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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)

#51

Post by sgarland »

deadfece wrote: post #49
sgarland wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Much of that can be automated (how do you think AWS does it?), but I get the point. Still, the OP said: "You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services." To me, that isn't implying "save money from personnel costs," it's discussing pure service cost.

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

#52

Post by deadfece »

The article honestly reads as if written by a very smart sysadmin with zero cloud experience.

1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive. In this case, if the author had been in charge of the migration, then yes, the services would have cost them dearly to operate in the cloud.

I'm sure if I was personally put in charge of moving some aspect of IT into an unfamiliar mode of operation, my inexperience there would make my approach insanely expensive as well.

That says nothing about the target, except that having undertrained and inexperienced staff in charge of its design and implementation is probably foolish from a financial perspective.

There are obviously thousands on thousands of scenarios where moving to commodity cloud is an absolute slam dunk in aspects that are important to the subject business.

Unfortunately we really get no insight into what the workload truly is in the article's comparison. There's no mention of solution aspects like app architecture, security, HA/DR, SLA, RTO/RPO, security or backups [1]. We only get what is plainly a tunnel-vision view of a comparison.

It's almost like the author doesn't make solutions for a living.

Maybe the author actually realizes their blind spot, and is secretly utilizing Cunningham's law to crowd-source a relatively free solution from the professionals and amateurs in the internet comments sections.

The good architects don't work for free. There's a reason why Troy Hunt's web services cost him vanishingly little to operate, and it's certainly not by running IaaS VMs 24x7x365.

[1] I mentioned security twice as part of an ongoing effort to make up for all the times CyberSec/Infosec teams have been forgotten in the planning process. =P

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

#53

Post by deadfece »

sgarland wrote: post #51
deadfece wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Much of that can be automated (how do you think AWS does it?), but I get the point. Still, the OP said: "You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services." To me, that isn't implying "save money from personnel costs," it's discussing pure service cost.

That maintenance problem is sometimes also expensive in terms of service costs. Which is more of a tech debt problem than a cloud comparison, honestly, but they're often inseparable.

Extended support costs on old hardware and software are sometimes astronomical. Then you're paying all of that to get something that, compared to modern gear, performs like ass and just breaks all the time.

I've also had C-suites tell me I have two months to start a project and have all the gear live, but I find we are only allowed to order direct from the manufacturer, and our orders will take 90 days to get to our door. Oh boy. That scenario is difficult to put into terms of money. Sometimes having that one-hop instant supply chain into a cloud service is a huge business enabler, sometimes it's not.

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

#54

Post by orf »

120TB of storage is 3k USD per month when using s3 in Singapore and can sustain a much higher aggregate read/write speed than their existing setup.

Like many have said, a lift and shift is never great, and imagining you need 120TB of EBS per instance then being surprised it costs a lot is rather telling about the accuracy of such estimations.

Nothing was mentioned about utilisation - like basically everything, services follow a utilisation trend across a given time period. This assumes 100% used capacity at all times.

Moving to S3 and being able to scale down to 50% capacity at non-peak hours seems to nearly equal the cost, aside from the human+time cost savings. Using spot instances would also save even more.

Lock in also takes many forms. If you’re locked in to an infrastructure that only supports a certain type of system with big bulky servers and big bulky disks, then you’re going to build that kind of system. You can’t take advantage of something like a lambda for specific parts of your scraping pipeline, or SQS or S3. These are useful things to have at your disposal when designing systems.

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

#55

Post by bcaxis »

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…

> You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services.

Managed services are more expensive, not less, per unit compute, per operation, etc. How exactly does that make things magically cheaper?

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

#56

Post by bcaxis »

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…

> first of all, ahrefs discounts the "people" cost, but that's a huge cost to ignore!

It's the hardest to compare. Cloud has a significant people cost too, particularly in the complexity. EC2, lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, cognito, glacier, light sail, EBS, fargate, cloud front, SNS, dynamo, elastica he, etc etc.

If you ignore this, you fail to completely understand a service you start to use. That's the quickest way to a surprise mammoth bill or insecure service.

> they _could_ save significant amounts of money by moving to the cloud AND re-architecting their apps to spend compute more efficiently.

This is a bad argument generally. If an org, institutionally, can't properly size services or they leave a lot of fat in their services.

Why would a move to the cloud fundamentally change that? You can even more easily over provision and overspend when it's a mere button click away.

I fail to see how a move to the cloud basically creates greater institutional ability to trim fat and optimize that just wasn't there before.

And I just love how convenient re-architecting is so casually thrown in like it's a walk in the park... Yikes. Rewrites can and do kill companies. Not a casual thing to undertake because a new vendor comes along with a shiny new tool.

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

#57

Post by bcaxis »

deadfece wrote: post #52

The article honestly reads as if written by a very smart sysadmin with zero cloud experience. 1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive. In this case, if the author had been in charge of the migration, then yes, the services would have cost them dearly to operate in the cloud. I'm sure if I was personally put in charge of moving some aspect of IT into an unfamiliar mode of operation, my inexperience there…

> 1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive.

Is it? Managed services cost a lot more than a vm. Re writing software cost a lot more.

Where are the savings?

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

#58

Post by sgarland »

deadfece wrote: post #53
sgarland wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of that can be automated (how do you think AWS does it?), but I get the point. Still, the OP said: "You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services." To me, that isn't implying "save money from personnel costs," it's discussing pure service cost.

That maintenance problem is sometimes also expensive in terms of service costs. Which is more of a tech debt problem than a cloud comparison, honestly, but they're often inseparable. Extended support costs on old hardware and software are sometimes astronomical. Then you're paying all of that to get something that, compared to modern gear, performs like ass and just breaks all the time. I've also had C-suites tell me…

I regret to inform you that you can also incur extended support costs with managed services.

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

#59

Post by tracker1 »

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?

Totally doable, as a peer response mentions... You can get a lot of performance in a couple 1-2u servers these days. Literally replacing a full rack from 6-8 years ago in 8-12u.

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

#60

Post by tracker1 »

michelb wrote: post #17

Not directly related, but how much energy is being wasted by thousands of companies scraping the internet continuously and storing roughly the same information as everyone else, and then storing that in their own datacenters? I understand the commercial reasons for it, but this all seems very inefficient.

When I was at a modest sized public facing site, roughly 3/4 of requests were from bots. Most painful is over half were search result pages, which were much more costly.
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