Why? Running HN can’t be that expensive, no?
Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. So they closed our datacenters and moved everything to AWS as-is. Including the process to request new "servers" with 10 tabs of complex Excel forms. They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol. It's as static as it can be. We even have the old lead-time for hardware emulated in the cloud now because of the complex approval process taking up similar time.
When you take the agile and auto scaling out of the cloud you just end up paying more. But I'm done telling them they're holding it wrong... Nobody wants to know.
I hope being modern was worth it. /s
By the way, it's only in the US. In Europe, people are a lot less zombified and susceptible to advertisement/brand image.
And now this exec has this "success story" in his CV and either got a promotion or jumped ship to a better role at another company. It's a tried and true strategy for the ridiculous corporate rat race.
As a first swipe ... this is smart - stepping your way into change is often better than one swell foop
However, if you never revisit it / plan to improve and do things The New Way(tm), it's stupid
Of course, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, etc aren't going to do you any favors and show you how to use cloud computing more effectively than dedicated hardware unless you ask them to: they're just providing a service; if you want to pay them $100,000 for something you could do for $1750...who are they to argue?
But it doesn't seem like we are stepping anywhere. For example, if there was a clear vision to a real cloud-based company, I would have at least made facilities to to do new things The New Way rather than forcing everything to be the old way. Which is what they're doing. I needed a beefy server do run a big datacrunch periodically, using only minimal software which I can easily autodeploy for every crunch, run it a few hours and kill it till the next time. Sounds like a great option to use cloud, right? Kubernetes would be a bit heavy for this but I could totally ansible this.
However there seems to be no way in our org to get a server I can simply spin up when I need it. It needs to be requested in advance in threefold, internal billing agreed etc, and even if I turn it off we'll still be billed for it because I can't destroy it. Destroying and spinning up a new one would mean going through the entire rigmarole again :P
The funny thing is, we always do this. By the time we actually go full-on cloud, the world will already have moved on and be on the next great thing, and our neat cloud setup will be all deprecated tech.
Sure
Work for a company with money than brains?
Ideally not :)
Customer service : if you need to use cusomter service something has gone wrong, and I literally move provider.
Even if you have 100,000 simultaneous users egressing 10k/minute (which seem implausibly high, but usable for a quick approximation), you're only looking at 40 TB/mo
And that has to be off by at least an order of magnitude (if not 2 or three)
There's no reason, from a bandwidth perspective, you can't host HN on $100 worth of DO droplets and some Object storage/hosted db
If HN cost even $500/mo in hosting, I'd be quite surprised
That post doesn't say how much memory they were running in 2018 (I'll guess 32G, which is probably about right for a dual-core CPU or that era[4]), but an as-close-to-similarly-specced phsyical box from Hetzner[5] (6 core, 64G RAM, mirrored 1TB NVMe, mirrored 2TB spinny) is currently € 64.26 per month (68+change in Germany vs Finland) with 20TB transfer per month (if you add-on the 10G uplink, unlimited (within fair use policies) on the 1gbit connection)
With 4M requests/day (let's even triple that to 12M/day now), at 10k per request (a ridiculously high guess, I'm sure), that's only 40-120GB/day tops in egressed data (or 1.2-36TB per month)
HN's a pretty cheap thing to run, as far as hardware and hosting is concerned :)
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=terramex
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32466789
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb
[4] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64598/i...
[5] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax51-nvme/confi...
If you use a fair amount of bandwidth, AWS is outright a scam.
Of course bare metal is much cheaper.
In my previous job (gaming), colocation was literally 20x cheaper than using AWS EC2.
The only place it's good for is for backups where traffic is almost one way.
Besides, there are plenty of VPS providers with excellent customer service.
And it's not specifically the "I didn't have a card" problem that was solved. It was the far more general "I had an issue that required human intervention and sacrifice on behalf of the provider", which was resolved. I can think of zero other tech giants with that level of service.
As a solo developer, you don't encounter problems of scaling your engineering team and hiring devops engineers because you are doing everything yourself. The moment you have to hire expensive developers/devops all this starts making sense.
But even for solo/smaller accounts, many people are using AWS as a jump host with a programmable whitelist to reach their VPS boxes. Why? Because AWS security is likely best in the world - they spend massive amounts of money on this and many banks and even government services run on them.
(And even if you did us it only to scale servers, you don't need to click a button :) AWS autoscaling is finely programmable on all kind of application metrics even custom ones. Or by time of day: many teams routinely scale down their UAT and DEV clusters at night and weekends to zero with an autoscaling rule, more than halving server costs.)
Enterprise public cloud like AWS really doesn't make financial sense for most large enterprises or small organisations. If you have enough scale there's no need to pay the premium. If you don't need the flexibility you don't need to pay the premium. Only those in are stuck in the middle or have use cases that need extreme 'elasticitiy' or 'agility' really benefit from using this model.
Reserved instances may or may not be competitive with other providers. But they’d check the CTO’s or CIO’s lists on “we’re on the cloud” and save some money.