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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#61

Post by dijit »

initplus wrote: post #34
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…

I'm not even sure it's cheaper. At a previous employer we had approximately 150k of cloud expenses per annum. Bringing that in house would have eclipsed the cloud expenses on additional staffing costs alone.

What are you guys doing to have such a low cost?

I have a small GKE cluster and a few databases and I’m well above that, I nearly hit that in a month!

Maybe you don’t have read replicas of your databases? Do you take any traffic?

Re: The cost of cloud

#62

Post by izacus »

fragmede wrote: post #43
nine_k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still about cost. (1) opportunity cost: doing your own systems administration instead of growing your business (features, marketing, etc). (2) switching cost: once you have a working system that outgrows the free / cheap AWS tiers, and might be cheaper to run outside cloud, switching away from the cloud becomes expensive, and does not look like a good investment to many, see (1).

Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.

And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired).

So what's the balance?

Re: The cost of cloud

#63

Post by izacus »

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.

Well, that's called "advertising and marketing" - persuading engineers to buy their products by doctoring the truth. It's actually easier with rockstar engineers - they never admit their pet approach might be wrong so AWS just needs to sell to them once ;)

Re: The cost of cloud

#64

Post by izacus »

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.

> 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?

Overall, our 10+ year old infrastructure has hugely outpaced reliability of any of the three main clouds (and brough in more business since we got customers when the main clouds killed most of the internet).

Why do you keep behaving like reliable infrastructure was impossible without paying rent to american bigcorp?

(This doesn't mean cloud doesn't make sense for many people, but, seriously, cut the crap.)

Re: The cost of cloud

#65

Post by geek_at »

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've learned a lot from managing school networks for public schools. Thousands of users runnung on either re-purposed or gifted hardware from 8+ years ago.

In 2013 I was running a school with 500 students and 70 teachers on a 8GB RAM HP Server that was built in 2005 and had no problems other than disk speeds for network transfers.

The same setup in the cloud would have been much more expensive but then again I had/have access to unlimited Microsoft product licenses because of the MS-ACH agreement so take that with a grain of salt. They even give every public school in the country their own unlimited KMS host key.

Re: The cost of cloud

#66

Post by sherifnada »

If you run your own datacenter, there is also the opportunity cost of slowing down R&D and new development work.

Let's say the year is 2012 and Redshift is introduced, completely changing how organizations can generate insights from their data. Running your own datacenter? good luck waiting for the ops team to install something similar! It might take you a couple of quarters assuming they are already competent at it. On the Cloud? Press a few buttons and you're off to the races.

velocity is a competitive advantage

Re: The cost of cloud

#67

Post by dilyevsky »

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.

Rent colo space, rent transit, rent equipment (which you should absolutely do below gigantic footprint). Boom - your physical dc is now an opex. Still cheaper than public cloud by an order of magnitude on certain workloads (egress heavy, gpus, etc)

Re: The cost of cloud

#68

Post by fragmede »

izacus wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.

And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired). So what's the balance?

Personally I think run on-prem till you outgrow a server in the office closet, Digital Ocean/Linode till you run out of features, then AWS/GCP when you start needing to scale to handle hockey-stick user growth. Then again, you'll need an expensive devops engineer to manage those redeployments seamlessly, so have you really gained anything there?

How much funding do you have? A couple hundred thousand is different from a couple million.

Re: The cost of cloud

#69

Post by ksec »

I dont think many are actually against "Cloud" per se. But Specifically AWS, Azure and GCP. Especially when you are only looking at like EC2 and wondering why they are 3x more expensive to other managed server / cloud vendor even on Reserve instances with zero bandwidth bundled.

If you look at prices from Oracle Cloud ( ignoring whatever feeling you have against it ) than all of a sudden it is extremely attractive.

Re: The cost of cloud

#70

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

The cost of three person months for a reasonably competent devops person is probably close to 50000$. Maybe a bit less for a cocky junior one that will make a mess and a bit more if you pay premium freelance rates for somebody less likely to botch the job. That pays for a lot of infrastructure. Not counting your own cost is a rookie mistake. And not realizing you really need 4-6 of these people to be able to get to your five nines is the second mistake (you need people on call 24x7 and when they are sick, over Christmas, etc). So, the real cost would be closer to 1M/year. Just staffing to babysit stuff you build manually ... or you pay Amazon, Google, etc. and you just worry about your own application not crashing. That's why this is so popular.

Few companies actually need that many instances. The math for the less than 10-20 instances the vast majority of companies actually need is quite brutal. A day of your time basically pays for months/years of hosting. The thing to optimize is devops time. Not hosting cost. It's by far the most expensive thing and also the most likely thing to fail on you (by leaving, by being incompetent, negligent, lazy, sick, etc.) and also the hardest thing to source when you need more of it. Good devops people are scarce.

I've dealt with plenty of companies that had no more than two or three idling t2 instances paying for multiple devops people to babysit that "infrastructure". It's stupid and wasteful. A decent devops person costs about 0.5-1 instance year (i.e. a full year of hosting 24x7) per hour for such small instances. And scaling an instance group from 2 to 500 instances is a 1 minute job if you ever need to. Unless the savings are enormous, the time they spend on minimizing the number of instances or automating their deployment will never be worth the money. It's money down the drain. You need to think in terms of a few hours for getting stuff done to make it worth the cost. Anything more is probably too expensive.

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