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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

What about AWS Aurora? I have not used it, but I definitely would if I was using MySQL.

AWS Aurora seems to go at the problem differently. They spread the disk out over three AZs in 10GB chunks. So if the instance powering the Aurora db engine crashes, a new one spins up quickly and begins pulling from the same disks.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/

I predict in 5 years... this will be the standard.

Its not so much about wanting to bolt onto amazon's eco for stuff -- but just allowing an org to focus.

AWS allows for an ops team to completely have no concern for hardware. Lovely.

I also don't want an ops team doing DB cluster mgmt.

I want to deploy and delve into my data.

I want my data/eng/dev/ops teams to be pummeling the shit out of my data without concern for the instances/hw/cluster.

aurora adds to the cloud fabric.

One thing amazon is moving to is to define compute capacity vs defining instances at all.

Their vision of abstraction is amazing.

> AWS allows for an ops team to completely have no concern for hardware. Lovely.

I split my time between managing a few racks worth of servers at one company, and an AWS setup at another client. The amount of ops work per server/instance is higher for the AWS client than it is for the company I manage physical racks for. That's despite the fact I do physical cabling and racking of equipment as necessary.

The issue is that there are so many aspects of the AWS infrastructure that takes extra effort because we don't have full control. E.g. we can stuff whatever disk subsystem we want in the servers and not have to work our way around the lack of any truly fast disk subsystems in EC2. So for every day I don't physically move serves, I spend 3-5 working around AWS limitations.

I agree with you with respect to what you want, but we're taking baby-steps today - AWS is way too expensive for most people to move to it, even before you factor in the ops complexities.

Same on Azure. Their networking stack is ... strange and undocumented. It's the worst IP network I've used in a while. Dealing with IP/TCP-level issues should not be something that's taking up any noticeable amount of time on a modern network. With Azure, it is.

I certainly think this will be the trend for startups but I believe it will take much longer for established companies to get out of the buying hardware business. Often times running locally can be drastically less costly than running on Amazon -- especially if you already have the staff dedicated to that sort of role.

I agree -- but I am curious to know the diff in opex/capex when you dont need to have staff to handle said HW/Roles etc...

I am sure this has been looked at by people -- anyone know of a report on it?

I don't know of any reports on it, but from personal experience, the amount of time spent on average per physical server I configure and shift around is a tiny fraction of the time I spend dealing with AWS peculiarities you don't have to deal when you control your own hardware (I currently split my time 60/40 between two clients - one with a physical hosting environment set up as a private cloud split over two colo's, and one in AWS)

The company I manage physical servers for would go bankrupt if we were to pay AWS level rates. Last time we priced it out we were looking at ~3x hosting cost - including fully loaded cost for staff time spent on maintenance etc.

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