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We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

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Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#51

Post by tablespoon »

hotpotamus wrote: post #25
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's bandwidth charges are highway robbery. It's my impression that AWS competes with the EC2 instance cost (as it that's what new customers look at), and the bandwidth/storage only becomes apparent when you are locked in. Really what AWS should be is one or two phases of service maturity: dev infrastructure and experimentation is phase one, phase two would be the "its a couple servers" production, BUT: with a scale…

I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. I assumed phase 3 was where AWS started giving you massive discounts because you represent so much business for them, but I've never been at a place big enough to swing that stick at them.

> I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale.

Could it be magical thinking based on marketing hype and autoscaling fantasies?

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#52

Post by isoprophlex »

frognumber wrote: post #43
that_guy_iain wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, loooong time ago - to get your dedicated server might have taken a few hours to provision and the instant server access that AWS brought should not be discredited. At one point it took often days for a dedicated server to be set up. We also didn't have such nice provisioning tools. Now it just seems like cargo cult to use cloud providers as the only option. People just completely discount dedicated servers.

In most businesses I've worked in: developer costs >> infrastructure costs An AWS large server is around $500/year, which is about 1-2 developer hours (with taxes, overhead, etc) at the cost scales last time I priced this out. That's crazy expensive in the absolute, but if it saves a couple of hours, it makes sense. PaaS providers cost even more. I've gone with those in the past, since it basically eliminated dev-ops…

1-2 developer hours?!

Anyone looking to hire an ML guy for 250-500$/hr flat fee, hourly rate, no taxes, no healthcare, cancel any time... get in touch!

For that money I'll gladly bark like a dog, walk on all fours and fetch your slippers.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#53

Post by joshstrange »

TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #38

"We used Apache Cassandra nodes on each of the servers that were compatible with AWS S3". What does this even mean? Regardless, starting a new Cassandra cluster in late 2022?! I bet they can save even more by just going with scylladb

That was also confusing to me as Cassandra is a NoSQL DB last I checked. I found this [0] online that indicates with some extra software you can talk to it like S3 but yeah...

[0] https://dzone.com/articles/s3-compatible-storage-with-cassan...

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#55

Post by goodpoint »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #2

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself

That's pretty obvious but years ago you would have been downvoted into oblivion for writing that.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#56

Post by pessimizer »

hazmazlaz wrote: post #16

There is no way this figure is accurate. The annual spend cited of $1,000,000 is purely hypothetical, as admitted here: "However, all this data and processes need to happen on a server and, of course, we used AWS for it. A few years of growth later, we’re handling over 70,000 pages per minute, storing around 560 million pages, and paying well over $1,000,000 per year. Or at least we would be paying that much if we st…

> There is no way this figure is accurate.

You've got the FUD covered, but you also need to add at least some substance to your claim. How do you know this figure would not be accurate? Why is your (hypothetical, not offered) estimate better than the author's?

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#57

Post by user3939382 »

floatinglotus wrote: post #45

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there. My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure. Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you woul…

I've had tons of greenfield web apps with thousands of users (not millions) and setting up a server was a problem I didn't need help solving. I'm versed in AWS now but, I don't see any benefit. The only big headache I had with server admin was running email services/deliverability.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#58

Post by elephantum »

isoprophlex wrote: post #52
frognumber wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most businesses I've worked in: developer costs >> infrastructure costs An AWS large server is around $500/year, which is about 1-2 developer hours (with taxes, overhead, etc) at the cost scales last time I priced this out. That's crazy expensive in the absolute, but if it saves a couple of hours, it makes sense. PaaS providers cost even more. I've gone with those in the past, since it basically eliminated dev-ops…

1-2 developer hours?! Anyone looking to hire an ML guy for 250-500$/hr flat fee, hourly rate, no taxes, no healthcare, cancel any time... get in touch! For that money I'll gladly bark like a dog, walk on all fours and fetch your slippers.

I have to mention, that what you described is not what ML guy is supposed to be doing.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#59

Post by taylodl »

joshstrange wrote: post #48

They don't mention at all what services they were using (other than slight mention of S3) which makes it very hard to respond to this. If you are running everything on EC2 then you are going to have a bad time (especially if you aren't using reserved instances). AWS (IMHO) shines with the various services they provide (S3, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS< SES, to name a few). AWS is a game of trying to reduce yo…

Yes. If you use and manage AWS resources as you would your own on-prem resources then you're not going to have a good time. As soon as you think you need EC2 instances you need to re-think your architecture. You're probably not using AWS most effectively.

Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

#60

Post by simfree »

elephantum wrote: post #58
isoprophlex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-2 developer hours?! Anyone looking to hire an ML guy for 250-500$/hr flat fee, hourly rate, no taxes, no healthcare, cancel any time... get in touch! For that money I'll gladly bark like a dog, walk on all fours and fetch your slippers.

I have to mention, that what you described is not what ML guy is supposed to be doing.

Well, it's either that or tuning/training/trimming a model to fit your intended use case...
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