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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#51

Post by trabant00 »

csydas wrote: post #47
trabant00 wrote: post #40

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of…

I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly bu…

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing.

You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc). I guess this justifies companies looking at cloud a little bit. But if you really search you can find engineers sub 100k per year being able to deliver 100k per month savings compared to AWS.

There are also engineers who stayed away from cloud and can't deliver that option. A lot more rare though. The same level of wrong if they argue against cloud from ignorance.

The right choice for serious infrastructures is always both these days. Have the bulk on premise for steady loads and 95% of features, expand to public clouds for dynamic scaling and features you don't want do do yourself, at least yet. This combination offers good costs, flexibility, covers possible future needs, etc

Re: The cost of cloud

#52

Post by dilyevsky »

trabant00 wrote: post #40

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of…

Which 500 instances? 500 ec2 “large” is like half of a rack… or is the point to engage opponent in unwinnable argument?

Re: The cost of cloud

#53

Post by etothepii »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #36
taspeotis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe both Azure and AWS (probably GCP too) have built in DDOS mitigations for free. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-s... You might be on the hook for bandwidth costs from a more sophisticated attack though.

That isn't very specific about how it works ("defends against the most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks" whatever that means), but it sounds like they're going to drop weird looking packets. The problem is, one of the more common types of DDoS is that the attacker has a botnet with a million machines in it and has them all make legitimate requests to your service all day, thereby…

Why is this unlikely? If you do it several times then they will start to get annoyed and say no but a service like AWS is all about the long term customer relations. I've had bills of ~$1k refunded even though I'm a ~$3 p.m. user.

Re: The cost of cloud

#54

Post by bfung »

oars wrote: post #46
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.

Could you elaborate how this is an advantage? In my previous role, my manager argued for my work as a developer to be charged as Capex to the project instead of Opex. Why would accountants want the opposite for AWS?

OPEX in the US is tax deductible for the current financial year; a lot easier to calculate and maintain. It’s basically the cost to run the company, taking away from revenue.

CAPEX items are amortized over multiple fiscal cycles; it’ll count and can helps raise the value(valuation) of your company, but tricker to calculate.

So depending what financial number goals your company has, the accounting of items can go one way or the other.

If your dev work brought permanent value to the company, then it can be capex. If you were a contractor instead, it could be either cap or opex. AWS services are basically rented and not permanent value to the company, ie, if you sold everything the company owned for cash, you couldn’t sell the AWS part, just the terraform scripts.

Re: The cost of cloud

#55

Post by lifeplusplus »

awill wrote: post #29
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.

when looking at these things, you always need to look over the long term. Sure, December wasn't great, but how was all of 2021 overall? It's also not just cost/availability, but flexibility and scalability. Most high-growth startups would have not been able to scale quickly enough pre-cloud. Facebook is literally the unicorn.

No reason you can't have onsite infra but have cloud as backup for 0.009% time your stuff is down

Re: The cost of cloud

#56

Post by Rastonbury »

oars wrote: post #46
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.

Could you elaborate how this is an advantage? In my previous role, my manager argued for my work as a developer to be charged as Capex to the project instead of Opex. Why would accountants want the opposite for AWS?

For business perspective, it's large irreversible upfront investment on capex vs ongoing opex. Sizing and building a data center is risky, execs not wanting to attach their names to $xxM data center project.

Cost wise Capex are depreciated, this gives less visibility on month on month costs compared with opex which goes onto income statement.

Developer work as capex is intangible asset, which has a bit more 'flexibility' depending on what management wants. It can operate on the same idea, developer wages for 1 year spread over several years via amortization of intangible asset.

Re: The cost of cloud

#57

Post by yawaworht1978 »

matdehaast wrote: post #33
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.

AWS/Cloud have seemed to create this fallacy that dedicated hardware/on-prem fails far more than actual reality.

Indeed there is an odd element to that, as when it's all said and done, AWS itself is an on-prem infrastructure too.

Re: The cost of cloud

#58

Post by presentation »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44
bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…

Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.

I choose to host on Vercel because I can spin up a production-ready, globally distributed web app in about 5 minutes with marginal, predictable costs without hiring a single other person, procuring any hardware nor learning anything beyond what’s necessary for coding my application. Pair it with analogous services like Upstash and Fly.io for persistence, and you can achieve incredible scale with minimal operational burden. Obviously this depends on your workload - for mine I can imagine this would cover the majority of use cases for the lifetime of my company. And there are many companies like mine.

Re: The cost of cloud

#59

Post by Ozzie_osman »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44
bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…

Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.

Couldn't you do this by leasing hardware before AWS?

Re: The cost of cloud

#60

Post by acd »

I think there is room for hybrid cloud built with open source software.

Datbases and virtual machines tend to be expensive in cloud providers. Steady state workloads.

Object storge tend to be fairly cheap.

There is also cost of vendor lock in if you use propritary cloud technologies such as databases.

You can build open source infrastructure with hybrid solution. Probably less risk of downtime.

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