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Comment by none2585 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

> I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

The end of the article has this:

> Consider custom infrastructure when you have both: sufficient scale for meaningful cost savings, and specific constraints that enable a simple solution. The engineering effort to build and maintain your system must be less than the infrastructure costs it eliminates. In our case, specific requirements (ephemeral storage, loss tolerance, S3 fallback) let us build something simple enough that maintenance costs stay low. Without both factors, stick with managed services.

Seems they were well aware of the tradeoffs.

And I am curious how many engineer years it requires to port code to cloud services and deal with multiple issues you cannot even debug due to not having root privileges in the cloud.

Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

> as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)"

Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Without on-prem, saving a file is as simple as s3.put_object() !

With s3, you cannot use ls, grep and other tools.

> Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Wow that's a lot to learn before using s3... I wonder how much it costs in salaries.

> With what network topology?

You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs.

> With what access policies?

Whichever is defined in your code, no restrictions unlike in S3. No need to study complicated AWS documentation and navigate through multiple consoles (this also costs you salaries by the way). No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

> With what backup strategy?

Automatically backed up with rest of your server data, no need to spend time on this.

I mean you can easily mount the S3 bucket to the local filesystem (e.g. using s3fs-fuse) and then use standard command line tools such as ls and grep.

It's probably going to be dog slow. I dealt with HDDs where just iterating through all files and directories takes hours, and network storage is going to be even slower at this scale.

I inherited an S3 bucket where hundreds of thousands of files were written to the bucket root. Every filename was just a uuid. ls might work after waiting to page though to get every file. To grep you would need to download 5 TB.

> You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs.

You do need to care when you move beyond a single server in a closet that runs your database, webserver and storage.

> No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.

With bare-metal machines you can go very far before needing to scale beyond one machine.

>> No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

> One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.

I don't think you are making a compelling case here, since both scenarios result in an undesirable exposure. Unless your point is both cloud services and local file systems can be equally exploited?

> One misconfigured .htaccess

First, I hope nobody is using Apache anymore, second, you typically store files outside of web directory.

Why nobody should use Apache? I rediscovered it to be great in many use cases. And there's llms to help with the config syntax.

Performance not great compared to nginx.

It sounds like you’re not at the scale where cloud storage is obviously useful. By the time you definitely need S3/GCS you have problems making sure files are accessible everywhere. “Grep” is a ludicrous proposition against large blob stores

You can't ever definitively answer most of those questions on someone else's cloud. You just take Amazons word for whatever number of nines they claim it has.

Not needing to ask the questions is the selling point.

Bro were you off grid last week. Your questions equally apply to AWS, you just magically handwave away all those questions as if AWS/GCP/Azure outages aren’t a thing.

Until it goes down because because aws STILL hasn't made themselves completely multi-region or can't figure our their DNS.

I don't think any of those mattered for their use case. That's why they didn't actually need S3.

>> Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB.

> Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Most of these concerns can be addressed with ZFS[0] provided by FreeBSD systems hosted in triple-A data centers.