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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

> Also AWS support is simply amazing.

A few weeks ago, I had a two-node Elasticsearch cluster (evidently my mistake...though IDK why AWS can operate high availability two-node transaction RDS clusters no problem but not ES).

One node went down, only manual intervention by AWS support could fix it, automatic backups were completely inaccessible (since they rely on the cluster being up? ... WTF), and it took many hours for support to reset the cluster.

I eventually just "screw it," and spent a couple rebuilding the cluster from scratch.

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AWS has over 175+ services and is continually improving. I would say more new services on launch don't live up to the promise but quarter after quarter you see dramatic improvement, some services it's year after year. What makes AWS so valuable is not individual services but the fact you can string them together which outweighs the feature set of a single service.

Github is amazing for developer happiness but CodeCommit is secure and seamlessly integrates with so many AWS Services I Can live without all the bells and whisltes of Github.

Elasticsearch is on the older side of those 175, since it launched in 2015. [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-elasticsearch-se...

I've never had aws hand over anything under a tenuous legal argument. Github bent over and found the first reason they could. I'll pay my money to AWS first, because it doesn't compromise my business.

This. AWS support is wildly expensive. I actually encourage most companies to find a smaller partner with strong infrastructure for this exact reason.

AWS Business Support is only $100 / USD per month where you can call in 24/7 and be connected with a Cloud Support Engineer within 5-15 mins. If you don't like the engineer, hang up call again and get someone different. That's incredibly in-expensive, saves me hours or hiring more devs.

You can get this Business Support for free a year if you join StartupSchool and get 3K USD credits with the business support.

If you can't afford it, maybe you are just hobbying around but AWS offers lots of ways to support you until you have a substainable revenue.

Last I checked it was a percentage of your spend.

I think you may not appreciate how much $100 a month is for many people around the globe.

That may be. But, then, you're definitely in the category of your time isn't really worth anything and screwing around for a few days doing DIY on software/hardware/etc. is a better solution than paying someone to do something for you. That's fine but you're really describing paid support generally.

This right here

I always hear people on the internet talking about AWS being crazy expensive, but from SFBA it looks really damn cheap. Would I rather give $thousands to AWS or $hundredthousands to an internal specialist who’s likely gonna say my company is too small and boring to keep them interested anyway?

AWS wind that math every day. And that’s the market they target. Why wouldnt they?

AWS is extremely expensive once you get to any meaningful size. If you save on infrastructure you pay for it on enterprise support, engineers or consultants and/or bandwidth.

I LIKE AWS. I think it can be a great choice for many companies and use-cases. But the idea that AWS is firmly everyone, that it's less expensive for everyone when you factor in the TCO, simply isnt correct.

> But the idea that AWS is firmly everyone, that it's less expensive for everyone when you factor in the TCO, simply isnt correct.

Correct. I specifically said it’s perfect if your labor cost is higher than your AWS cost

Another good case is indie hackers whose project likely won’t ever make it out of the free tier

This just isn't true, in fact quite the opposite. If you just have a website you are working on aws is complex and expensive. When you need to handle it at scale then AWS is far better than other clouds and an order of magnitude cheaper than rolling your own racks.

What's meaningful? It'll cost you a half million to build a full rack, power it and give it connectivity for a year. That's a lot of spot instances if you don't have a constant load

> It'll cost you a half million to build a full rack, power it and give it connectivity for a year.

For $1500/mo you can get half rack (5Kv) and 50 Mbps internet. A couple $5k switches and 6-8 10k servers and you're well under $125k, plus you probably don't need $10k servers or $5k switches and can find cheaper hosting. I realize you said a full rack, but that's probably overkill and could be done for $350k or less. Once you have the servers/switches your fixed costs are relatively low.

Part of it is that people see the AWS or support bill or consultant bill or whatever. But they don't really see the cost of DIY whether initial cost or ongoing support. The cost of build (on many dimensions) vs. buy is often underestimated. That's not to say you should never build--no, you shouldn't use AWS for everything--but it's important to understand the real costs.

I ran the tech team of a startup in a third world country (bullet lending $100 bucks to people) we were cheap and it was always a problem to convince finance to buy technology instead of throwing more cheap labour.

Still, those $100 monthly we paid for aws support were worth their weight in gold.

For a person anywhere on earth? Sure. But 99.99999% of those people don't need on-demand cloud hosting support.

But for a business that requires cloud hosting with support? There aren't many places on the planet where $100 is a prohibitive cost for a business that's willing to spend at minimum that much for hosting.

In short, it's the cost of doing business.

They once tried to get me to sign up for $100/month to fix an issue on their side. I refused and 3 days later my problem was magically resolved. AWS is starting to mimic the poor customer treatment I used to only associate with the Amazon marketplace.

Elasticsearch is a bad example. Their elasticsearch offering has always been wack.

There's a tier of services at AWS:

s3/ec2/ecs/rds/elasticache - Flagships, will almost always work except in weird edge cases. Everyone uses these.

Niche Stuff - If you need it you'll know. It'll generally at least be an 80% tool (think athena/firehose/aws waf/etc).

Stuff with shitty pricing - Stuff they obviously only built for feature parity with GCP/Microsoft (think EKS/Managed SFTP/Cloud Active Directory)

Broken shit you use once, it screws you, and you never use it again - Usually it's either because the underlying open source tool is built in a fashion that isn't appropriate for a shared services environment or it's because someone at AWS has 'opinions' (think Elasticsearch/Cloudformation)

It is not recommended to run two node ES clusters. The AWS service shouldn't allow that configuration.

Yeah, that was my mistake.

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