Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 109 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#71

Post by [deleted] »

BoorishBears wrote: post #66
dangus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would point out is that the simplicity of StackOverflow's hardware stack means that it would also be very simple to host in a cloud provider like AWS. I would also point out that StackOverflow isn't an incredibly good performer compared to a number of other websites. Check it out on PageSpeed Insights. I also used a couple other tools that suggest that it loads slower in some regions than others.

> Check it out on PageSpeed Insights. I also used a couple other tools that suggest that it loads slower in some regions than others. And yet Stack Overflow has such strong SEO that outright cloning their content on a malware page will get you top 10 results. I think people seriously overestimate the value of Web Core Vitals. At the end of the day a website is usually trying to deliver some value to a visitor: if you…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#73

Post by nucleardog »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #46
slau wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have to strongly disagree with that. Sure, AWS can be stupidly expensive, however it can also save you a lot of money. A few years ago, I was the VPoE for a small-ish startup in Denmark. I was the only ops person, and I was able to provide 100% uptime for a year, including a migration from k8s clusters, AWS AZ outages and whatnot. During that time, I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a…

Yeah that Lambda setup you mention is terribly cheap, and it is one of the very few extremely attractive services pricewise - but many people get lured into using other AWS services that aren't cheap, even though Amazon makes people think so by blurring the total price by splitting it into hours, calculating egress separately, dependencies on services that are billable by the hour (it's not obvious when you start tha…

> it's not obvious when you start that a private network has the cost of an NAT GW attached to it

It’s not actually required. And I don’t mean the completely unrealistic “if you run stuff on your private network that never needs to connect to the internet, then you don’t need a NAT gateway!”. I just mean you can implement routing to the internet in cheaper ways.

If you don’t need 100Gbps highly available outbound traffic routing like a NAT gateway provides… you run a t3.nano instance doing forwarding and NAT that will sustain 30Mbps and burst to 5Gbps for $3.80/mo. Just on raw bandwidth, unless you need more than a t3.large can push (~500Mbps continuous, 5Gbps burst), it’s cheaper to run an EC2 instance as your gateway rather than use a NAT gateway.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#74

Post by jesterson »

> I could probably scale like crazy and avoid AWS completely with my stack

You don't need AWS for that (although they do a good job convincing you otherwise).

AWS didn't invent anything. They just simplify (or make complex) systems in order to send you hefty bill.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#76

Post by sjducb »

I help big companies reduce their cloud costs. Frequently I recommend moving Postgres and Kubernetes to on-prem.

When you’re spending over $1 million per year on either of those then you’ll save a lot of money by moving to on-prem.

The ideal cloud lifecycle is to iterate quickly on the cloud while you find product market fit, then when you know what you need start moving to on-prem to save money.

I don’t think you’ll ever need to migrate to AWS.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#77

Post by Turskarama »

dangus wrote: post #12
movedx wrote: post #4

> I'm keeping things simple, so I've got mostly Go services, pg + caching, and a svelte webapp. I deployed my Go services on a low-ish end bare metal provider, and for now it is fine. Deployments are triggered via scripts, and so far so good. Is it sexy, using all the latest and greatest tech? No, its just simple shell scripts. But it works? Don't change a thing. This is perfect. > Am I wrong to think that I could pr…

One thing I would point out is that the simplicity of StackOverflow's hardware stack means that it would also be very simple to host in a cloud provider like AWS. I would also point out that StackOverflow isn't an incredibly good performer compared to a number of other websites. Check it out on PageSpeed Insights. I also used a couple other tools that suggest that it loads slower in some regions than others.

Is StackOverflow slow? Maybe. Has this ever bothered me as a user? Nope.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#78

Post by delomoto »

As a startup it's not about scaling.

Either you have to scale than you should have the revenue or VC for doing so or you don't need it.

Cloud provider is about were to spend your resources: do you want to build features which make money or do you want to manage your deploy scripts and build monitoring etc yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Do I need AWS? Or am I thinking this wrong?

#80

Post by sgarland »

dangus wrote: post #69
sgarland wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound as though there’s some obscene sprawl of interrelated tooling, barely held together with shell scripts, and only OP knows how it all works. Nothing described is that weird, nor should it have difficulty horizontally scaling when and if the time comes - add another node, and front it with a load balancer. The problem is that DevOps has shifted so heavily to Dev that “I’m running services natively on…

Try to see the forest for the trees here: ask yourself how does the business make money? If I throw my application on some PaaS thing and put the database on RDS, let’s say I can hire 5 developers who know almost nothing about infrastructure to develop and deploy the application. Each developer working on the application delivers valuable business logic. Let’s say each developer makes $200,000 total compensation and…

So hire an SRE. You’re gonna have garbage / non-existent CI/CD, IaC, and all the other stuff that makes expansion (and audits, apparently) easier. Bonus, any decent SRE should also be able to code.

I don’t think you _need_ a DBA/DBRE initially, but I do think if you’re in the range of hiring five devs, one of them should know about infrastructure.

Post reply on HN