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Comment by mchusma | Hacker News Reader

I just glanced at our own airflow instance in AWS (not on this service). We run 1 t3.xlarge instances 4vCPU for the scheduler and web server and 1 t3.xlarge instance (4vCPU) for the workers. At $0.33 per hour (on demand), this seems to most closely match the resources for their medium or large offering, at $0.74-$0.99 per hour (roughly 3x).

I realize you are buying not just the compute, but the management, but that ends up being something in the cost range of $300-$500 or so per month for the airflow management part of it. Seems a bit steep. $50-$100/mo would be a no brainer for us. For some orgs I can see this being a great solution, but its not really friendly for the little guy (with a min price of $350/mo).

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Would you agree the $300-500 is easily offset by any 1 production incident/outage that would require manual intervention on the airflow servers (and thus developer salary for however many hours to fix, and lost productivity elsewhere)?

I understand that the premium is paid _every month_ -- and you may not otherwise have an incident every month -- but the AWS premium can also be considered an _insurance premium_ against those outages.

I used to manage an airflow deployment (of which my team was the primary consumer), and it was not enjoyable in the least.

(I'm not the OP)

For an enterprise, this pricing would work for some projects, for the reasons you suggest. Although this assumes nothing ever goes wrong with the managed offering, which is unlikely.

But for everyone else, it's a hard sell, especially in these days of infrastructure-as-code - even if you had to rebuild an Airflow server from scratch, it's not going to take very long.

(am OP) We haven't had a major outage in 3 years of using airflow. Some issues, and it consumes some time, but so would managed airflow in all likelihood. Most issues are related to "airflow configuration type things" that presumably this solution would not fix.

I am really just surprised it is not a "no brainier price". It's a tough sell. I am sure it's valuable for some people, I just can't really justify using it. I think value to me is like $100/mo (as random airflow user on the internet).

not OP, nor do we use airflow (not sure there is a fit for us) - but $300-500 for something that could cost our modest company an equivalent half day of human time to mitigate, with possible tens of thousands in lost revenue if it occurs at the worst possible time, seem like a win-win peace of mind proposition.

Sure. The right circumstances this can make sense. But at a high level of your SAAS starts at $500/mo, you are selling to mid market and enterprises, not startups, almost universally. I was hoping for a product that would make sense for smaller companies. The list of business critical software we pay less for is long (GitHub, credit card processor, email, sms, managed redis, managed postgres, etc).

They can certainly sell this for what they want, I just won't buy at this price.

i guess i really don't understand what separates a startup from enterprise...i know my particular company is nowhere near enterprise level...at least as far as i know of it, but i also know we're not a startup.

edit: in this sense...i know the fundamental differences otherwise

edit #2: we're also not a SaaS, but a B2C

and i totally get where you're coming from - i'm the point guy on validating any new integrations for what we do. i was just commenting on the cost/benefit of having someone fix a home rolled version vs their managed and if it'd save money

What is there to manage in airflow that can be outsourced?

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