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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#61

Post by nickthemagicman »

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…

If you can somehow finagle your application as a docker container, It makes it super easy to transfer too.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#62

Post by tnolet »

nicoburns wrote: post #29
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…

The system I inherited at my current job was built with "scalability" in mind. That meant use of the Firebase databases and splitting everything out into lots of microservices. Ironically this actually caused scaling issues (even with the very small scale we have at the moment) because the lack of query flexibility in the database meant downloading entire collections in order to provide the necessary functionality. W…

Sadly, I’ve seen this at more misguided startups. Microservices solve a problem no startup has until they go series B and grow like bananas. When they actually scale.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#63

Post by vmception »

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…

> my first go-to is something like DigitalOcean or Amazon LightSail

I look at compute instance providers by how they charge and for what project.

Sometimes I need more RAM, sometimes I need a faster CPU, sometimes I need more storage space accessed as a normal filesystem. Sometimes I need all of the above.

So it might be DigitalOcean, it might be Linode, it might be some fly-by-night bare metal provider.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#64

Post by Patrick-STH »

joshuamorton wrote: post #52
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.

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?

Very little, but that is probably because we cover the server industry in-depth with reviews and such. I mentioned a bit that that knowledge is key. This is our cost analysis and not going to be the same for everyone.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#65

Post by ericpauley »

Patrick-STH wrote: post #35
munk-a wrote: post #3

Wait - this article appears to compare hardware costs of self-hosting against the total cost of using AWS. It's missing the most expensive component (labour) which just so happens to be extremely expensive to scale.

Labor is included and discussed both for my time as well as remote hands we pay for. It is very low at this point.

Are you including having someone on call who can drive to the colo on a moment's notice? Unless your hardware is redundant and remotely swappable then you need to be ready for physical disaster response. Cloud providers abstract this away for a price.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#66

Post by saberience »

So, as someone that works for an enterprise that uses AWS... if we went colocation, how would we replicate:

SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Lambda, Kinesis, ECR, ALB, Aurora, S3, Glacier, EMR, EKS, multiple AZs, multiple regions, etc?

For us to get the same functionality as all of these services in colocated data centers would be an INSANE amount of work, we'd have to hire so many IT/hardware specialists for the networking, let alone hiring data storage tech specialists for stuff like Spark/Hadoop.

Looking only at costs for instances is only 10% of the story here.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#67

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

Everything you said still has to happen with colo, as well as everything the parent mentioned.

"The cloud is just someone else's computer" - I used to say that with contempt, and now I say it with understanding.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#68

Post by TravelPiglet »

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.

Things got rebooted a lot due to Specter and Meltdown mitigations a few years ago, but rarely now.

We’ve had more issues with the collocation data center, like removing one of the good drives in a degraded raid-array and extremely expensive bandwidth.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#69

Post by bob1029 »

hangonhn wrote: post #21
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…

I think your sort of thinking requires a certain level of maturity and experience. I see the opposite with with some engineers who always have this illusion that the first or even second version of their project will be the final one for all times so they build it to scale (which actually doesn't even really scale because they don't know where the real bottlenecks are) and highly configurable. I've seen way, way more…

> I've realized one of the great skills a good engineer has is the ability to change/fix/scale a project once it is up and running and while people are using it.

This is by far the most important lesson I have learned this decade. Anyone can pull the rug out on iteration 1 and start a completely new attempt in a 2nd iteration bucket.

It takes determined engineering efforts and talent to iterate on top of the existing code base while not impacting the ability to deliver ongoing feature support to production.

We have historically tried to do complete rewrites with bombastic claims like "We can do it right this time". Well, we did it "right" 3 times until we decided that restarting from zero every time is a bad way to make forward progress. I will advocate for a clean restart if you are just beginning or it is clear you have totally missed the domain model target. If you have been in production for 3 years, maybe consider a more conservative iteration approach.

The best analogy I can come up with is the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Rebuilding the ship from the inside while you are sailing it to the new world will get you there much faster than if you have to restart in Spain every time someone is in a bad mood or doesn't like how the sails on the boat are arranged.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#70

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Zelphyr wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Yeah, AWS isn't for a smaller company.

When you have a real finance department that vets each third party or have some governmental requirement to get three quotes for each new service (part of requirements set out to minimize grift in sourcing), having a single bill that can be expanded to include new projects and services makes it a little simple.

This causes a problem during cost cutting because unless it's a priority your bill will spiral out of control.

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