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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#631

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

Galanwe wrote: post #324

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…

The company I used to work for used AWS for the many CRUD websites they made for many small clients. Route 53, LAMP stack on Ubuntu on EC2, and synchronised the MySQL database to Elasticsearch for the search box on the front page of the site. That was it.

I suspect that they could have achieved that result far cheaper on a different provider.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#632

Post by dotwaffle »

cyberax wrote: post #630
dotwaffle wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic. I've been irritated at AWS (and the other large cloud providers) that they charge $0.01/GB for cross-az traffic. That's $3.24/Mbps -- about the same I was p…

> My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic. As far as I remember, accounts within the same organization will have the same mapping. You also can use stable zone names these days, instead of the regular mappings. And yeah, egress traffic pricing is freaking…

Insanely high S3 storage charges too. $23/TB/month? Even with the insane HDD pricing that we see today, that's paying off a drive in 1 month (at retail) that will last for 50-100 months. Sure, there's probably some encoding overhead, but it's still mad.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#633

Post by cyberax »

dotwaffle wrote: post #632
cyberax wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic. As far as I remember, accounts within the same organization will have the same mapping. You also can use stable zone names these days, instead of the regular mappings. And yeah, egress traffic pricing is freaking…

Insanely high S3 storage charges too. $23/TB/month? Even with the insane HDD pricing that we see today, that's paying off a drive in 1 month (at retail) that will last for 50-100 months. Sure, there's probably some encoding overhead, but it's still mad.

S3 is pretty competitive if you want similarly-performing storage with consistent millisecond-level latency, high scalability, and at least 3x redundancy. Try looking at how much it's going to cost you in enterprise SSDs :)

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#635

Post by throwaway2037 »

htx80nerd wrote: post #626
AJRF wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small. Why do I say Hetzner? It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.

Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host I've ever used in 20+ yrs of using different web host. Spending hours trying to do basic things, and even AI couldnt help. Switched to one of their competitors after 2(!) days of trouble shooting and got the same basic task done in ~10 mins.

    > Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host
This is the first negative thing about Hetzner I have read on HN. Does anyone else dis/agree?

    > one of their competitors
Can you share which one?

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#636

Post by rushcar »

IsTom wrote: post #559
sudosteph wrote: post #123

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

I might be holding it wrong, but last time I tried to use DynamoDB it made absolutely no sense performance-wise to me. Postgres on my laptop was many orders of magnitude faster for fraction of price. It seemed like it maybe might make sense when you hit multiple TBs of database data and can no longer run on a single server? But then the costs would be sky-high and you probably could engineer your way around this with…

When you do a DynamoDB write it's replicating that write to 2 other datacenters before ACK (for availability + durability reasons). Your local Postgres instance doesn't need to make any network hops at all.

DynamoDB handled >100M qps during prime day, and its storage is effectively infinite. You don't have to self manage sharding, failover, CDC, etc.

disclaimer: I work for AWS (but not on DDB)

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#637

Post by mpyne »

petepete wrote: post #558
mpyne wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do. AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL. On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort... Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business…

Obviously I mean PostgreSQL themselves don't have one, like Redis, MongoDB etc.

Of course not, their individual contributors formed business models that make sense, and work at those companies instead. Companies that are, I must again reiterate, linked directly from the official PostgreSQL.org website, in case there's any confusion on pedigree.

"Our consultants are recognizable from their many contributions to PostgreSQL"

"Our co-founders have written several books ... [co-founder] is also a core developer and project steering committee member on PostGIS and pgRouting projects"

"With a strong focus on PostgreSQL, they recently launched Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL, which delivers a single source, enterprise-grade, open-source installation of PostgreSQL Core Distribution." (Custom sales on software products based on the open-source original? Sounds almost like what AWS did with Redis)

Obviously these companies are likely to give back monetarily to the things needed by the open-source team, if only because their viability of their own business relies on having the open source product to sell expertise around. But a lot of companies simply use PostgreSQL and pay nothing, and that's fine too. It's all part of what it means to be an open-source product.

There's ultimately no reason Redis Labs couldn't have been successful as the Percona or KDAB of their own product's ecosystem. I guess they figured there was more money in hosting than services, or maybe Redis was simply too foolproof to need consultants?

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#638

Post by mpyne »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #583
mpyne wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had no choice but to change the licenses. Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no? Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.

I've got a field of strawberries, and I put up a sign, "free to pick by yourself, or pay 10$ for a pre-picked basket". Then Amazon comes in, starts sending their workers to pick my strawberries, and sell them for 5$ a basket. Was I then lying when I advertised the strawberries as free in my original sign, if I now want to change it to stop them from doing that?

I'm sorry, but "or pay $10 for a pre-picked basket" is not an open source product, because "free to pick" was the other option for an open source product.

"free to pick by yourself" is the equivalent a proprietary freeware product, not an open-source product, because it excludes the idea of others picking strawberries. If that's your thing then by all means license it as such. But call it proprietary rather than open source.

Some companies make a living off a model of "free to pick as needed for as long as you agree to help tend the future strawberries held in common, even if your competitors pick strawberries. Or you can pay $10 for your own exclusive plot of land and no requirement to let others past your fence".

But that's not the model Redis was trying to use.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#639

Post by mpyne »

htx80nerd wrote: post #627
mpyne wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had no choice but to change the licenses. Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no? Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.

Companies are making a trillion dollars on Open Source free code then maybe donate 50k to that project. People are spending huge amounts of time , stress, their lives, to help these projects. Companies have proved themselves to be very self centered. CEOs getting 2x yatchs and 5x houses while Open Source guys are trying to figure out which grocery store has the cheapest food items.

Companies should contribute as they can, if only for self-centered business reasons relating to keeping the upstream viable. But there are obligations to the users of software as well, it's not AWS's fault if making their user's lives easier make it harder for companies try to sell hosting of open-source servers.

I didn't see the PHP or SquirrelMail contributors having a conniption when Dreamhost started offering free webmail with their hosting offering.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#640

Post by dotwaffle »

cyberax wrote: post #633
dotwaffle wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insanely high S3 storage charges too. $23/TB/month? Even with the insane HDD pricing that we see today, that's paying off a drive in 1 month (at retail) that will last for 50-100 months. Sure, there's probably some encoding overhead, but it's still mad.

S3 is pretty competitive if you want similarly-performing storage with consistent millisecond-level latency, high scalability, and at least 3x redundancy. Try looking at how much it's going to cost you in enterprise SSDs :)

Is it 3x redundancy forever? I always just kinda assumed it was RS encoded after a while, so only 30-50% larger than a single copy. Plus, almost all object storage is written to / read from hard disks, not to SSDs. Unless they're in a caching layer that is.

I know Azure has done a bunch of work around Pyramid Codes (essentially a locally repairable EC/RS variant), and Google obviously have the Colossus infrastructure that allows variable encodings, I'd be surprised if AWS is still triple-replicated everywhere.

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