
Cloudflare doesn’t let you host Docker containers or offer managed Postgres do they?
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#44Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.
Switching to Gravitron isn't an automatic cost savings. Everything is optimized for x86. It maybe cheaper, but significantly slower. We've been trying to migrate for the last year for both cost saving but also we switched to ARM based laptops.
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#45We have a very similar story at my org. We run around 100 RDS aurora clusters and switched to graviton. I'm surprised to see 35% gains here, we saw more like 10-15%. But since amazon natively supports mysql on aurora we didn't have to worry about compatibility. Our main highlight was the way we wrote our infra as code where we made switching instances types or service we use fairly simple task, so we have switched instance types a couple of times in past and could easily make dev use t3s.
Getting on cloud is a trap and not the usual we deploy on the servers and we live situation. Give weight to write some good code to manage your infra and able to adopt optimizations as they occur. It will ramp up in expense soon otherwise.
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#46Cloud cost optimisation is underrated. In the companies I've worked in nobody has really given a shit (at least not under normal economic circumstances). In the industry there's a strong avoidance of ARM compute instances for no good reason. If I were building from scratch today I would definitely go with Graviton.
Let's go even further - "Cloud cost is underrated"
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, this is starting to shift with M1 MacBooks, Graviton is looking more attractive for precisely that architecture parity reason for teams using majority M1 devices.
Yeah if only. Our ops people are too uneducated to be able to deploy anything Apple. Literally there are armies of factory pressed Windows monkeys but nothing in the Apple space. Note to apple: please start concentrating on the enterprise sector. We're dying over here. My Dell weighs 3x my personal M1 MBP, has a shitty keyboard with keys designed for Borrowers, the battery lasts 8 minutes and it reduces my sperm coun…
For what it's worth, I work in a large 30,000 employee company. Everyone gets a Windows machine by default.
6 years ago our department of 200 people "went rogue" and started provisioning Macs, because it was the only way we could hire developers and provide a good developer experience for the work we were doing.
This took some convincing, but it was possible. We agreed to be unsupported by the in-house help desk, but we had 2 people in IT that supported us for provisioning and fixing machines, and sorting out a small amount of required enterprise software like a Cisco VPN client and some fleet management background agents.
Otherwise, we self-organized support over Slack and in-office and also made use of Apple's business support directly.
As of earlier this year, our department is now over 600 people, and we've given our internal IT enough incentive to officially support Macs, which they now do, alongside Windows.
They use some kind of MDM software to manage and update and monitor our Macs the same as they do Windows.
There are also now additional much larger teams in the organization exploring Mac adoption where it makes sense for their developers too, and we could soon have thousands of Macs in use.
So it's definitely possible, even if you have to start small.
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I started to build today I'd build and host my own servers, or go with servers from ionos. Cloud is very expensive.
I just worked on a massive "optimised" cloud migration like you've never seen. We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are. We were realistically expecting 2x which gave us some regional agility and was expected but the unconstrained growth and misunderstanding of the cost model was terrible. It's designed to be so convoluted that you can't possibly estimate c…
>We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are.
8x?? that's crazy, what where you doing wrong then?
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just worked on a massive "optimised" cloud migration like you've never seen. We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are. We were realistically expecting 2x which gave us some regional agility and was expected but the unconstrained growth and misunderstanding of the cost model was terrible. It's designed to be so convoluted that you can't possibly estimate c…
>We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are. 8x?? that's crazy, what where you doing wrong then?
Everything, all at once.
SMEs can't reliably manage that transition with any skillset and still deliver a product at the same time.
Re: Switching to AWS Graviton slashed our infrastructure bill
#50I found graviton to be a mixed bag. It was certainly extremely fast when using the very high end instances and I tested it successfully using a Rust based message queue system I was writing and it got some ridiculously fast number like 8 million messages a second, from memory, using the fastest possible graviton instance (this was about 18 months ago). I did try to switch some of my database servers to it a couple of…
> local servers tend to be much faster and cheaper than cloud. Of course, running a server in your house is not going to achieve five or even three 9's of reliability, and even colocating a single rack in a single location might be more expensive than putting that infra in AWS (depending on how data-heavy your use case is, given AWS' exorbitant data transfer costs).
you can hit three nines even if you're down for 1.5 minutes every day, or ten minutes a week. It's really not as hard to hit as it sounds. For a compute heavy process that isn't end user facing (e.g. batch processing) it's perfectly viable.
Also, most cloud providers don't guarantee five nines anyway. GCE SLA is 99.5 on a single instance, 99.99 on a region