Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
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Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#2>by not going to the cloud
...in the worst way imaginable
Doing a direct lift and shift with 1:1 replacement of instances is, intentionally, prohibitibely expensive, so you stop and think.
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#3(2023)
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#4They crawl all the time, their instances could go down and no problem, there are still hundreds doing the same task. They consume waaaay too much traffic for the cloud to make sense financially.
Hybrid approach is best in cases like this. Use the cloud for client facing interfaces and rent dedicated servers for the spiders.
edit: even better, build your own data center instead of renting.
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#5>by not going to the cloud ...in the worst way imaginable Doing a direct lift and shift with 1:1 replacement of instances is, intentionally, prohibitibely expensive, so you stop and think .
I don't really get it. You can't buy the same stuff, so reorganize your business to produce the same value by doing less stuff? It seems like advice that you could follow to achieve massive cost savings even without involving clouds.
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#6Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#7Original post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094407
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#8[deleted]
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#9Yes, but this is truly an exceptional case. Their workloads are basically scraping (crawling) at a massive scale. Just like Google does, it makes more sense to have cheap throw-away hardware for this use case.
There are no permission issues or ACLs.
There’s no need to auto scale and the traffic is very predictable.
There is no serious need to orchestrate deployments. I imagine it’s mostly just workers reading URLs from a queue and crawling a page. So very easy to deploy new servers.
This is just an edge case scenario specifically great for self hosting.
Re: Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)
#10>by not going to the cloud ...in the worst way imaginable Doing a direct lift and shift with 1:1 replacement of instances is, intentionally, prohibitibely expensive, so you stop and think .
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