Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

I don't use AWS for a damn thing because of exorbitant costs. I just don't get why people think that it's necessary other than that they're the types to get drawn into marketing hype.

There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

View on HN

I agree that cloud compute is usually (too) expensive, but it is sometimes useful and cost-effective. Not long ago, I need to very quickly run a one-off analysis, which required over 200 GB of RAM. It was much cheaper and faster to spin up one VM on GCP for a day than having to order parts, etc.

Similar - wanted to see how much ram gron would need for a particular file and needed much more than the 16GB or 32GB available at home. Quick and easy to spin up a 192GB EC2 to verify it needed ~95GB all told. No way I could have done that without something like AWS.

Depends... set the pagefile to something large, run the program. If it doesn't thrash too hard you can observe it to its largest growth. You'd probably want an SSD. Maybe that would work. Maybe.

What was the price?

No idea about GCP but a 32-CPU Digital Ocean droplet with 256GB of RAM costs $1,280/month, which is less than $43/day.

IIRC, about $120.

The argument is - engineers are expensive so why pay for the expertise to setup and run machines? There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

What if my company is pretty much all engineers?

We don't let pencil pushers with MBAs anywhere near what we're doing, and it's going great.

I know this isn't the most usual configuration but if undervaluing my skills and trying to bottom dollar on them is going to be their rules, then I'm just going to do my own thing, and they're just going to have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for talent.

I hope the zeitgeist changes any time soon. God knows how many unicorns have been sacrificed with that kind of paradigm which could be successful companies by now.

>What if my company is pretty much all engineers?

I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product.

With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.

I hear this bad argument often (“replacing hard drives”) and I don’t understand why. It’s as if we’re mentally stuck in a bad hacking movie from 1999.

If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work.

You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and optional on-site service.

Or you’re leasing them from a hosting company who will take care of those pesky RAID alarms for you.

You (or your hosting providers) have likely outfitted your server with remote out-of-band access to allow you to get into BIOS or the RAID controller without physically being in front of the server.

And finally, you have remote access to power cycle the server (or a batphone at your hosting provider to do it on your behalf).

I want to say that these datacenter-visit-prevention techniques have been near standard practice for a decade-and-a-half.

Or is it just me and my circle that do this?

> Or is it just me and my circle that do this?

Nope, this seems to be the norm. I've worked on a couple colo servers that nobody at the company had ever actually seen in person. They figured out colo in Germany was the best deal, so they had some servers delivered straight to the DC and the staff there installed them and plugged them into an IP KVM. Not sure if this is a standard service most providers offer, but I'm sure a big enough cheque would convince most - and considering the cost of transporting both the hardware and engineer to install it, that cheque can be quite large.

Almost as if redundant colo servers on VRRP or CARP costs less like damn

We do very occasionally go into our telehouse data centres, maybe one person once every year.

Our in house data centres we visit more often, usually to add new equipment, doesn’t take long to walk down stairs.

I can’t think of the last time a hard drive failed

Seems to me KVMs also save travels. I don't know, one can make productive travels. There's more tools available for that nowadays.

So you've just explained why 'the cloud' is better than DIY.

Take all those things you just talked about, and expand them horizontally and vertically up the stack, and you have 'AWS'.

So not just 'a guy to replace the hardware' - but now it's software configurable, has all sorts of other, fancy things.

Time is money, and it's expensive to pay people to mess with things if they don't have to.

It's like this:

If your company needs 3 cars, you rent/lease them. You do not hire your own mechanics, even if technically speaking "we could change the oil for so much less!"

If your company is in the business of transportation, and you have thousands of trucks, you may want your own repair/maintenance team etc. instead of paying some service company a fat margin to change the oil.

The original discussion was around price-performance of physical servers vs cloud VMs. That being the case, it's not a clean a distinction as you describe it. It would be more along buying a few trucks and taking them to the garage when needed (which is rare in small numbers) vs renting many more vans, for higher margin, just to avoid the garage.

I'm just really glad not to work in a company under these delusions

Maybe you need an MBA to help you understand that in many cases, it's incredibly more cost effective to use the cloud, because the marginal savings that could be achieved with on prem hardware are dwarfed by the cost of labour, and especially lost opportunity cost.

For most things 'local prem' is an optimization that usually needs on some degree of scale to justify, or, you have a peculiar setup i.e. a couple of well versed hardware and networking guys who have no problem with a bit of a physical setup. Which can be a bonus.

"I hope the zeitgeist changes any time soon."

No, it won't, it's going in the 'other direction' forever, because the 'economies of scale' at Amazon, it's incredibly difficult for individual engineers to compete with those efficiencies.

Just the opposite of 'being a problem for startups' , the 'cloud' has basically made entire swaths of types of startups possible where they wold not otherwise.

Like everything, you have to use think about it a bit but their costs are really, really transparent (imagine Oracle trying to do it ...).

I have never worked for a business with well controlled AWS costs, seems the MBA is failing a lot of people.

I think the big difference that I'm seeing here is that I don't live in a country where engineers demand +100000/yr salaries

I love that you say “demand” like somehow engineers are forcing companies at gun point to pay their salaries. No, stop. It’s the result of market pressure and actual engineering degrees + peng certifications being hard to acquire and desirable.

What a glib and senseless follow up.

Never understood that argument. How exactly an expertise of setting up and running (your cloud provider) instances is cheaper than expertise of setting up a physical machine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com