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

61–70 of 513 posts

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

#61

Post by calgoo »

vb-8448 wrote: post #53
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…

> Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ? It's a way to "commoditize" engineers. You can run on premise or mixed infra better and cheaper, but only if you know what you are doing. This requires experienced guys and doesn't work with new grad hired by big cons and sold ad "cloud experts".

Also, when something breaks, you are responsible. If you put it in AWS like everyone else and it breaks, then its their problem not yours. We will still implement workarounds and fixes when it happens, but we are not responsible. Basic enterprise rules these days is to always pay someone else to be responsible.

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

#62

Post by marcinzm »

They were running for a long time (months? over a year?) on a single rack in a single datacenter. Eventually they scaled out but the word is eventually. I think that summarizes both sides of this debate in a nutshell. You can move off of AWS but unless you invest a lot you will take on increased risk. Maybe you'll get lucky and your one rack won't burn down. Maybe you won't. They did get lucky.

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

#63

Post by al_borland »

pbiggar wrote: post #7
pbiggar wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I'll add that Amazon execs told us to our face that they use your AWS usage to decide if they were going to copy your services (which they did in our case), so any dev or ops tool on AWS shouldn't be there anyway for competitive reason.

They do this in the Amazon store as well, making their own knock off versions of popular products.

Very interesting that it extends into the digital space as well.

This really feels like it should be illegal, and if not, I’m not sure how there hasn’t been a massive revolt against them by people who make and sell things. If they are too big and powerful to revolt against, that sounds like a monopoly that needs to be broken up.

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

#64

Post by cornfieldlabs »

Managed DB costs a lot.

Is there a simple safe setup that we can run on an Ubuntu server?

We self-host the Postgres db with frequent backups to s3 but just in case the site takes off, we need an affordable reliable solution.

Does anyone here run their own db servers? Any advise?

Backups, security, upgrades etc

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

#66

Post by andrewl-hn »

seidleroni wrote: post #14

As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.

In similar way I once worked on a financial system, where a COBOL-powered mainframe was referred to as "Backend", and all other systems around it written in C++, Java, .NET, etc. since early 80s - as "Frontend".

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

#67

Post by lofties »

cornfieldlabs wrote: post #64

Managed DB costs a lot. Is there a simple safe setup that we can run on an Ubuntu server? We self-host the Postgres db with frequent backups to s3 but just in case the site takes off, we need an affordable reliable solution. Does anyone here run their own db servers? Any advise? Backups, security, upgrades etc

I love the argument that Managed DBs cost a lot, but they're supposedly safer. Meanwhile people can't figure out the IAM permission models so they give the entire world access with root:root.

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

#68

Post by vidarh »

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…

There is this belief that it is not extremely expensive and/or that the ops cost of bare metal will outpace it. It is a belief, and it is very rarely supported by facts.

Having done consulting in this space for a decade, and worked with containerised systems since before AWS existed, my experience is that managing an AWS system is consistently more expensive and that in fact the devops cost is part of what makes AWS an expensive option.

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

#69

Post by marcinzm »

darkwater wrote: post #48

The core of this success is this, IMO: > Our workload is 24/7 steady. We were already at >90% reservation coverage; there was no idle burst capacity to “right size” away. If we had the kind of bursty compute profile many commenters referenced, the choice would be different. Which TBH applies to many, many places, even if they are not aware of it.

I'd say the core of their success is running everything in a single rack in a single datacenter at first (for months? a year?) and getting lucky. Life is simple when you don't need the costs and effort of reliability upfront.

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

#70

Post by Msurrow »

realitysballs wrote: post #56
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…

For my org. I don’t have budget for a dedicated in-house opsec team, so if I on-prem it triggers additional salary burden for security . How would I overcome this?

Familiarize yourself with your company’s decision process on strategic decisions like this. Ensure you have a way to submit a proposal for a decision on making the change (or find someone who has that access to sponsor your proposal), build a business case that shows cost of opsec team, hardware and everything else is lower than AWS (or if cost is higher then some other business value is gained from making the change — currently digital sovereignty could be a strong argument if you are EU based).

If you cant build a positive business case then its not the correct move. Cash is king. Sadly.

Post reply on HN