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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

#641

Post by layoric »

stingraycharles wrote: post #503
layoric wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be reading the pricing wrong but you have to pay per hour for the port plus per GB transfer? And looks like the cheapest is $0.02 per GB? Is that really the 'cheap' option? That looks fine for a TB or two, but still crazy when getting closer to PBs.

Yes that’s the cheap option. But to be fair, I deal with several customers that are in the double digit petabyte scale. When you’re operating at that scale, and have 7-figure AWS bills on a monthly basis, AWS is suddenly a lot more available to you and much more willing to accommodate pretty much anything.

I've heard stories of bills like that and is wild to me.. I built a SaaS that had just over a PB in data and our monthly was low 5 digit and largest part was S3, and co-location was already on the table. I can't imagine getting to 6-7 digit a month.. I understand how it happens with rapid growth, but even 6 months of that I would be scrambling for other hosting options.

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

#642

Post by andrewstuart »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #624
andrewstuart wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wasn’t you Simone. I don’t think you had joined AWS at this time. It was a nice guy I think named Mike. He has since passed away. I think you misunderstood the blog post. I was never employed by AWS, I was a customer. Since there’s people here from AWS I’ll give some feedback that might prevent posts like this……. if you suspend/restrict someone’s account - put yourself in their shoes - they probably want it bac…

There's many reasons to dislike a company or service. I know. It is not a good reason to look for employment to "get in and out". If I were your hiring manager, I would be upset to know. Mike Culver, great guy and a bit of a mentor to me. Yes, very sadly he passed away several years ago now. RIP.

Hey Simone you misunderstand.

You keep mentioning employment… but I was a customer never an employee of AWS.

Please reread the post….

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

#643

Post by cyberax »

dotwaffle wrote: post #640
cyberax wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, and S3 is multiply redundant and is designed to survive a total AZ failure. So your data is physically replicated into at least 2 different AZs and might be multiply-redundant within them. They also provide a crazy SLA for data integrity, meaning that data must never be lost.

S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper.

It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all the numbers, it's actually not unreasonable. I'd argue that using the real S3 is overkill for most scenarios that don't need infinite scalability.

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

#644

Post by rpdillon »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #530
rpdillon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I just don't think it's on Amazon to fix those institutional and economic realities when they decide to host a project that people find useful.

It's on Amazon to consider the second-order effects of their actions. They may in some cases be killing the golden goose.

Companies that provide offerings that are open-source, and then later stop offering open-source updates are not a "golden goose". Organizations that produce open-source need to have a funding model that isn't "charging for hosting". Hosting can certainly be part of it, but there also needs to be a larger strategy. Framing those that don't have one as victims of Amazon ignores the company's culpability for offering the product as open-source in the first place.

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

#645

Post by DANmode »

hvb2 wrote: post #287
voncheese wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture. This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession. That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon suck…

Just saying, you can be customer obsessed and still not have a good feel for UX... Ask me how I know

Are you describing you?!

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

#646

Post by rpdillon »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #468
rpdillon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model". https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine... We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers. With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an o…

If printers were free, and ink was free or open, and the printer company said "don't operate a printer leasing business, that's the only thing you can't do", I would side with the printer company.

This ignores the part where the printer company said anyone could use the printers for whatever they wanted.

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

#647

Post by Our_Benefactors »

devin-2030 wrote: post #603
AJRF wrote: post #572

AWS / GCP / Azure aren't for individuals or small businesses. They won't tell you this anywhere, and they won't stop you from signing up - but they simply do not care one iota about users with anything less than $100k billing per month. They treat big account owners like kings, they fly them out to Formula 1 events, they get 3 day workshops in swanky retreats, because a few k spent on this equals maybe millions of do…

Used to be different when AWS started properly 20 years ago with S3 and EC2. But yes they went from catering to startups to SMBs to enterprise. Unfortunately a lot of developers still believe the AWS / GCP / Azure propaganda (tech evangelism, cloud advocacy, or whatever else you're calling it). Nowadays you shouldn't use them at all when starting up.

What should someone use? Selfhost? Cheap VPS? Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

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

#648

Post by Dylan16807 »

rpdillon wrote: post #646
Dylan16807 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If printers were free, and ink was free or open, and the printer company said "don't operate a printer leasing business, that's the only thing you can't do", I would side with the printer company.

This ignores the part where the printer company said anyone could use the printers for whatever they wanted.

It's a hypothetical, we don't need that level of complication. And a software company could start with such a license and then that part disappears.

But even if we factor that in, we have to remember it only applies to new models and it's only being added because some megacorporation stepped in, so that's not getting me to change sides.

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

#649

Post by MaxBarraclough »

pessimizer wrote: post #250
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a risk they knowingly chose to accept when they opted for FOSS licensing. It's not as if people hadn't asked " Well, what if another party tries to fork our open source code for profit? " all the way back when FOSS was starting to gain traction in the 1990s.

OSS licensing. Free Software was designed to avoid this, and has become stricter as the technology changed. Open Source was deliberately designed to thwart this. The entire intention of it was to allow businesses to resell work that was done for free. When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.

> OSS licensing. Free Software was designed to avoid this

This is pretty much a distinction without a difference. There are licences that qualify as one but not the other (per the FSF and OSI's determinations), but none are in widespread use.

> When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.

That would be copyleft. [0] Not all Free Software licences are copyleft licences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

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

#650

Post by dotwaffle »

cyberax wrote: post #643
dotwaffle wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, and S3 is multiply redundant and is designed to survive a total AZ failure. So your data is physically replicated into at least 2 different AZs and might be multiply-redundant within them. They also provide a crazy SLA for data integrity, meaning that data must never be lost. S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper. It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all…

GCS / Azure can survive a total AZ failure too, think of 3 x Replicas as RAID-1, whereas Erasure Coding is more like RAID-6. Only it's actually more resilient:

Let's say you have 10 data blocks, and you have 4 parity blocks. You can now lose 4 servers containing a block and still be able to repair the data, whereas in 3 x Replica you can only lose 2, and have to store everything 300% of size, instead of only 140%.

And yes, it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth.

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