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Why we moved away from AWS

blippex.github.io

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Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#81

Post by nemesisj »

velodrome wrote: post #49
nemesisj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd stay away from Rackspace London as well. Horrible horrible experience. 1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time 2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot. 3. They're expensive. 4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess. 5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) tha…

Was this on the 1st-gen and/or 2nd-gen Rackspace cloud servers?

On all gens. They're all terrible.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#82

Post by startupcry »

nemesisj wrote: post #40
leokun wrote: post #13

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…

I'd stay away from Rackspace London as well. Horrible horrible experience. 1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time 2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot. 3. They're expensive. 4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess. 5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) tha…

we have had rather similar experience with RS support. Essentially when you call in what's happening is you get to talk to some people who literally have no clue and are just "call" masters...they HOPEFULLY after some time pass you on to L1 technicians who have A clue...and it goes on and on and on like this until someone more senior takes over and resolves the issue. Worth the extra money ? Nah. The only advantage I'm seeing is non-ephemeral instances, though you should be prepared for failure in Cloud and don't expect miracles.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#83

Post by laxk »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #54

The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is. Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.) Of course, it…

$750 x 21d x 12m = $189K

Do you think $189K per year is an average salary? It is not true.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#84

Post by tlb »

laxk wrote: post #83
mechanical_fish wrote: post #54

The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is. Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.) Of course, it…

$750 x 21d x 12m = $189K Do you think $189K per year is an average salary? It is not true.

It's about right for salary + payroll tax + benefits + office space in Silicon Valley.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#85

Post by laxk »

tlb wrote: post #84
laxk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$750 x 21d x 12m = $189K Do you think $189K per year is an average salary? It is not true.

It's about right for salary + payroll tax + benefits + office space in Silicon Valley.

It is true for Silicon Valley but not for the country.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#86

Post by fragsworth »

laxk wrote: post #85
tlb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about right for salary + payroll tax + benefits + office space in Silicon Valley.

It is true for Silicon Valley but not for the country.

You're seriously underestimating how much it costs. $750/day is probably low-balling it for anywhere in the country if you also count hiring costs/employee turnaround and training costs.

Also, for the skills implied, have you ever tried to hire a systems administrator who has experience in production environments with all of those aspects of back-end web servers? It's not easy, and it's not cheap.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#87

Post by vacri »

nasalgoat wrote: post #72
consultant23522 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, $750 is about one engineer-day. Someone is now going to be spending at least a full day per month managing your new hardware, running security patches, etc. Even if your sysadmin guy is cheaper than an "engineer" it's not going to be cheap.

You realize you need to do all that on the EC2 instances as well, right? This is the common disconnect I see when people tout The Cloud as a solution to having system administrators - that somehow that instance of Linux running in EC2 doesn't require the same maintenance as a physical one. It does.

No, you don't really. You don't need to spend time considering and researching different load balancers to see which one is the best for your use-case, running through your company's purchase process (in itself a big project), lead time, physical install, configuration, and monitoring. If you want an AWS load balancer, click EC2 > Load Balancers and config one. From "Hey, I'd like a load balancer" to having a functioning, active load balancer in literally less than five minutes. No jaunt to the colo necessary. And that's just one item - rinse, repeat for a pile of other aspects as well.

It's not true that AWS gets rid of the need for sysadmins, but it's absolutely not true that you do all the same sysadmin tasks on a cloud service.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#88

Post by rgbrenner »

tlb wrote: post #84
laxk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$750 x 21d x 12m = $189K Do you think $189K per year is an average salary? It is not true.

It's about right for salary + payroll tax + benefits + office space in Silicon Valley.

Blippex says they're in Austria... so SV prices don't figure into this at all.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#89

Post by dkersten »

I often hear that the best way to use AWS is to host your 24/7 stuff elsewhere and use AWS for the spikes. This makes a lot of sense, but I always wonder what the recommended (ie most cost-effective, especially in regards to bandwidth costs) place to host te 24/7 stuff? For example, moving a ton of data between EC2 and S3 is free (for bandwidth; ignoring requests costs), but moving 10TB out costs $0.12/GB which seems quite costly...

I guess the sweet spot is to use external hosting for your web apps and such and AWS for any large spike-prone batch processing: moving data into S3 is free (though obviously moving data out of wherever else you're hosting probably isn't), use EC2 to process it (possibly on spot instances!) and then move the results (which are much smaller than the raw data for a lot of use cases) back to the 24/7 hosts?

Though my question still remains: where do HNers recommend to host these servers knowing that AWS will be used to pick up the slack and handle irregular/unpredictable workloads?

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#90

Post by kyledrake »

NeoCities is currently using OVH. We were using Hetzner but we ran into issues when our server was the victim of a DDoS attack, and Hetzner responded by null-routing our server's IP address for a few days. OVH has better DDoS mitigation strategies (supposedly), so that's why we're switching.

I've used AWS before in corporate work, and I have to say I was very unimpressed with it. The prices for what you get are exorbitantly high. I've heard people say "they are affordable for corporate standards", but my reaction to that is just that their previous hosts were even worse about it. Every hosting solution I have had other than AWS has been cheaper.

More importantly to me than price though is the knowledge. I really don't like that AWS is a "black box" of mystery meat. I don't know how most of the systems are implemented under the hood, which means I can't predict what the failure points are and what I'm implementing. The way I would compile capabilities of AWS systems together was through anecdotal information via blog posts. We would have servers fail and be given no explanation as to why. And many of the interfaces are proprietary, which means that moving to an alternative is not an option. Not to mention the APIs are not particularly stellar (a lot of XML). The only options for persistent storage are network drives and local disks that go away on shutdown, which is not a particularly good choice of options.

With OVH, I get a server. I know what a server is, how to back it up, and what its fail points are. If OVH does something I don't agree with, I can move to another company and have exactly the same environment.

I'm not saying AWS is useless (again, I've used it for corporate environments before), but it's hard to justify the high cost when you're on a budget, especially when you can't even determine if the tradeoff is worth it.

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