Comment by thomaslord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomaslord | Hacker News Reader

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> If your team is filled with devops engineers, then, sure, go with the non-AWS route.

This seems backwards to me - running a simple VPS on something like OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode is a matter of creating the instance, setting the size, and setting up your server software. Super simple, and likely about the same complexity as setting up a dev environment.

Setting the same thing up on AWS requires slogging through the documentation of their many services, deciding what makes the most sense for you (EC2? ECS? EKS? Lambda? Fargate?), and then configuring more options with less-friendly UI than any other provider I've seen. If you can fully wrap your head around all those services, create a stack that makes sense, and maintain it long-term, you're probably well on your way to being qualified for a DevOps engineer job. I can spin up a quick DigitalOcean droplet for a new project in less than half the time it'd take me to set up an EC2 instance, configure the exact amount of storage I need, and pull up 2 additional browser windows to determine the specs and pricing of different instance sizes in different regions.

> running a simple VPS on something like OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode is a matter of creating the instance, setting the size, and setting up your server software. Super simple, and likely about the same complexity as setting up a dev environment.

Until that server goes down.

I'd say the risks of a server going down are about the same as an AWS setup going haywire at that level.

Sure but sometimes that’s ok. Everything goes down sometimes. You need to figure out how much effort you’re willing to expend for each extra “9”.

I wonder what percentage of all sites hosted at AWS are actually ready for a zone to fail.

# uptime 01:43:36 up 666 days, 11:42, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.01

From OVH VPS. Funny thing it's 666 today. YMMV

# uptime 01:47:03 up 640 days, 6:53, 2 users, load average: 2.39, 2.62, 2.73

From hetzner dedicated server. YMMV

# uptime 01:48:11 up 482 days, 20 min, 2 users, load average: 1.53, 2.10, 2.78

From leaseweb dedicated server. YMMV

Please patch your systems.

Why would you leave a server running that long? Is that best practice? I'm by no means a sysadmin but I do monthly scheduled reboots, because on monthly reboots you test that reboot gets you a running server that correctly comes back, and you get a more thorough fsck.

Also not a sysadmin, but regular reboots are a must-have. Not only does it test that the machine comes back up, but it will also ensure that your kernel and other services are patched. Of course, the services can also be restarted separately after an update, but swapping the running kernel with a new one is still very uncommon.

Digital ocean droplet:

03:48:56 up 238 days, 15:04, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

> Setting the same thing up on AWS

Having run a simple web server + database on both EC2 and Digital Ocean I disagree. The two services are nearly identical at that scale.

In fact I don’t see any significant differences between any of the proper cloud providers at this level. The cost & functionality are very nearly the same.

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