Cloud costs are in a bubble • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#91

Post by sebag1507 » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #63

vkou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thing is, it does disappear approximately every 10 years, as we've observed since software first became a thing. It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces. My point is that in the average case, there is ~zero opportunity cost or damage to your career, because you worked at MS Azure, instead of... Somewhere else. You cit…

> It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces. Tech has been the darling of late exactly because it hasn't followed the general economy. In 2008, when virtually every other industry was about to sound death knells, developers were making bank producing apps. Similar story through the pandemic, when people were locked out of…

[I work at Firebase, but opinions are my own] I am happy to report that Firebase is actually used by companies of all sizes and types, including Fortune 1000.

I appreciate the concern though :).

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#92

Post by mushi » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

snird wrote: post #6

bfung wrote: post #2

Hard to confirm the article and the tweet. The author should provide the exact details and operations for someone to replicate and verify, or at least do the math. The mongodb pricing page says one can setup a M10 instance for $57/month. [ https://www.mongodb.com/pricing ] Racking up a $2500/day bill is several of magnitudes off - there’s nothing in the article to help put the workload in context. I have zero interes…

Author here. I used the "Serverless" product, not the "Dedicated" product. That's the gap you see here. But your point is important, I'll add it to the post. Thank you.

How much did you actually pay them?

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#93

Post by DeathArrow » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 5:52 AM UTC

From my PoV, using cloud instead of self hosting, rarely makes economic sense.

Most of the time is more expensive than paying for the infrastructure and personnel to manage it.

Also, while apparently cloud reduces complexity, it will end up adding lots of other complexities. And dealing with complexity means more money.

Also, the more you invest in a particular cloud technology, the more locked in you are, the less alternatives you have and that means paying up more.

If Stack Overflow does well by managing few dedicated servers, I don't get why smaller operations really "need" cloud.

And to add another perspective, the more layers of abstraction and indirection you add, the more complicated and ineficient things will be.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#94

Post by DeathArrow » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 5:54 AM UTC

sebag1507 wrote: post #91

randomdata wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces. Tech has been the darling of late exactly because it hasn't followed the general economy. In 2008, when virtually every other industry was about to sound death knells, developers were making bank producing apps. Similar story through the pandemic, when people were locked out of…

[I work at Firebase, but opinions are my own] I am happy to report that Firebase is actually used by companies of all sizes and types, including Fortune 1000. I appreciate the concern though :).

Which percentage are Fortune 1000?

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#95

Post by DeathArrow » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 6:24 AM UTC

turtlebits wrote: post #66

queezey wrote: post #3

Related reading from DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and Hey): https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

All of these posts never seem to talk about the operational overheard they're saving by using the cloud. 500k/year is a couple of engineers. And IME, at scale, Elasticsearch is a huge pain to self manage.

We had large Kubernetes deployments, + Elasticsearch + various databases, + monitoring tools managed by two guys.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#96

Post by vitaly_il » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 9:21 AM UTC

I read both Snir's port and the HN thread, but I'd like to see more details about his workload and setup. $2500/day is a lot. Of course, it's possible to reach such numbers, but IMHO and AFAIK: 1) it's not the same setup as " $800 Azure VMs deployment " - I promise you 2) the post is useless w/o detailed bill

At a glance, Atlas pricing includes the typical ~ 20% premium if we compare it with AWS (Azure/GCP) VM setup. 20% is very far from *100 price difference as per article.

Vitaly https://linkedin.com/in/vkarasik

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#97

Post by vitaly_il » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

bfung wrote: post #2

Hard to confirm the article and the tweet. The author should provide the exact details and operations for someone to replicate and verify, or at least do the math. The mongodb pricing page says one can setup a M10 instance for $57/month. [ https://www.mongodb.com/pricing ] Racking up a $2500/day bill is several of magnitudes off - there’s nothing in the article to help put the workload in context. I have zero interes…

+1 - the post speaks about 100 times difference between VM and Atlas setup. At a glance, Atlas cloud has typical ~ 20% premium if we compare their pricing to AWS/Azure VM setup. 20% is not x100. So IMHO and AFAIK we're speaking here about serious misconfiguration.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#98

Post by vitaly_il » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

jd_mongodb wrote: post #4

bfung wrote: post #2

Hard to confirm the article and the tweet. The author should provide the exact details and operations for someone to replicate and verify, or at least do the math. The mongodb pricing page says one can setup a M10 instance for $57/month. [ https://www.mongodb.com/pricing ] Racking up a $2500/day bill is several of magnitudes off - there’s nothing in the article to help put the workload in context. I have zero interes…

I did manage to approach his costs by running a sharded cluster with our largest configuration (M600 nodes with 640GB RAM. 4TB storage and 3.8m IOPS). That is priced quite clearly on the bottom page at 102.49 USD an hour.

Obviously we cannot launch such 3node cluster in Azure/AWS for $800/month :-)

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#99

Post by llanowarelves » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #11

I have always kind of disliked both cloud and containers. Primarily, they just add more complexity and overhead into the computing landscape. I've thought this to be bad both in material resources and energy consumption, but humans have a high time preference, and therefore they choose to spend both materials and resources to get a little more time back. This is much the same reason that hipster languages and framewo…

I predict that in the downturn, we will see not only less cloud, but less microservices -- more "macroservices" or monoliths.

For the same reasons you outlined above: complexity.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#100

Post by outworlder » Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #13

Be it VC money, or just general apathy, it seems cloud costs are rarely a priority. My biggest gripe is when see that justification that goes like, "developer's time is $100/hr and better spent elsewhere." Okay, I agree, doing something like self-hosting everything to reduce costs would be a terrible idea, but there's a fine balance. In 2019, Lyft spent $300M on AWS [1]. Sure, it's a big service, but are you seriousl…

> it seems cloud costs are rarely a priority.

Because they aren't a priority until they are.

Execs will either turn a blind eye or simply won't understand that it's a problem, until a massive purchase order lands in accounting and gets escalated to the highest levels.

Now it's suddenly a problem and it is up to the operations/devops/SRE/name of the month/SecFinDeVOps to figure out how to reduce costs. Which is completely backwards as they are probably not the group who requested the resources in the first place.