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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#51

Post by busterarm »

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…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom.

It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding interest.

For most organizations, what I just talked about equates to man years of work wasted and I think a lot of people nitpicking about cloud being expensive have lost sight of this.

Sure it costs more, but it's from money you've already saved. You'll have loads of saved money left to spend on more developers too.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#52

Post by joshuamorton »

Patrick-STH wrote: post #40
Rantenki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

How much time did you spend deciding which components to upgrade and purchasing parts to later install? How much would you charge a client for that time?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#53

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Patrick-STH wrote: post #40
Rantenki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#54

Post by CSDude »

I'm probably sure this is response to the AWS Reinvent announcments on the front page. Not that I work on AWS, but we heavily use and rely on it.

The ones comparing AWS to VPSs even colocation think AWS is just short sighted. If VMs and bandwidth is your only case, yes it is expensive. Skipping the marketing talk, AWS has great services like SQS, S3, Dynamo, SNS, Kinesis, Firehose and hosting open-soure or paid alternatives of them requires a lot of engineering power, effort and extra monitoring, restless nights. I prefer our engineers to work on features, not infrastructure and only deal with it when it is required financially.

Most organizations are fine with vendor lock-in when vendor is stable (not deprecating, not increasing costs). Money is always an issue but its relative, there are many factors in real business. Some can afford cloud, some cannot.

I also agree that you would be fine if you did not use brand new X service that does AutoML, any shiny new over marketed features for you etc. but comparing AWS to Colocation is just one dimensional thought.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#56

Post by Rantenki »

vonmoltke wrote: post #43
Rantenki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are perfect world actual hours that don't include any unexpected downtime, or any ancillary costs outside of racking.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#57

Post by busterarm »

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.

I have several million dollars in infrastructure that I'm responsible for in multiple cloud providers and on our own metal in multiple physical datacenters.

In terms of management burden, I will take the cloud infrastructure a thousand times out of ten.

Automation work is easily an order of magnitude of less effort in the cloud than on-prem. Labor dollars spent go exponentially further.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#58

Post by bpodgursky »

teh_klev wrote: post #50
Patrick-STH wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's absolutely nothing in the article (which I did read) about it. If you yourself had read the article, you would know that it was not explained, accounted for, or justified.

There is a single vague reference to a "primary DC". There is no discussion at all of backups or disaster recovery.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#59

Post by Patrick-STH »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #53
Patrick-STH wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

That may be true. We grow 20-30% Y/Y which is not as big as many other places (but is more than most others in our space.) 20-30% growth we handle with refresh cycles since we have extra capacity.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#60

Post by Zelphyr »

busterarm wrote: post #51
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…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out.

I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work.

Not to mention; I have the same freedoms to try things out with a $10/mo DigitalOcean droplet as I do EC2/Lambda/ELB/RDS/S3/etc... If something doesn't work, delete the droplet and start over. To that degree, it's even easier, cheaper, and more free to just test something out in Docker containers on my laptop.

So, respectfully, I'm not buying the "freedom" argument. That's not even the selling point AWS is pitching.

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