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We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

taloflow.ai

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Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#51

Post by sokoloff »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #25
nojito wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work. This comparison is the #1 flawed sales tactic the cloud companies use to convince you youre saving money

Yes. I’ve found that the amount you have to learn to use a managed service often equals or exceeds the amount you have to learn to run something on EC2 or on-prem. The automation/management costs of AWS or equivalent are a lot higher than people think and not significantly different from the costs to learn Linux and enough networking to do an “old-fashioned” deploy.

Much of that rings true, but I find some of the cloud abstractions can help to make the steady-state ops time required lower (especially for a side project where you really don’t want to deal with life interruptions).

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#52

Post by twic »

acdha wrote: post #49
twic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a false equivalence to suggest that managed services have zero staff costs, and that using a DIY database has a staff cost measured in whole FTEs.

That could be the answer to the question which was actually asked but if you read the thread again, notice that you’re arguing against a claim nobody made.

Scroll up, my dude:

> False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work.

> This comparison is the #1 flawed sales tactic the cloud companies use to convince you youre saving money

"False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work" -> "It's a false equivalence to suggest that [...] using a DIY database has a staff cost measured in whole FTEs."

Hey, maybe AWS should launch some kind of ML-powered reading-comprehension-as-a-service?

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#53

Post by acdha »

twic wrote: post #52
acdha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be the answer to the question which was actually asked but if you read the thread again, notice that you’re arguing against a claim nobody made.

Scroll up, my dude: > False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work. > This comparison is the #1 flawed sales tactic the cloud companies use to convince you youre saving money "False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work" -> "It's a false equivalence to suggest that [...] using a DIY database has a staff cost measured in whole FTEs." Hey, maybe AWS should launch s…

Yes, do scroll up — note that the portions you quoted were the strawmen which nojito tossed out, not the original question, and perhaps ponder whether accusing someone else of not reading for comprehension is adding anything to the conversation.

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#54

Post by owenmarshall »

pmelendez wrote: post #31
dylan604 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is involved in managing backups? isn't that just a cronjob?

There was a time when I used to think the same, then I found my backups were corrupted (or stopped because run out of space, etc) just in the moment when I needed them.

I once worked at an IT shop that worked closely with the construction industry. A new sports stadium was being built and we were doing panoramic photos during each stage of construction, and rendering them in a web app where the facilities team could “peel back the layers” and see what was behind the wall or under the floor all the way down to the foundation. This was... 15 years ago? So it was pretty neat technology and a little less ubiquitous than today.

Well, our storage server barfed and the data was gone. Went to restore from backups, all the hourly tar files were there... but were zero bytes.

We looked at the backup script the engineer had put together and it was one of those classic “didn’t give the right parameter to have tar recurse” type bugs. Unfortunately we lost all the photos of the foundation and much of the photos of the electric being run. Oops.

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#55

Post by serverQuestion »

Neil44 wrote: post #40
vageli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work. > This comparison is the #1 flawed sales tactic the cloud companies use to convince you youre saving money Time is of a limited quantity and time spent managing postgres backups (for example) is time not spent doing other (possibly more meaningful/impactful _to the business_) work.

How much liability can you claim against AWS if there's an issue with their RDS backups?

How much liability can you claim against Cloud Employee if there's an issue with your RDS backups?

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#56

Post by acdha »

aritraghosh007 wrote: post #15

Back when AWS started, there would be articles about the work to master scalability and performance for the modern web but as things matured, we somehow ended up in a much larger heap of literature around AWS cost optimization.

Engineering is always balancing capabilities and costs. Before AWS existed there were plenty of stories about people over-buying to handle peak loads, optimizing workloads to fit a particular budget (especially during the dotcom era when VCs stopped underwriting huge sales for Sun, et al.), etc.

Cloud services gave new options for variable use and reallocating management costs but they also did something which most places were not used to: expose every detail as an itemized bill. That makes costs more visible than they’d been for most organizations which is good in the sense that people can make architectural decisions with pretty detailed numbers but bad in that many CIOs get sticker shock unless they’d done a well above average job calculating on-premise TCO.

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#57

Post by ckdarby »

chrischen wrote: post #24
alharith wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone else find the costs associated with running well-tested, well developed systems overblown? Like if you know how to adjust some basic parameters, you will solve for 99% use cases (adjust memory, adjust ram). Examples I can think of is Rabbit MQ and Cassandra. But in general, we have some really battle-tested software these days that has become simpler to configure and run over time. People seem scared to r…

Yea exactly and unless you are FB scale you can just run a single docker container and never really have to worry (granted you know how to use Docker). Most small startups are actually the ones who don’t really need SaaS services.

>Yea exactly and unless you are FB scale you can just run a single docker container and never really have to worry

This has not been the case at multiple employers and or consulting clients.

If you're providing software to an enterprise this almost will never fly. That single docker container will have an outage when basically anything happens. The container dies, systemd fails to restart, node dies, network switch dies, data center has basically any major issue, etc.

I think your comment brings value just probably biased with your own experience of running a consumer to consumer startup.

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#58

Post by cthalupa »

nojito wrote: post #44
agounaris wrote: post #43

I am curious about the actual cost in $! Managing your own kafka or observability infra is expensive, you need a team to do this. A 67% reduction doesn't say the whole truth. They have more services to manage now, which means they need more people and more time to do this. Saving 10k from your AWS bill by hiring 2 more engineers is not cost effective.

Or course it is. Where did we get the idea that engineers are hired to do only one thing? This has never ever been the case in my experience. Also Kafka being hard this manage is not the case. A simple look into many small companies and startups running their own clusters shows otherwise.

>Where did we get the idea that engineers are hired to do only one thing?

At a certain size or number of self run services, they very well might be. I used to be the guy that did the set up for these sort of self managed solutions, and ran them day to day. In some shops the workload was high enough we needed multiple people like me doing it. Or a whole team. Doing DevOps style management of them just let us do it with fewer people - it certainly didn't make it feasible for developers to do the day to day management of these services and still write code.

Re: We reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline

#59

Post by conradfr »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #25
nojito wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False equivalence. The engineer will be doing more than just cloud work. This comparison is the #1 flawed sales tactic the cloud companies use to convince you youre saving money

Yes. I’ve found that the amount you have to learn to use a managed service often equals or exceeds the amount you have to learn to run something on EC2 or on-prem. The automation/management costs of AWS or equivalent are a lot higher than people think and not significantly different from the costs to learn Linux and enough networking to do an “old-fashioned” deploy.

The cloud was supposed to help you get rid of all these pesky sysadmins. Imagine the savings!

Now the cloud is so complicated that you have to hire "devops". It's the same people as before, with a higher salary.

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