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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

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Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#91

Post by osigurdson »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #19

This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…

I think you can be pretty big and still stay in Public Cloud. There is enough competition that pricing should trend toward commodity over time.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#92

Post by benmmurphy »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #47
cj wrote: post #5

This is just another way of saying “you shouldn’t use AWS if you don’t know how to use it” Yes, there’s a steep learning curve. But once you’re passed that (or if you gained that knowledge in a prior role) AWS can easily hands down be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest infrastructure platform to use. …if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know the ins and outs of AWS, then yes, you probably shouldn’t use it for…

Different strokes for different folks. (Or at least, use cases.) We’ve found at work that if you already have the talent, the hyper scale cloud platforms are amongst the most expensive ways to manage infrastructure if you go all in. For example $0.40/secret/mo is _expensive_ compared to the cost of an HA vault (not necessarily Hashicorp) setup. If you have 1,000 secrets but you only need to access any given secret on…

If you don’t need secret manager features like region replication and rotation you can use system manager parameters and the secret type. It’s effectively free. We use secret manager but weren’t aware of the price difference.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#93

Post by nine_k »

dcoperator1 wrote: post #66
sofixa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…

The price for colocating in a Tier 2 datacenter close enough for me to walk to was $75/amp. Which is about the same cost as AWS. You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.

How can you directly compare $75 / amp to AWS? This very much depends on the kind if load you have.

Also, AWS's egress likely costs much more than the datacenter's; again, possible savings very much depend on the kind of load you have.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#94

Post by scarface74 »

pkos98 wrote: post #82
scarface74 wrote: post #27

I work for AWS and I get paid decent money to work with companies and help them become “cloud native”. My specialty is “application modernization” and I avoid “lift and shift” projects like the plague. Even though I realize that doing lift and shifts first is the right answer sometimes. I think I can confidently state that I know AWS pretty well. That being said, in my personal life if someone ever came to me and sai…

Hey, coincidentally I am about to start a role in "Application Modernization" as Cloud Solution Architect at MSFT (though I only have experience with AWS). Do you mind if I ask u some further questions via the email in your profile?

I’m not even sure if I have access to that email. My username is the same on Reddit as it is here. DM me there.

I come from a .Net background , so feel free to reach out.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#96

Post by nicoburns »

scarface74 wrote: post #27

I work for AWS and I get paid decent money to work with companies and help them become “cloud native”. My specialty is “application modernization” and I avoid “lift and shift” projects like the plague. Even though I realize that doing lift and shifts first is the right answer sometimes. I think I can confidently state that I know AWS pretty well. That being said, in my personal life if someone ever came to me and sai…

What advantage do you see companies getting from using AWS's proprietary products over standard open source equivalents?8

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#97

Post by PubliusMI »

dijit wrote: post #45
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #19

This article is written in kind of a controversial way but it seems like the throughline of the argument is something like "use heroku until you have 100k users". This seems very reasonable to me. I thought it was going to be a pitch for on prem, which is also fine for certain scales. I think generally the scaling steps from startup to megacorp go: Heroku/Dokku > Public Cloud >Dedicated servers in someone else's DC >…

I really agree with you, what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you.

It's not weird.

Many mega-corps are extremely bloated and dysfunctional. Their IT (Private) Cloud teams slower and less competent.

With public cloud, a small team can be fully responsible for all their resources with crystal clear cost accounting.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#98

Post by CharlieDigital »

nicoburns wrote: post #88
fullstackchris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it lets you avoid up to about $50/month of digitalocean bills. Wish I'd know about this AWS free tier, because that sounds a lot like my monthly digital ocean bill :')

What are you running that costs $50/month? Several services with decent amounts of traffic?

If you run an RDS instance, I can see hitting that.

But there are alternatives like using Supabase or any of the Postgres or MySQL aligned serverless DBs like Cockroach, Planetscale, or other services if you want relational semantics and still be serverless.

On AWS, the load balancer is also surprisingly pricey; easily eats up $20/mo.

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#99

Post by [deleted] »

727564797069706 wrote: post #61

ITT: people who spent many hours learning proprietary (often unnecessarily complex) cloud platforms trying to convince others (and themselves) that it was the best use of their limited time alive. Stockholm syndrome à la Big Cloud. It's okay to be interested in elaborate cloud architecture things and learn them because of that, but don't sell it as one-size-fits-all thing that every little company needs. Most compani…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice

#100

Post by acdha »

kqr wrote: post #67
sofixa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks fo…

If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be. The upside is that it's much cheaper once you're at the scale where you no longer need to variableise your compute costs, but can tank the up-front fixed costs and do proper capacity planning.

> If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be.

Those people are speaking from greater experience - there are many things which seem easy but aren’t once you’re over a certain scale, and at large organizations you often have things like conflicting policies or coordinated demand (e.g. your slack capacity disappears when every project is trying to hit the same budget deadline or a change moratorium ends, a pipe breaks in building A and you need to shift a ton of previously-stable systems for 6 months, etc.).

You can do that kind of capacity planning well but it’s harder than it looks and often politically challenging because the benefits aren’t obvious. Cutting corners looks like saving money right up until it doesn’t. If you aren’t buying servers by the hundred or storage by the petabyte, you are unlikely to be competitive with a cloud service without sacrificing multiple of performance, reliability, timeliness, and security.

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