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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)

#61

Post by tracker1 »

bcaxis wrote: post #57
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?

Fewer IT staff for systems mgt. Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances. Right sizing resources to application needs.

There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed. It will vary by application, size and staff.

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

#62

Post by deadfece »

sgarland wrote: post #58
deadfece wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, I thought we were having a discussion in good faith. Later!

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

#63

Post by bomewish »

sph wrote: post #33
bomewish wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What crawling framework you using?

In-house made in Elixir. 20% of a crawler is fetching and parsing pages, the remaining 80% is dealing with misconfigured, broken and non-standard web servers and HTML. Dealing with Cloudflare, Akamai and random bot-busting tools that cause more false positives than a chaos monkey. It's better to write one yourself that you can control, monitor and operate as you need, instead of relying on third-party logic. Makes se…

Ah. Have so been there. But don’t really have the resources to spin something from 0. Good luck!!

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

#64

Post by bcaxis »

tracker1 wrote: post #61
bcaxis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Fewer IT staff for systems mgt. Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances. Right sizing resources to application needs. There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed. It will vary by application, size and staff.

> Fewer IT staff for systems mgt

This hasn't been my experience. Replace sysadmin with cloud engineer/architect, salary bump, no reduction in quantity. This assumes you are mildly competent as an organization.

On managed services, say the database. My experience is that the extra costs of the service are larger (usually much much larger) than any salaries or head count reduction. I'd rather employ more people than not, and actually control my data, given the choice. Particularly when the savings are questionable or false.

I generally prefer a lower dependency count. Code and vendor. Even at modest immediate cost increases, you gain better flexibility and there are less things to bite you.

> Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances.

Agreed. You do increase system complexity to accomplish it. But there are actual cost savings here.

> Right sizing resources to application needs.

This isn't unique to cloud, you can do this in any hypervisor. This is a basic feature.

> There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed

It does not "always" hold. This is critical missing nuance in the original claim.

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

#65

Post by pinkgolem »

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…

>There's a reason why Troy Hunt's web services cost him vanishingly little to operate

And I thought that's because he is on a cloudflare premium plan with a workload where 99,8% of requests are cached

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

#66

Post by joepie91_ »

eloisant wrote: post #34
addicted wrote: post #25

The new mantra with the cloud champions in my company is that cloud was never meant to save money. It’s a premium experience that’s about saving time. This did not sound right so I dug into the emails our leadership sent us between 6-3 years ago upping our “cloud transformation”. And yup, saving money was a part of it. It’s only over the last year or so where it’s become obvious we didn’t save any money and in fact s…

> The new mantra with the cloud champions in my company is that cloud was never meant to save money. It’s a premium experience that’s about saving time. But that's true, AWS really took off when people were developping Facebook apps and seeing exponential growth over a few days. They wanted servers right now, but their supplier had 1 week of lead time to get a new machine, + setup time. On the other hand you could sp…

During the time that this became a frequently-repeated marketing talking point, 'regular' hosting providers with one-day turnaround or even instant provisioning were already widespread. It was never really the revolutionary feature it was pitched as, honestly.
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