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

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

#71

Post by vidarh »

fulafel wrote: post #26
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…

The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments. ("Shall we make the app very resilie…

I was about to rage at you over the first sentence, because this is so often how people start trying to argue bare metal setups are expensive. But after reading the rest: 100% this. I see so many people push AWS setups not because it's the best thing - it can be if you're not cost sensitive - but because it is what they know and they push what they know instead of evaluating the actual requirements.

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

#72

Post by vidarh »

calgoo wrote: post #61
vb-8448 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unless you put someone on retainer to be responsible, which you can do cheaper than to keep your AWS setup from breaking...

(I do that for people; my AWS using customers consistently end up needing more help)

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

#73

Post by pgwhalen »

seidleroni wrote: post #14

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

I don't work in firmware at all, but I'm working next to a team now migrating an application from VMs to K8S, and they refer to the VMs as "bare metal" which I find slightly cringeworthy - but hey, whatever language works to communicate an idea.

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

#75

Post by vjerancrnjak »

nik736 wrote: post #9

It's an interesting article, thanks for that. What people forget about the OVH or Hetzner comparison is that for those entry servers they are known for, think the Advance line with OVH or AX with Hetzner. Those boxes come with some drawbacks. The OVH Advance line for example comes without ECC memory, in a server, that might host databases. It's a disaster waiting to happen. There is no option to add ECC memory with t…

Is there software that works without ECC RAM ? I think most popular databases just assume memory never corrupts .

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

#76

Post by 7thaccount »

esskay wrote: post #54
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…

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

I think some of that is a certain group of people will do anything to play with the new shiny stuff. In my org it's cloud and now GPU.

The cloud stuff is extremely expensive and doesn't work any better than our existing solutions. Like a commentator said below, it's insidious as your entire organization later becomes dependent on that. If you buy a cloud solution, you're also stuck with the vendor deciding to double the cost of the product once you're locked in.

The GPU stuff is annoying as all of our needs are fine with normal CPU workloads today. There are no performance issues, so again...what's the point? Well... somebody wants to play with GPUs I guess.

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

#77

Post by qaq »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
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…

Forget? You have to hire people for that. We are a software organization. We build software. If we rent in the cloud, there is less HR hassle - hiring, raises, bonuses, benefits, firing … none of that headache involved with the cloud. Technically? Totally doable. But the owners prefer renting in the cloud over the people-related issues of hiring.

Just because AWS abstracted something doesn't mean you don't need people who understand all the quirks of the black box you supposedly don't have to worry about. Guess what those people are expensive. You also have to deal with a ton of crap like hard resource account limits that on any meaningful size project will push complexity up by forcing you to use multiple accounts.

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

#78

Post by ndhandala »

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

If you're running k8s cluster. Check out cloudnative pg. That thing is a beast.

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

#79

Post by TheCondor »

esskay wrote: post #54
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…

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

It’s the current version of CCIE or some of the other certs. People pay money to learn how to operate AWS, other thing erode the value of their investment.

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

#80

Post by Spooky23 »

esskay wrote: post #54
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…

> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.

I don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail.

AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS.

Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently. I have apps that I run in a data center because they’d cot 10-20x at a cloud provider. Conversely, I have apps that get more favorable licensing terms in AWS that I run there, even though the compute is slower and less efficient.

You also have people who treat AWS with the old “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” mentality.

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