At least some people mention "but I can scale this lambda x1000" and that's one advantage... But you can do all those tasks on a hetzner server in same amount of type, just python scripts.
Let's say that Hetzner server goes completely toast at 2am and you get a pingdom message. You log in, realize you have to restore from backup. You fire up a new instance, and go through your restore procedure, and everything works great. You're lucky to be offline for an hour.
I cannot even tell you what would happen if an underlying instance running a Lambda goes offline, because it never happens. But let's say that an underlying machine dies in us-east-1. Lambda just starts running more instances of your code on another underlying group of cpus, and you aren't offline.
I wish there was some easier way to quantify the “soft” aspects of everything that surrounds us, e.g. the long-term impact of beautiful and usable UI design, the reduction in “ambient” psychological stress, the impacts of chaos/consistency on how we feel, any robust measures of happiness, excitement, relaxation, etc.
They seem to be such important attributes, but not as easily measured as a latency. Which in turn makes reaching consensus harder—and probably why design by committee doesn't work?
My entire goal is for my services to never wake me up. And if they do it had better because I clearly messed up and am the sole human alive able to fix it.
There's no point in waking up when everything is blowing up if you don't have the access to fix the underlying issue. AWS doesn't actually guarantee 99.9% uptime. What they guarantee is they'll give you some company currency[1] if they can't meet or exceed 99.9% uptime.
So the next time the ship is on fire, don't worry, stay asleep and your Amazon account manager will be by shortly with a thimble of water to throw on you :)
[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/aws-syste...
Bravo.
Having been on call for some truly monstrous amount of things and seen things break in all kinds of ways... I can't agree more with this principle.
While the cloud isn't cheap, if your org can afford it, there is no question about it: go with managed services. Focus on building things, leave the OPS to AWS/GCP/Azure.
Are you really sure that it all re-ran? No. You have to query your latest batch - which means you have to have arbitrary boundaries for when failures might have occurred like say, last 24 hours. If was a weekend, just query the whole database looking for any entry that's missing the "final" status success. Try not to run anything while you're doing this, unless your system is tolerant to the DB being locked for a full-table scan.
This is all very fragile and change-averse. Who would choose to run an ETL like this? I have worked for large companies who all end up with this rickety system. Every one, every time. God forbid you want to run tests with a mock set of serverless AWS services.
Our use of AWS Lambda for ETL is usually just one-off small processes that don't have dependencies.
As soon as you start getting into "This ETL depends on X, Y, and Z being run first" I think you're out of "small utility" territory.
Meanwhile, I don't have to do things like /make sure the ETL process is running/ or /clear out a bunch of logs when a disk inadvertently fills up/ or any of those other stupid last-century compute problems. It's just a far, far easier way of thinking about application development.
I can appreciate that. A lot more people than you might think, use Kafka or SQS because of various requirements (like that's all their infrastructure supports) and you end up with a massive "source" DB which is a duplication of all-time messages. Such is the reality of a larger byzantine organization. If it can't be audited by someone else, at their own pace, it's not approved.
Does it make sense for FAANG to run their own datacenters? Yes of course. Does it make sense for you? No. This is what I don't get about arguments for running a bunch of VPSs-- for literally any environment that isn't thousands of engineers, it is more cost effective to let someone manage your underlying infrastructure for you, and any workload at that scale, you aren't contracting with some random bare metal hosting shop.
I believe he is comparing aws bills vs. engineer time+other hosting bills.
This is how we actually end up having centralized services. The larger companies who have all this infrastructure, and have the size to justify building their own.. well they inevitably ask themselves "Hey! we have all this infra, we have to pay these people anyways, why aren't we selling excess capacity?"
Then you get AWS. Then as time progresses people at even large institutions that could benefit from running their own infra just go and use another company's infra. Where the other company has evolved into being an infra provider instead of a car parts store, book store(amazon), or search engine.
To answer your question directly. Yes I think this can be done within one engineer salary even if I'm including my own salary. There would be a startup cost that eats into that salary in year 1. But it would be manageable. And then iterative upgrades/replacement parts would be a negligible cost ongoing after year 1. With some financial tricks that startup cost can be spread out over a long enough period that it wouldn't even impact year 1.
And we're approaching that because as these types of skills are outsourced to these institutions the amount of people with the skills necessary to carry them out are diminished in number from attrition. Amazon doesn't need 10 company's worth of engineers to have the requisite skills. If everyone buys into this model then eventually the market will only bear the number of engineers having that knowledge as Amazon needs.
You'd be spending more than 1/2 your time just on the phone talking to people.
If we want to talk about running a CDN company in terms of lots of additional organizational complexity in terms of customer service it can't be done on a single engineer's salary. My perception of a homegrown CDN is one that rivals uptime and deliverability metrics of existing commercial CDN providers. Within an existing org it can be done. If we're talking outside of an existing org think http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/ to shave costs.
If we're willing to define parameters on what level of service this CDN needs to meet and ramp up time I'd be willing to take it on.
This is my point-- I am not in the hosting business. I am in the application creation business. Every minute that I even have to think about modifying /etc/localtime in order to make sure that the instance is running in UTC is a minute I'm not being productive. Multiply that by those million little things that you have to do in order to keep even an ec2 instance running, and it's such a colossal waste of time and effort. Similarly, I am not in the database tuning business. I plan out my data relationships, create the required Dynamo table or tables, and I never need to worry about replication or backups or any of those ancillary tasks that keep me from being productive.
I'm not a woodworker, machinist, farmer, or doing a PhD in literature. Nevertheless, I engage in all of these things. I enjoy crafting things and learning new techniques. I enjoy learning how to optimize plant growth. I enjoy reading old literature and gathering what I can from it about the historical context, linguistics, etc. All of these types of things, while not "productive" give me additional knowledge that I can pull from in "unrelated" tasks.
In the tech world, I'd say that realistically all abstractions are leaky. So engaging in these tasks(you mentioned) are productive. But even more than that because abstractions are leaky this is knowledge that is useful. If you don't have the knowledge of the systems underlying the abstractions you're using it's a footgun waiting to happen.
I can give an example. I had a boss that was doing some serverless work and he made an assumption about JSON. I told him in review that JSON does not respect ordering of keys. Well, he assumed it would not be a problem. It was pushed to production anyways. And a few weeks later it came back to bite him.
Now what happens when you don't dig into your abstractions? You lack the knowledge to fix problems that happen at a lower level. When you're deploying these "relationships" to your database provider. What happens when the machinery breaks down for replication, backups, etc? You have to sit around and wait for an expert to fix your app. Meanwhile you're staring at your users and stonewalling.
No, you're not in the hosting business, you're not in the database tuning business, you're not in the sysadmin business, and you're not in the Ecmascript working group. Until you are. Then when you're foisted into this role you're a fish out of water. Specialization is for ants, but we're humans, not ants.
Have fun with an army of one-trick pony hires. One old-school diehard computer nerd knows enough to supplant 10 of those fools, but only costs 2x.
About staff, maybe consider finding a good consulting/support firm that can look after your servers for <10% the price of hiring one person, are friendly and on-call, and will likely stick around even as their people change.
That solves the worry about replacing people, as well as the cost.
But as with people, it can take some luck to find a good one :-)
(I used to provide that kind of consulting/support service. Not as much now because there isn't much demand, and development & research work is more satisfying. But still a little, ticking along in the background.)
That's some ridiculous propaganda. AWS has whole regions going down for hours.
That's a big selling point for DigitalOcean: you sleep easy knowing what your bill will be. If you have an unexpected spike in traffic--whether a great opportunity, a mistaken test run wild, or a DDoS--it doesn't increase your bill. AWS offers the opposite: no matter what happens, we'll keep you online and just send you the bill.
Edit: add RDS to the parenthetical list of AWS services above.
Nothing a server template, code repo, and daily db dump cronjob can't solve
Dealing with server infrastructure isn't business differentiating. Doing it poorly can certainly be business terminating, though.
I agree, for most businesses no it isn't.
However, saving on cloud hosting costs to replace them with a handful of dedicated servers in different data centres can make a large difference to costs, depending on what the cloud usage is. For a funded rocketship startup with lots of free AWS credits it makes sense to use AWS; for a steady state or long-term low income business, not so much.
Those costs can make all the difference to a business if the cloud rental is creeping up to look comparable with salaries.
I've used a combination of dedicated and cloud hosting for a long time. In general the dedicated systems are so much cheaper for the same amount of bandwidth and compute, and you can run VMs on them with great performance, so you can run everything interesting inside VMs and a lot of the arguments around upgrade downtime have completely gone away.
With some cloud to assist, you can even use cloud temporarily to cover the downtime for major upgrades such as replacing hosts or reconfiguring the cluster network.
99.9% uptime with excellent bandwidth is easily achievable this way, and you can completely avoid user-facing downtime due to planned upgrades, with a bit of planning around DNS and IP transitions, VM migration, overlay networks, things like that.
Sometimes at much lower opex cost (100x) than the modern cloud-recommended equivalents, although it takes knowledge and time to ensure it.
If you have enough redundancy and occasional infrastructure stress testing, a similar level of "optimise for sleep" is possible as with cloud deployments. If you care about this (not every business does), it does take some work and knowledge to produce and verify hot redundancy, and of course there are costs.
Things will go wrong, but they'll tend to be at the level of things running inside VMs and containers, rather than hosts failing. The same things which go wrong with cloud deployments anyway.
The cloud can be used alongside dedicated to provide some of that redundancy and extra scaling. Cloud is rented in small units of time, so you can use cloud as "free most of the time" cold-backup service, and if there's a burst in traffic beyond what the dedicated systems can provide, or if you want to temporarily improve geographic locality for a service.
It might seem wasteful to rent larger dedicated services rather than cloud-as-needed, but the cost differential has changed in the last 10 years to favour the former more than it used to.
Even assuming that you save 100% of your hosting costs, you have to be spending quite a lot to even cover the salary of one full-time employee.
I can believe that larger businesses can save quite a bit, but I don't see how it makes sense for anyone spending less than seven figures a year on AWS.
For a small business, it makes sense to outsource things like that, even you if you could conceivably do it in-house.
I dunno, that's a problem for the ops team. It was in the 20th century too. The only reason you would have to worry about it is if you're pulling double duty as under-trained ops. If that were the case the right answer to every "build or buy" question is "buy" because you don't have anyone with the domain knowledge to bring more architectural options to the table than 'half-ass server management with internet tutorials.'
Then don't have backups at all, let's see how that goes.
I don't want to have to manage security updates, disk usage, or any of the other multiple things that come with owning a server.
I also could probably debate on the friendly-ness of just dumping all of these one-off services onto a single server (seems like it could get messy pretty quick), but I think you could probably go either way on that.
We are also an AWS shop for our "production" stack already, so there is no added overhead for owning an AWS account.
One to run the application.
One to run the application while the first is being upgraded.
Now you need three servers, one to run the application, one as backup and one as load balancer.
99.99% uptime means you can be down no more than an hour a year. Which is really easy to overshoot when you're dicking around with a dist upgrade on three linux boxes.
So that's why you end up with a server farm starting from your one small server.
Drain a server, upgrade it, boot it, check that it works, let it accept traffic. Repeat once more. Done.
It may be true that most businesses don’t need the uptime, but I’d say it’s usually easier to give them high availability rather than field complaints when some random user tries to look something up during a maintenance window.
I don’t think of this as particularly fancy or expensive, considering how much you have to pay for engineers and technicians. It was critical enough for >3 nines, and that means having a technician on-call.
I saw this setup at two different companies I worked at, even though the tech stacks were completely different. Whenever I price out setups for similar requirements in cloud I almost always end up with basically the same setup, just on cloud VMs instead of dedicated servers.
My bank has regular scheduled downtime, Steam/Dota has regular downtime, entire Microsoft datacenters had issues and had around a day of downtime, Lime, Uber, my mobile carrier - all had downtime or bugs or glitches that were equivalent to downtime.
If you really need crazy uptime, then you must make sure you have no bugs, because bugs cause more downtime than any hardware failures.
That means an approach to software development that isn't relying on flavour of the month js library.
That 99.99% uptime is achievable with a single dedicated server, plus cloud as a cold backup and some monitoring to trigger spinning it up.
You will spin up the cloud server when the dedicate server is down. It will cost, but only for brief periods of time.
That's sometimes cheaper than two dedicated servers.
I prefer more than 1 dedicated server, but it's definitely possible to get the 99.99% uptime with just 1.
And in some ways the extra diversity of having a different kind of backup is useful, e.g. for burst scaling as well, and for peace of mind not relying on a single provider.
Even better, you can (and should) run the applications in VMs, or in containers inside VMs. They perform well these days, and even a severe application crash won't take down the host.
Then regular application upgrades don't need a separate host server. Instead you're spinning up and shutting down VMs.
You can also migrate VMs between hosts, and this can be done live if you want. It takes some setting up to have working distributed storage and movable networking, but it's possible.
However, you might decide not to bother with that, as starting and stopping instances and having fleets of instances managed by something like K8S is modern practice for other comforting reasons anyway.
Then the only "big" upgrades are limited to host server upgrades and major network reconfigurations, both of which you will do rarely. You might do host server security upgrades (kernel etc) more often, but that costs the time of a reboot unless it goes wrong.
If those are planned or automated, those "big" upgrades can be done with zero user-facing downtime except in the event of failure, in which case it's limited to the cold-spare startup time
So provided you have the backups in place, maybe on the cloud as a cold-spare so you're not paying for it except when it's needed, you can still have that 99.99% uptime for approximately the cost of one server.
You do not need a separate load balancer device for uptime specifically; only if load balancing is something you want anyway for other reasons. For seamless transitions between backend servers, if you have multiple servers running at a particular time, there are other methods.
On occasions you might instantiate a cloud load balancer temporarily to cover downtime during a planned host upgrade that can't be routed around another way. Like with a cloud cold-spare server, you don't pay for it except when it's temporarily instantiated.