Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

oneuptime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 513 posts

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#501

Post by vidarh »

Aeolun wrote: post #414
alemanek wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In orgs I have seen this it is usually a symptom of the data center unit being starved of resources. It’s like they have only been given the choice of on prem but ridiculous paperwork and long lead times or pay 20x for cloud. Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery ph…

I feel like companies are unreasonably afraid of cost up front, never mind that they’re going to pay more for cloud over the next 6 months, spending 6x monthly cloud cost on a single server makes them hesitate. It’s how they always refuse to spend half my monthly salary on the computer I work on, and instead insist I use an underpowered windows machine.

You also don't need to commit to upfront costs. You can easily rent, rent to own/lease these resources.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#502

Post by vidarh »

metalforever wrote: post #482
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements. I kinda feel like this argument could be used against programming in essentially any language. Your company, or you yourself, likely chose to develop using (whatever language it is) because that's w…

So, I was around back then and am around now as a principal and this comment doesn't really pass the reality sniff test. Its a lot worse than this in terms of AWS cost for apps that often barely any people use. They're often incorrectly provisioned and the AWS bill ends up in the hundreds of thousands or millions and could have been a few thousand in bare metal on Hetzner with a competent sysadmnin team. No, its not…

I've been seeling a cost-reduction service for a while, and the hardest aspect of selling it is that so many people on the tech side doesn't care because they don't seem to be held to account to the drain they cause.

I can go in and guarantee that my fees are capped at a few months worth of their savings, and still it's a hard sell with a lot of teams who are perfectly happy to keep burning cash.

And I'll note, as much as I love to get people off AWS, most of the times people can massively reduce their bill just by using AWS properly as well, so even if bare metal was bad for their specific circumstances they're still figuratively setting fire to piles of cash.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#503

Post by vidarh »

kelnos wrote: post #453
vidarh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

> people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive This is so weird to me, because if you're running a company, you should be cost-sensitive. Sure, you might be willing to spend extra money on AWS in the very beginning if it helps you get to market faster. But after that, there's really no excuse: profit margin should be a very important consideration in how you run your…

I was checking the appetite for some cost reduction service a while back and one of the responses I got was from a CTO telling me he didn't need to care about cost because they'd just gotten funded and had lots of cash in the bank.

It's perfectly valid to not want to put engineering effort into it at the "wrong time" when delivering features will give you a higher return, but it came across as a lack of interest in paying attention to cost at all.

I saw a lot of that attitude from the tech side when I was looking at this. A lot of the time the CFO or CEO would be appallled, because they were actually paying attention to burn rates, but where often getting stonewalled by the tech side who'd often just insist all the costs were necessary - even while they often didn't know what they were spending or on what.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#504

Post by didgeoridoo »

cs702 wrote: post #15

In the early days of cloud service providers, they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier. That was then . Things today are different. As cloud service providers have grown to become dominant, they now offer a vast, complicated tangle of services, microservices, control panels, etc., at prices that can spiral out of control if you ar…

I’ve heard people talk about using “raw AWS” (instead of a PaaS like Heroku) to “save money.”

It’s like dude if you think AWS is raw, sushi restaurants must really confuse you.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#505

Post by hoppp »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

AWS spends a lot in educating developers to use their service and it's a working strategy.

People simply don't believe bare metal is better because of this conditioning towards the cloud.

Every company should strive for self-sufficiency, but this idea is not that widespread in the software industry.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#506

Post by jrs235 »

torginus wrote: post #204
fulafel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

Unfortunately it's not, and it gets more difficult the more cloud-y your app gets. You can pay for EC2+EBS+network costs, or you can have a fancy cloud native solution where you pay for Lambda, ALBs, CloudWatch, Metrics, Secret Manager, (things you assume they would just give you, like if you eat at a restaurant, you probably won't expect to pay for the parking, toilet, or paying rent for the table and seats). So clo…

I have a fair idea of how much our cloud costs. However, others in the org don't want me to actually see how much it costs. Which is bonkers. I can help identify how we could rearchitect or investigate lowering our costs, if I know what they are and where to look first. No point guessing and accidentally optimizing something that will be an order of magnitude or more less beneficial.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#508

Post by rasjani »

bilekas wrote: post #11

I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? > We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime…

> when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?

My opinion on this: docker sort of changed the game here. It sort of enabled a lot of people to get a "new and fresh" level of abstraction to not bother about bare metal.

As an example, I work in company where most consultants are doing DevOps and k8 is big part of that.

What made me consider that? I've been told multiple times that "you know your stuff" when I mention some kernel or userland feature that container approach provides.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#509

Post by esskay »

mrits wrote: post #155
esskay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

I think people that lived through the time where their severs are down because the admin forgot to turn them back on after he drove 50 miles back from the colo might not want to live through that again

It's 2025 not 2005, if you're still rolling out hardware that requires a physical push of a button to power up theres something very, very wrong.

Re: AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

#510

Post by krapp »

esskay wrote: post #509
mrits wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people that lived through the time where their severs are down because the admin forgot to turn them back on after he drove 50 miles back from the colo might not want to live through that again

It's 2025 not 2005, if you're still rolling out hardware that requires a physical push of a button to power up theres something very, very wrong.

Physical buttons are good. Physical buttons can't be backdoored or rooted.
Post reply on HN