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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

From AWS' own marketing propaganda: How much would said clients have to invest in people and hardware otherwise? What if their application becomes an overnight success and needs to scale up fast?

Sure, if it's an established company then using their own hardware (and people to set up and manage it) might make sense; iirc Dropbox is a fairly recent big player that made that move. But otherwise it's a big upfront investment to make, and you can't know if it'll pay itself back.

So sure, AWS can be 2x or more as expensive as renting servers at a company like OVH or building your own datacenter, but it's paid by the minute if need be, not all in one go. If your startup or its VC money runs out in six months at least you can quickly scale down and pull out.

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I think 2x is a bit optimistic, if you just compare what kind of hardware you get by renting a dedicated server compared to EC2 it can easily be 5x or more. Of course that compares very different things, and doesn't mean that renting dedicated servers is always cheaper. The comparison gets much, much worse when significant amounts of traffic is involved. And scaling down isn't so much more difficult than with AWS within certain limits.

Comparing managed services like databases is maybe more meaningful than just EC2, but also so much more difficult.

StackOverflow is famous for running on-prem on bare metal Dell hardware: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

Last time I checked, GitHub was also mostly on bare metal and cloud-free.

They launched in 2008, on a stack built around IIS because that was what their early devs were familiar with.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

StackOverflow does predate the AWS world takeover.

How is this relevant? Amazon.com also predates AWS.

The implication is that they had already solved these problems and redoing the stack has its own cost to consider.

For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month. And it is not hard, easy in many ways. Do not be fooled, the cloud companies are peddling is an expensive scam.

Cloud companies are useful as long as you want what their selling. The best case is needing say 2 TB of ram for some workload or test that only going to take a few hours.

Or something like the Olympics where 95% of your demand comes in a predictable spike across a few days.

very true, the original selling point for Cloud was instant upgrade/downgrade as needed. That was the original amazing thing, dials that said RAM and CPU you could turn up or turn down.

If I was doing my own thing I would go the same route as you, but I’m knowledgeable about this stuff, and can manage the entire system (network, replacing bad hardware, etc). It would need to be a very good reason for me to be oncall for that, or else I’d save money by going with something like ovh.

> For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month.

Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper?

Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you aren't taking advantage of the features available to you which would allow you to reduce your costs.

> Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem...

It was far better to invest a little up front, and maintain at $600 my operations than the same for $96K a month, that's why.

I never "lifted and shifted", I built and deployed, with physical servers, a 3-way duplicated environment that flew like a hot rod. At a fraction of cloud's expense.

I think the point GP was making is that you could have likely started off much cheaper, eg. with 2k/month of AWS costs before needing to "simply" scale at eg. 12 months, especially so if using managed services and not just bare ec2 instances.

I personally think there's room for both, and I think hybrids between on-prem and cloud are the ideal for long running apps: you size your on-prem infrastructure to handle 99% of the load, and scale to the cloud for that one-off peak.

That's still pretty complicated due to different types of vendor lock in (or lock out in some cases). Google has invested in k8s to get people some value for moving away from AWS.

My application had (still would have) very high CPU requirements, and 2k/month would have got me spending more money than necessary. When I started I bought 1 server with the capacity I needed and put that in co-lo for $75 a month. That little puppie was equal to $10K a month at AWS, so why would I want to use AWS again? Just do the math, even 1 server out performs and is exponentially less expensive. The cloud has the majority of engineers looking like morons from a financial literacy perspective.

Are you claiming that you knew exactly how powerful you needed your machines to be, before you launched? Or are your machines running at 25% utilization which AWS would charge substantially less for?

I'm not making any such claim. I'm saying I built a 24-7 available physical 17-server cluster to operate my startup's needs. I had more capacity than I needed, but at the same expense thru AWS I'd not have enough to operate. At less than the expense of one AWS month, I had my entire environment owned outright. How is that difficult to understand?

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