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

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

#81

Post by shrubble »

px1999 wrote: post #32

If you can do things yourself or with your staff, you probably don't need aws. But when the cost of you doing something (either direct or opportunity cost) becomes higher than that of using aws (or another cloud provider), you should use them. Yes, you can get really really really far without needing to scale if you spend a lot of energy and effort on optimisation, but that's time you're not doing biz dev, or buildin…

This is mostly FUD. A single 8core server made in the last 10 years, with 64GB RAM and SSD/NVME drives, can saturate a 10gb/s link even with some db lookups thrown into the mix. How many lifestyle businesses would even need more than this, aside from backups and redundancy?

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

#82

Post by shrubble »

qwytw wrote: post #43
shrubble wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the mid-1990s a large ISP I am aware of, rented "pizzabox" and larger Sun SPARC systems (like SPARCstation 2s; but even the larger systems ran the same OS) to corporate clients. The team of 5 sysadmins setup, installed, secured and managed 2000 such systems, mostly running SunOS 4.1.x , which didn't have nearly the automation that we have now on newer Unix based OSes. Using only the bash shell and the many scripts…

Wouldn't it still be 1 sysadmin per 5 systems instead of 400? It's not like you can hire 1.25% of a sysadmin directly, while on AWS you can you just pay a significant premium.

Sysadmin consulting exists.

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

#83

Post by fatnoah »

slau wrote: post #38
tommek4077 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just not cheap.

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…

I have a similar story, though from almost 10 years ago, so maybe things have changed. As VPoE for a small startup with mobile messaging apps (something like a couple million MAU and ~200M messages/month), I orchestrated a lift-and-shift from a top tier managed hosting provider to AWS EC2. The result was about a 60% drop in monthly spend on hosting. We used almost nothing except S3 and EC2, with some provisioned IOPs for our SQL backend.

That said, it was a long time ago, and I'm sure competition and prices have changed dramatically.

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

#84

Post by Spivak »

mindcrash wrote: post #55

37 Signals is living proof nobody needs a public cloud. And from my own experience, basically what all cloud providers are relying on is ops being lazy. Set up some decent hardware in a good data center, set up a good platform on top of it, automate the hell out of it and with all current open source software you can run everything by yourself. At least, that's something I am currently actively researching because ou…

> And from my own experience, basically what all cloud providers are relying on is ops being lazy.

This makes no sense to me, I've worked jobs where the app was hosted entirely on perm and jobs where it's hosted in AWS. By far the AWS shops required more work. There's so many more limitations, random footguns, arbitrary rate limits, capacity issues, having to do "cost optimization" because it happens that what is simple and maintainable is expensive. Once you have a setup you like on-prem it will hum along until you decide to break it.

S3 is the one of the 7 technical wonders of the world but I would rather run Postgres/Redis/Kafka/RabbitMQ on my own hw than the AWS managed service given the choice.

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

#85

Post by pleoxy »

dangus wrote: post #70
pleoxy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which takes then off the list of providers you can do this with. They could have reasonable prices but they don't. You couple to AWS with your whole system architecture or you stay away.

If you tell me I need to go 250 miles per hour to get to the grocery store then I guess I have to buy a Bugatti.

Can't carry much in a Bugatti.

It's a real problem if you build on a VPS as your base. I was asked to prep such a system for scale on AWS and choked on the pricing. So we settled for what they offer at reasonable pricing and if further growth is needed, will need to hit eject on AWS and just go elsewhere.

I recommend starting elsewhere and save the migration of you just use EC2.

Most places will let you scale a VPS quite well and there is a logical handoff to your own hardware where you can scale to a system with 512 vCPU and TBs of ram for less than Amazon is charging for step two.

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

#86

Post by barelysapient »

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…

Exactly this. The only thing unmentioned, but that you should be aware of, is the effort to deploy this stack from scratch. You can assume the DB survives, or doesn't, but the ability to go from zero to a running deployment from a recent restore is probably the only thing you need to really worry about. If you can get that to be less than hour, or ideally a few minutes, then you're golden.

Don't be afraid to add CDN/Caching when its appropriate.

You can always buy a beefier instance, or a dedicated box.

Deal with the scale later when its truely needed. Give yourself permission, or plan to hire a team, to handle the scale issues later.

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

#87

Post by pleoxy »

gurchik wrote: post #3

If you find yourself constantly reinventing the wheel when AWS offers a managed service that handles that for you, it might be time to switch to AWS. Some examples might be: writing a complicated postgres backup solution instead of using RDS Automated Backups, or running your own Kubernetes control plane instead of using EKS. But if you have an infrastructure that is easy for yourself to maintain, then spend your eff…

> similarly-specced EC2 will easily be 10x that cost.

I actually tried this, it's closer to 200-300x. The number of premium add on fees that appear as you build a higher performing EC2 server is just stupid.

It's not so bad if you scale out horizontally instead of vertically. But that complicates the architecture when other providers don't charge crazy pricing for vertical scaling.

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

#88

Post by hnGuyReaderDude »

sjducb wrote: post #76

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…

Is one million really the point where on prem becomes cheaper? I would think it’s much more like 10 million. Between having to pay server engineers and regional distribution and power costs I’d think it adds up to far more than 1 million. Where am I doing my math wrong?

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

#89

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

dangus wrote: post #70
pleoxy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which takes then off the list of providers you can do this with. They could have reasonable prices but they don't. You couple to AWS with your whole system architecture or you stay away.

If you tell me I need to go 250 miles per hour to get to the grocery store then I guess I have to buy a Bugatti.

The advantage of the cloud was supposed to be elastic compute, but what this thread is trying to claim is that's not the case.

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

#90

Post by px1999 »

shrubble wrote: post #81
px1999 wrote: post #32

If you can do things yourself or with your staff, you probably don't need aws. But when the cost of you doing something (either direct or opportunity cost) becomes higher than that of using aws (or another cloud provider), you should use them. Yes, you can get really really really far without needing to scale if you spend a lot of energy and effort on optimisation, but that's time you're not doing biz dev, or buildin…

This is mostly FUD. A single 8core server made in the last 10 years, with 64GB RAM and SSD/NVME drives, can saturate a 10gb/s link even with some db lookups thrown into the mix. How many lifestyle businesses would even need more than this, aside from backups and redundancy?

Many people underestimate how much easier it is as a business to throw money at things than to actually solve possibly hard problems. "Database failover and scale to z1d.12xlarge" as a strategy is insanely cheap in comparison to spending days/weeks/months trying to prevent spikes from impacting performance.

As much as folks here might not want to hear it, throwing an army of mediocre (or, ideally, decent) developers at a problem and paying through the nose for managed infrastructure often winds up being a much (much!) cheaper way to arrive at a good outcome than a smaller number of more skilled engineers with a shoestring infrastructure budget.

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