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Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

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Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#41

Post by sgarland »

politelemon wrote: post #38

This is a weird read. The analysis makes the classic mistake of assuming a lift-and-shift calculation. Of course that's going to be more expensive. You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services. Which makes me scratch my head at the concluding statement: > A cloud is convenient and locked in. Everything is a lock-in. But in the case they've described, which is just shifting from VMs to EC2s, it is…

I hear that all the time, but I don’t see how it’s true. Have you priced RDS vs. an EC2? It isn’t even close. You’re paying for the convenience. Not to mention the massive speed loss you take with the increased latency of EBS.

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#42

Post by asjkaehauisa »

How much do servers cost nowadays? According to the article, the cost would be $61,500 USD per server for specifications including 2TB RAM, 100Gbps, 16x 15TB drives, and 64 core CPU (assuming "We use high core-count CPUs").

Is this accurate? Could you provide me with a tip on how to acquire a server with those specifications for $60,000 USD?

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#43

Post by sgarland »

nunez wrote: post #39

i don't buy it. first of all, ahrefs discounts the "people" cost, but that's a huge cost to ignore! the biggest advantage that AWS and the like confer is being able to reduce interactions with literally every piece of infra you consume from them down to APIs. having physical hardware means you need a team who knows how to rack/provision/configure/update hardware *along with* administrating operating systems and every…

> having physical hardware means you need a team who knows how to rack/provision/configure/update hardware

Not with a colo. They all have that as a service. If by provision you mean installing an OS via PXE or the like, then no, but everything else, yes.

> along with administrating operating systems and everything that comes with along with the automation needed to hold everything together.

If you have a team managing Terraform for cloud infra, congratulations – you have a team who can manage physical infra. Seriously, it’s the same tooling. Pick your favorite configuration management tool (Ansible, Chef, Puppet…) and you’re off to the races.

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#44

Post by sgarland »

eloisant wrote: post #35
markonen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean to imply that cloud services at higher levels of abstraction are cheaper per unit of compute than simple VMs? I believe you’ll find that the opposite is true. At the scale discussed here, there are no free lunches.

It depends on the scale, but running containers over a k8s clusters means your load will be distributed among the nodes according to capacity. Managing VMs with dedicated resources directly means you have to distribute the load manually, leading to unused and wasted resources.

You absolutely do not have to distribute VMs manually. This [0] is a tiny Python script run as a cron that migrates VMs in a Proxmox (also free) cluster according to CPU utilization. You could extend it for other parameters.

While I don’t personally have experience with more enterprise-y solutions like VMWare, I have to imagine they have more complete solutions already baked-in.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/tokalanz/proxmox-drs

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#45

Post by silverquiet »

politelemon wrote: post #38

This is a weird read. The analysis makes the classic mistake of assuming a lift-and-shift calculation. Of course that's going to be more expensive. You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services. Which makes me scratch my head at the concluding statement: > A cloud is convenient and locked in. Everything is a lock-in. But in the case they've described, which is just shifting from VMs to EC2s, it is…

Re-architecting is also very far from free and the result of spending all that developer time is that you are indeed then hard locked into your provider's managed offerings. But even lift-and-shift will have some lock in. The classic is the egress bandwidth roach motel model; free to enter but expensive to leave.

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#47

Post by GreyStache »

akouri wrote: post #46

> Also, we pay for IP Transit and dark fiber between the data center and our point of presence. IP noob here- can someone explain what this means?

Broadly speaking: IP Transit is the relaying of bandwidth towards the rest of the world. Dark fiber is a fiber optic connection where you shine light in and get it out on the other end, no other party on the physical fiber strand.

(Both are generatalizations)

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#48

Post by jart »

ghaff wrote: post #31
addicted wrote: post #25

The new mantra with the cloud champions in my company is that cloud was never meant to save money. It’s a premium experience that’s about saving time. This did not sound right so I dug into the emails our leadership sent us between 6-3 years ago upping our “cloud transformation”. And yup, saving money was a part of it. It’s only over the last year or so where it’s become obvious we didn’t save any money and in fact s…

Whether or not using a cloud for a given workload today makes sense, the original mantra was absolutely around cost. The basic narrative was that computing was a utility and--especially before local solar was really a thing--how could an individual company compute/generate electricity competitively when they could just consume it off a grid?

I thought the original mantra was social mania, after an order came down from the prince of darkness.

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#49

Post by deadfece »

sgarland wrote: post #41
politelemon wrote: post #38

This is a weird read. The analysis makes the classic mistake of assuming a lift-and-shift calculation. Of course that's going to be more expensive. You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services. Which makes me scratch my head at the concluding statement: > A cloud is convenient and locked in. Everything is a lock-in. But in the case they've described, which is just shifting from VMs to EC2s, it is…

I hear that all the time, but I don’t see how it’s true. Have you priced RDS vs. an EC2? It isn’t even close. You’re paying for the convenience. Not to mention the massive speed loss you take with the increased latency of EBS.

I've worked places where they had so many databases from M&A that half of their FTEs were wholly preoccupied all year with performing outstanding DB maintenance: fixing backups, doing storage management, patches, applying move/add/changes.

For them, managed DBMS was a life-changing event. As soon as they had RDS or even Azure SQL MI, they were begging the cloud team for more, so they could get their team back.

In some businesses, it's definitely not a big loss to lose agility by having a large portion of your team tangled up in infrastructure management, but for some businesses, that constraint is an impediment to their line of business. Some businesses are missing opportunities for want of infrastructure being able to move fast enough.

Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)

#50

Post by pinkgolem »

asjkaehauisa wrote: post #42

How much do servers cost nowadays? According to the article, the cost would be $61,500 USD per server for specifications including 2TB RAM, 100Gbps, 16x 15TB drives, and 64 core CPU (assuming "We use high core-count CPUs"). Is this accurate? Could you provide me with a tip on how to acquire a server with those specifications for $60,000 USD?

In that range you usually have to talk to a sales person, if you are not into that, super micro has a nice online configurator with realistic pricing

You can configure a server with 192 cores, 24x96GB Ram & 16 drives for 60k no problem

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