How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
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Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#2Nice writing!
My gut feeling says part of the problem is C-levels, like CTOs, in recent time, coming solely from programming experience and its just mentally hard for them to even consider having physical hardware (yet on colocation!) and managing such systems. It's just out of equation.
On the article itself, billions scale payments are astonishing. And how much paying for traffic would add here too.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#3Nice writing! My gut feeling says part of the problem is C-levels, like CTOs, in recent time, coming solely from programming experience and its just mentally hard for them to even consider having physical hardware (yet on colocation!) and managing such systems. It's just out of equation. On the article itself, billions scale payments are astonishing. And how much paying for traffic would add here too.
Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation.
I can see why, though. First, there was so much money flowing into IT since 20-ish years that cost was not a consideration both on infra and salary side. Second, connecting all the piping gives an illusion of doing work and feeling "important". You know, we need to be scalable because Google does, and they're successful, right?
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#4Nice writing! My gut feeling says part of the problem is C-levels, like CTOs, in recent time, coming solely from programming experience and its just mentally hard for them to even consider having physical hardware (yet on colocation!) and managing such systems. It's just out of equation. On the article itself, billions scale payments are astonishing. And how much paying for traffic would add here too.
Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation. I can see why, though. First, there was so much money flowing into IT since 20-ish years that cost was not a consideration both on infra and salary side. Second, connecting all the piping gives an illusion of doing work and feeling "important". You know, we need to be scalable because Google does, and they're successful, r…
> Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation.
I partially agree with you, but my point is - things are even worse at times - arguing happens when there is more than single person involved - CTO may just not even considering/thinking on using hardware, it's a very strong habit to relay on cloudy stuff, atrophy of some sort.
> Second, connecting all the piping gives an illusion of doing work and feeling "important".
This happens as well, but I think it's more about "keeping things under control" - humans feel more comfortable when they control or tend to believe they control things, all humans, not just developers. From this perspective "gee, this Cloud has API and Console, I can manage it" gives this assurance -> leads to have feeling of control => preferable solution.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#5Fun random fact, Ahrefs is STILL denied a Wikipedia article, even though their competitors like SEMRUSH have one. Wouldn't be surprised if bad actors were involved. I mean hell, I've heard their crawling spider was the 2nd largest on the web after Google.
Super interesting article though, and a nice addition to their prior one.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation. I can see why, though. First, there was so much money flowing into IT since 20-ish years that cost was not a consideration both on infra and salary side. Second, connecting all the piping gives an illusion of doing work and feeling "important". You know, we need to be scalable because Google does, and they're successful, r…
> Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation. I partially agree with you, but my point is - things are even worse at times - arguing happens when there is more than single person involved - CTO may just not even considering/thinking on using hardware, it's a very strong habit to relay on cloudy stuff, atrophy of some sort. > Second, connecting all the piping gives a…
I’ve been doing infrastructure for 27 years.
Around a dozen years ago, my business was designing building and supporting physical infrastructure for startups.
One company was humming along nicely on $4000 of used hardware and a $2000 a month cage in a Colo facility.
Their business had ramped up and got some funding, so we got them another 60k worth of hardware in nother facility.
They onboarded still more customers to where they needed a few thousand dollars worth of SSDs to keep up with their random io demands.
But their new VC-installed CTO was like… No! We spent all this money on hardware and it’s not doing what we need it to! That’s crap! We’re gonna move to the cloud and save money.
So they moved to Amazon.
Their first month’s bill was $50,000. And it only went up from there.
The cloud is dandy for small workloads. But where you’ve got a consistently large workload the break even point on owning your hardware is a lot lower than most people think, even factoring in infra management expenses.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#7I think these articles are great.
It's about understanding what you do and what infra is appropriate.
I have to wonder how that would look with a negotiated AWS discount. But they might get beaten to death by incoming bandwidth costs anyway.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#8I think these articles are great. It's about understanding what you do and what infra is appropriate. I have to wonder how that would look with a negotiated AWS discount. But they might get beaten to death by incoming bandwidth costs anyway.
from AWS/GCP/Azure/you_name_it's perspective, it may be worth to give that 90% discount extra, just to ensure
1. keep shrinking workforce being able to keep doing such kind of setups
2. avoid such writeups with _numbers_ at all
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Arguing with programmers is oftentimes pointless these days. Pragmatism is out of the equation. I partially agree with you, but my point is - things are even worse at times - arguing happens when there is more than single person involved - CTO may just not even considering/thinking on using hardware, it's a very strong habit to relay on cloudy stuff, atrophy of some sort. > Second, connecting all the piping gives a…
I’ve been doing infrastructure for 27 years. Around a dozen years ago, my business was designing building and supporting physical infrastructure for startups. One company was humming along nicely on $4000 of used hardware and a $2000 a month cage in a Colo facility. Their business had ramped up and got some funding, so we got them another 60k worth of hardware in nother facility. They onboarded still more customers t…
> But their new VC-installed CTO was like… No!
Largely the point I'm trying to put here
> Their first month’s bill was $50,000. And it only went up from there.
Well, I've read it's not uncommon to have salaries of 200-500k USD/year per programmer, on that scale may be it doesn't matter is it 50k spending on infra or 100k . For others such extra spending is _something_ though.
Re: How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount
#10I think these articles are great. It's about understanding what you do and what infra is appropriate. I have to wonder how that would look with a negotiated AWS discount. But they might get beaten to death by incoming bandwidth costs anyway.
Netflix is a flagship example of AWS usage. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/innovators/net...
We don't know what are Netflix discounts. Maybe Netflix uses AWS just for free to make others pay. Maybe AWS even pay to Netflix to continue attracting the other guys.
On the other hand, just read this disclosure in the Netflix 2023 annual financial report: "We have architected our software and computer systems so as to utilize data processing, storage capabilities and other services provided by AWS... Given this, along with the fact that we cannot easily switch our AWS operations to another cloud provider, any disruption of or interference with our use of AWS would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted. While the retail side of Amazon competes with us, we do not believe that Amazon will use the AWS operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service, although if it were to do so it could harm our business."