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

We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS

levelup.gitconnected.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 355 posts

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

#61

Post by m0llusk »

There is not quite enough information here to be sure, but this article highlights transmission costs. This particular business model involves throwing around big chunks of data just in case they end up being needed and then handing them back out in response to potentially large numbers of requests. That would make this particular usage pattern fit to exactly what AWS is charging the most for. Also many alternative AWS services that can be used to speed up or simplify services are not really going to help with this case.

So an alternative way of interpreting this is more along the lines of: We may have saved up to 80% of server costs by moving from AWS, but you almost certainly won't save that much even if a bunch gets spent on developing operations and tools.

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

#62

Post by ryanisnan »

taylodl wrote: post #59
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.

Using Karpenter for AWS has been a game changer. Set your instance family designations, set up a compute savings plan, and let it ride.

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

#63

Post by alex_suzuki »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #33
HWR_14 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.

Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.

Someone missed the DevOps revolution…

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

#64

Post by bratao »

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…

I consider this a fallacy. I´m on the dedicated server camp, but had to use AWS in a "everything in cloud" company. I spend way more time with Lambda/Cloud formation/ECS shenanigans than the terraform recipe I use in dedicated servers. And this is not even considering the higher latency between services and how hard is to debug it.

In your case, you are not exchanging 2 hours of a developer for a higher bill. In my experience you will get a higher bill and 5 hours of a cloud expert, and probably a solution that for every change or problem, you will have to call this expert as no one know what to do.

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

#65

Post by macinjosh »

taylodl wrote: post #59
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.

What I don't understand is why anyone would spend, precious and expensive engineering resources on coding to a proprietary API owned by one of the largest companies on the planet to whom you are nothing.

Ok so you save money on the monthly bill but what happens when Amazon decides they want to enter your market? What happens if they decide your service is too controversial and they kick you off?

If you were deploying your own services to EC2 instead of using AWS's own services you could at least setup shop elsewhere with just a bit of work.

To me it is antithetical to building a sustainable product. People just hoping their startup gets bought and then it is someone else's problem.

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

#66

Post by pclmulqdq »

pessimizer wrote: post #46
pclmulqdq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work. Realistically, a company will charge slightly less than whatever your alternative is, and they will provide products that restrict the number of alternatives you have. AWS, GCP, and Azure provide several differentiated products that lock you in to higher prices on everything else…

> The whole idea that since they have economies of scale, they must pass those savings on to you is a misunderstanding of how companies work. That idea was not expressed in the comment that you replied to. The comment you replied to was in response to a strong claim that ignored the existence of economies of scale, and therefore concluded that it's so obvious that cloud providers must always be more expensive than se…

At this point, it should be pretty clear that self-hosting is cheaper, given all of the examples we have seen.

AWS's economies of scale have as much to do with its pricing as the phases of the moon, and citing them as a reason why AWS could be cheaper than self-hosting is pretty ignorant in itself.

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

#67

Post by wglass »

I found the headline to be misleading. The article is mostly about the migration process (which is interesting), but very little about the details of the cost savings.

What does it cost to run their data center? What are the salaries they are paying for internal IT efforts to administer it? Is it an apples-to-apples comparison, e.g. are they load balancing across multiple datacenters in case of an outage?

It sounds like this was a good move for Prerender but it's hard to generalize the cost claims to other situations without details.

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

#68

Post by pooper »

macinjosh wrote: post #65
taylodl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I don't understand is why anyone would spend, precious and expensive engineering resources on coding to a proprietary API owned by one of the largest companies on the planet to whom you are nothing. Ok so you save money on the monthly bill but what happens when Amazon decides they want to enter your market? What happens if they decide your service is too controversial and they kick you off? If you were deploying…

> To me it is antithetical to building a sustainable product.

Continuing what you said, Google uses macOS and Windows for client machines. That is ok because if Apple or Microsoft were to decide to cut off Google altogether, Google would have bigger problems.

However, I think from a business point of view, this is similar to how so many businesses use cloudinary. Cloudinary is a software as a service company that provides cloud based image and video management services. What if cloudinary kicks you out? There is a lot of custom code out there to interface with cloudinary API. Where do we draw the line between using Cloudinary is ok but Amazon aws lambda is not?

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by twawaaay »

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…

Yeah, you need to do calculation of what you are doing right now vs AWS.

If you already have a mature team that is doing well optimising the environment, you have stable demand and no need to develop things rapidly then it is very likely that going cloud is poor choice.

As to "cloud agnostic", don't believe this bullshit. In my opinion most projects fare much better by just letting go of this "cloud agnostic" and just getting tied and locked in to the vendor. It is not like there is a good chance Amazon (or Microsoft or Google for that matter) will suddenly pull a significant price hike or another move out of step with other vendors.

Spending effort on trying to make your app "cloud agnostic" usually ends up with far higher development costs and a chance of failure for no benefit. Embracing one vendor in this case is usually best way to achieve smaller, leaner app that is using the platform well.

It is the same story as with SQL. Trying to use frameworks to keep your app DBMS-agnostic but then nobody ever migrates their apps to another DBMS. And for various good reasons: you hired your staff for their expertise with X, they are used to it, so now going for Y will usually be far higher cost than the benefits.

Post reply on HN