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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#61

Post by throwup238 »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#62

Post by PaulKeeble »

shooker435 wrote: post #23

The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern. This means that teams must make…

Seems like nowadays people seem less concerned with vendor lockin than they were 15 years ago. One of the reason to want to avoid lockin is to be able to move when the price gouging gets just a little bit too greedy that the move is worth the cost. One of the drawbacks of all these built in services at AWS is the expense of trying to recreate the architecture elsewhere.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#63

Post by tbeseda »

Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

> But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.

Agreed. These sort of takedowns usually point to a gap in the author's experience. Which is totally fine! Missing knowledge is an opportunity. But it's not a good look when the opportunity is used for ragebait, hustlr.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#64

Post by ch4s3 »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #25
ch4s3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but in 800 months you'd come out ahead with a dedicated server in your closet.

I run a tiny local dedicated server 24/7 that consumes around 10W on average, which is about $2/mo in electricity costs where I live.

I meant the upfront cost of the machine.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#65

Post by observationist »

ranger_danger wrote: post #2

Sorry but my $3 AWS instance is still cheaper than all of those options. If you need a lot of, well, anything, be it compute, memory, storage, bandwidth etc., of course cloud stuff is going to be more expensive... but if you don't need that, then IMO $3/mo on-demand pricing really can't be beat when I don't have to maintain any equipment myself. Oracle also offers perpetually free VM instances if you don't mind the g…

Just get a raspberry pi and run it from your own home internet. You should already be paying for a VPN service and your regular internet service, so you should be able to trivially work out a self-hosted solution. You'll recover your costs inside of two years and come out the other end better off for it.

Don't give the big cloud companies an inch if you don't absolutely have to. The internet needs and deserves the participation of independent people putting up their own services and systems.

Amazon really doesn't care if your $10,000 bed folds up on you like a sandwich and cooks you when AWS us-east-1 goes down, or stops your smart toilet from flushing, or sets bucket defaults that allow trivial public access to information you assume to be secure, because nobody in their right mind would just leave things wide open.

Each and every instance of someone doing something independently takes money and control away from big corporations that don't deserve it, and it makes your life better. You could run pihole and a slew of other useful utilities on your self-hosted server that benefit anyone connected to your network.

AI can trivially walk you through building your own self-hosted setups (or even set things up for you if you entrust it with an automation MCP.)

Oracle and AWS and Alphabet and the rest shouldn't profit from eating the internet - the whole world becomes a better place every time you deny them your participation in the endless enshittification of everything.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#66

Post by PaulKeeble »

Sebb767 wrote: post #40
pfix wrote: post #28

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs. On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin. Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted…

> Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable. This, and also startups are quite heterogeneous. If you have an engineer on your team with experience in hosting their own servers (or at least a homelab-person), setting up that service with sufficient resiliency for your average startup will be done within one relaxed afternoon. If your team consists of designers and engineers wh…

Its a skillset that is out of favour at the moment as well but having someone who has done serverops and devops and can develop as well is a bit of a money saver generally because they open up possibilities that don't exist otherwise. I think its a skillset that no one really hired for past about 2010 when cloud was mostly taking off and got replaced with cloud engineers or pure devops or ops people but there used to be people with this mixed skillset in most teams.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#67

Post by tqi »

fennecbutt wrote: post #51
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things. Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

I don't think that's a hard and fast rule? I think et al is for named, specific entities of any kind. You might say "palm trees, evergreens trees, etc" but "General Sherman, Grand Oak, et al"

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#68

Post by PaulKeeble »

mnw21cam wrote: post #14

I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for. However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then…

Its a weird service because before that point AWS is crazy expensive for storage, especially down in the TB range its awful value compared to your box and drives. But once you get into that PB scale AWS actually seems to be competitive, I guess because the GB/TBs they are selling are from PB scale solutions and all the overhead that entails.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#69

Post by fennecbutt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #58
fennecbutt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things. Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

> although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person... Corporate legal personhood is actually older than Christianity, and it being applied to businesses (which were late to the game of being allowed to be corporations) is still significantly older than the US (starting with the British East India Company), not a unique quirk of American law.

Oh I didn't how that, thanks for the lesson.

Tbf it just sounds...so American, so I assumed, my bad. But East India Company was involved...whew I guess that does make sense, oof.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#70

Post by ericbarrett »

throwup238 wrote: post #61
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.

> which was often red tape hell

Seconded. I was working for a storage vendor when AWS was first ascendant. After we delivered hardware, it was typically 6-12 weeks to even get it powered up, and often a few weeks longer to complete deployment. This is with professional services, e.g. us handling the setup once we had wires to plug in. Similar lead time for ordering, racking, and provisioning standard servers.

The paperwork was massive, too. Order forms, expense justifications, conversations with Legal, invoices, etc. etc.

And when I say 6-12 weeks, I mean that was a standard time - there were outliers measured in months.

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