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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#81

Post by mark242 »

I think the moral of the story is: if you have a predictable workload that fits within a smallish, stable infrastructure and you can make on-prem work, that's great, more power to you.

If you are treating cloud services as purely an apples-to-apples cost comparison then you've missed the point of deploying to (insert your favorite cloud provider here). What you get with cloud services is flexibility and speed. If the OP wants to undertake a new project that they have no idea of the resulting workload or popularity, they need to guess about the required underlying infrastructure. If you miss on your guess, you can either kill momentum for that new project, or you can wind up overprovisioning and paying way way too much on hardware.

I'm not sure how quickly their colo provider could spin up new hardware for this hypothetical new project, but you can assume it's not the dynamism that you get from deploying to an elastic cloud environment. Again, you're paying a premium on day-to-day costs in order to have this freedom to create and deploy. That's what cloud infrastructure is about.

To give an example -- I have a very-CPU-heavy workload that started its life out on prem. As more and more customers signed up, I would go through tiers of adding more hardware to a rack, where my overall margins looked like a sawtooth waveform when I would provision more hardware. I started out moving to EC2 and then finally to ECS/Fargate. If I want to spin up a new piece of functionality for my users, I don't need to provision any new hardware, set out any real new infrastructure, or do anything that you would consider prework in order to get that new functionality deployed. My margins are much much more predictable and I get faster time-to-market on feature development. That's what you're paying the premium for, that ability to just move faster.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#82

Post by candiodari »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #70
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

Yeah, AWS isn't for a smaller company. When you have a real finance department that vets each third party or have some governmental requirement to get three quotes for each new service (part of requirements set out to minimize grift in sourcing), having a single bill that can be expanded to include new projects and services makes it a little simple. This causes a problem during cost cutting because unless it's a prio…

And yet, AWS isn't for a really larger company either. At some point the bills become so huge that running your own IT and datacenters is cheaper. Usually a lot. Even when it means building some AWS services yourself.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/dropbox-aws/

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#83

Post by Daishiman »

saberience wrote: post #66

So, as someone that works for an enterprise that uses AWS... if we went colocation, how would we replicate: SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Lambda, Kinesis, ECR, ALB, Aurora, S3, Glacier, EMR, EKS, multiple AZs, multiple regions, etc? For us to get the same functionality as all of these services in colocated data centers would be an INSANE amount of work, we'd have to hire so many IT/hardware specialists fo…

For real. I think people don't understand that the software that cloud providers bring us just a _tremendous_ force multiplier.

How many different vendors and licensing schemes would do you need to bring to your own data center to get an equivalent amount of functionality going? (I ask rhetorically; this is the equivalent of a few FTEs at the least).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#84

Post by ProAm »

Rantenki wrote: post #26
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

I have extensive infrastructure running across 3 separate org accounts for blast radius, with multiple separate VPCs per org, RDS databases across multiple AZs, and a large variety of instances. Everything is built up and torn down via Terraform, and ZERO maintenance tasks are done via the console. Changes to infrastructure configuration are managed via CAB which approves PRs on Github which are automatically deploye…

We see just as much downtown with AWS with DR/HA/MTTR as with colo. You still have to set it all up and maintain it, its just different setup and maintenance than if you actually have a servers in DCs. Most people still have the learning curve with AWS and usually do it incorrectly, or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring.

It's really a matter of who within the company wants to know whats behind the curtain. I'd almost always vote for self hosting but its a hard argument internally when everyone thinks the cloud eliminates these issues magically.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#85

Post by busterarm »

Zelphyr wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware.

For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking things with front end JS calling out to apis and nginx SSI while still serving static conntent) and a hosted wordpress ($25/mo) for the content editors (and CircleCI's free tier for builds -- woop woop). And we were insanely over-provisioned with those t2.smalls.

Procurement sucks. Having to test out new systems when you need to buy new hardware 2 years later also sucks. Having to wait behind much larger customers when Intel has a Xeon supply shortage sucks (2018 sucked if you had to buy servers).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#86

Post by legulere »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #53
Patrick-STH wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

Stackoverflow was run on a few servers (don’t know about how many there are now) http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Often you don’t need that much hardware.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#87

Post by Zelphyr »

tnolet wrote: post #74
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

You don’t go for AWS for EC2. You go for AWS because in half a day you can whip up a secure, managed and auto scaling app using their proprietary services like SQS, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, Dynamo etc.

Right, but my argument is that most products--especially when the company is a startup--doesn't need that kind of scalability and won't for quite some time, if ever.

They all start out starry-eyed thinking they're the next unicorn and oh-my-gawd what if we start getting the kind of traffic Facebook gets tomorrow?! That's just not a reality. Facebook themselves didn't get that traffic for several years.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#88

Post by iptrans »

I find it interesting that these comparisons always pit AWS againsta colocation.

It would be much more interesting if the comparison was between AWS and dedicated servers. Dedicated servers have all the benefits of colocation, only you don't need to deal with the hardware. The DC takes care of the hardware, all you have to do it administer the server.

I find dedicated servers to be very cost effective. You can get off the shelf servers in minutes and if you need custom hardware that's only a quote away. Most providers will offer month-to-month billing, so there is no lock-in.

Often dedicated servers are even cheaper than colocation when you add up all the costs of hardware, racking, sparing, financing, etc.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#89

Post by renewiltord »

Makes sense. Good reasoning for the use case you have in mind.

Cloud stuff makes sense when you have some combo of the following imho:

* Need for scalability - at one place I worked high-load was 3x low-load so going up and down saved a lot of time

* Rare need for powerful resources (sort of the same as above) - I provisioned a real fatboi on AWS the other day to do some file processing. Worked like a charm and gone in the hour

* Ability to use higher-level primitives - lambda vs. EC2 instances, databricks vs. EMR, IAM/Kinesis all that

* Need for exploration - I could not afford the peak ElasticSearch + Redis + Postgresql that I had but I can trial it

* Need for resilience - If you need to preserve the data/compute for whatever reason, AWS is way easier to get to a good place

* Lack of knowledge on top-tier ops - I've run long-term dedicated servers for almost two decades now, with top uptime in a decade. I have fuck-all knowledge of doing smart colo ops. If you want to keep your team lean and you don't have this to lean on, it's going to sink you.

If you're using hardware as hardware and it isn't changing that much and you have the skillset, you can get a long way with a colo even today.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#90

Post by busterarm »

Zelphyr wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

I didn't even mention the best part about hosting projects in cloud providers.

You can generalize the infrastructure to run 99% of businesses needs and write that Terraform code only once. You can bring that with you everywhere and take care of the basics in seconds and you can sleep at night easily without a pager going off.

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