S3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have.
Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router.
This is a boring argument that has been done to death.
Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router.
This is a boring argument that has been done to death.
And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively.
In my experience, in terms of availability and security there’s not much difference in practice. There are tons of good tools nowadays to treat a physical server or a cluster of them as a cloud or a PaaS, it’s not really more work or responsibility, often it is actually simpler depending on the setup you choose. Most workloads do not require flexible compute capability and it’s also easy and fast to get it from these cheaper providers when you need to.
I feel like the industry has collectively accepted that Cloud prices are a cost of doing business and unquestionable, “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. Thinking about costs from first principles is an important part of being an engineer.
If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)
I suspect that if you broke projects on AWS down by the numbers, the vast majority don't needed it.
There are other benefits to using AWS (and drawbacks) bit "easy scaling" isn't just premature optimisation because if you build something to do something it's never going to do that's not optimisation it's simply waste.
Not too different from how many other lines of business get their clients in the door.
And even if you are building with microservices, most standard servers can handle dozens in a single machine at once. They are all mostly doing network calls with minimal compute. Even better actually if they are in the same host and the network doesn’t get involved.
If you want to, there are simple tools to hook a handful of them as a cluster and/or instantly spawn extra slightly costlier VMs in case of failure or a spike in usage, if a short outage is really a world-ending event, which it isn’t for almost every software system or business. These capabilities have not been exclusive to the major cloud providers for years.
Of course we are generalizing a lot by this point, I’d be happy to discuss specific cases.
Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work.
And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $300k on two dev ops admins alone and the cost savings of using cheaper dedicated servers are completely gone.
I'll have you know I am a cantaloupe, you insensitive clod!
If my own dedicated server goes down, I'm going to need to call my admin at 3am 10 times just to wake him up.
It's actually kinda frustrating - as an industry we're accepting worse outcomes due to misperceptions. That's how the free market goes sometimes.
As opposed to be with the small provider round the corner who is currently having a beer and will look at that tomorrow morning.
Now - I am in the phase where I ap seriously considering to move my email from Google to a small player in Europe (still not sure who) so this is what may ultimately be my fate :)
Customers call and complain about downtime, I can just vaguely point at everything being on fire from Facebook to Instagram to online banking sites.
They get it.
When the self-hosted server fries itself, I'm on the hook for fixing it ASAP.
What is your point?
Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.
I'm not even one of the "cloud is so great" people - but it you're generally doing software it's actually a lot less friction.
And while the ratio of cost difference may sound bad, it's generally not. Unless we're talkign huge scale, you can buy a lot of AWS crap for the yearly salary of a single person.
AWS isn't going to help you setup your security, you have to do it yourself. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to monitor your database performance. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to setup your networking. Previously a sysadmin would do this, ...
Managing hardware and updating hosts is maybe 10% of the work of a sysadmin. You can't buy much on 1/10th of a sysadmins salary, and even the things you can, the quality and response time are generally going to be shit compared to someone who cares about your company (been there).
It doesn't change anything, especially as I did not blatantly argue cloud=good,hardware=bad. That is a completely different question.
My point is that given some circumstances, you need a lot less specialized deep knowledge if all your software just works[tm] on a certain level of the stack upwards. Everyone knows the top 1/3 of the stack and you pay for the bottom 2/3 part.
I didn't mean to say "let's replace a sysadmin with some AWS stuff", my point was "100k per year on AWS makes a lot of small companies run".
Also my experience was with having hardware in several DCs around the world, and we did not have people there (small company, but present in at least 4 countries) - so we had to pay for remote hands and the experience was mostly bad . Maybe my bosses chose bad DCs, or maybe I'd trust sysadmins at "product companies" more than those working as remote hands at a hoster...
is that because they were using AWS so hired people who knew AWS?
I would personally have far more confidence in my ability to troubleshoot or redeploy a dedicated server than the AWS services to replace it.
> Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.
There are lots of options for renting dedicated hardware, that the service provider will maintain,. Its still far cheaper than AWS. Even if you have redundancy for everything its still a lot cheaper.
One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. We felt less impotent and we could do more to mitigate the situation.
If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other virtualized services for way cheaper with similar guarantees, they are not stuck in the last century.
And I don’t know how people are using cloud, but most config issues happen above the VM/Docker/Kubernetes level, which is the same wether you are on cloud or not. Even fully managed database deployments or serverless backends are not really that much simpler or less error-prone than deploying the containers yourself. Actually the complexity of Cloud is often a worse minefield of footguns, with their myriad artificial quirks and limitations. Often dealing with the true complexities of the underlying open-source technologies they are reselling ends up being easier and more predictable.
This fearmongering is really weakening us as an industry. Just try it, it is not as complex or dangerous as they claim.
But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business.
And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work.
We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K.
Once my business requires reliability and I need to hire a dedicated person to manage, I'd absolutely move to the cloud. I personally like Digital Ocean/Render.
Higher-level services like PaaS (Heroku and above) genuinely do abstract a number of details. But EC2 is just renting pseudo-bare computers—they save no complexity, and they add more by being diskless and requiring networked storage (EBS). The main thing they give you is the ability to spin up arbitrarily many more identical instances at a moment’s notice (usually, at least theoretically, though the amount of the time that you actually hit unavailability or shadow quotas is surprisingly high).
The truth is that there's still a lot of things you have to handle, including cloud bugs and problems. And other problems you don't have to think about anymore, especially with fully managed, high-level PaaS- like services.
I ran a cloud backend service for a startup with users, using manged services, and we still had an on-call team. The cloud is not magic.
Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.
Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B pension fund [1]
Or your cloud portfolio is so big you need a "platform" team of multiple devops/developer staff to build wrappers around/package up your cloud provider for you and your platform team is now the bottleneck.
Cloud is useful but it's not as pain free as everyone says when comparing with managing your own, it still costs money and work. Having worked on several cloud transformations they've all cost more and taken more effort than expected. A large proportion have also been canned/postponed/re-evaluated due to cost/size/time/complexity.
Unless you are a big spender with dedicated technical account manager, your support is likely to be as bad as a no name budget VPS provider.
Both cloud and traditional hosting have their merits and place.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...
Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1ha5qgk/hetzner_ca...
Or you need to debug why your Lambda function is throttling and you find out that the CloudWatch logs were never properly configured and you’ve been flying blind for three months.
And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year AWS solutions architect so that at least one person can actually understand the bill and they can check each other’s Terraform configs. Suddenly, you’re spending $300k on two cloud wizards alone and the cost savings of "not managing your own infrastructure" are completely gone.
The snide rebuttal basically writes itself.
Except - wait, you do have to think about, because of course you. So the promise of AWS is gone.
The initial impression that we don't need to hire many people because AWS takes care of everthing, fades away pretty quick.
You still need to hire the same people, they just do the same things in a different way.
in my experience you always need a "Devops team" to operate all that cloud stuff; so to paraphrase - suddenly you're spending $400k on three devops to operate $500k cloud
I think The Promise behind the cloud was you just pay for the service and not worry about it, but in practice you need some team to maintain it
Single human point of failure for something tied to the bottom line is NOT a technical problem, it's management.
That's why AWS can get away with charging the prices they do, even though it is expensive, for most companies it is not expensive enough to make it worth their while to look for cheaper alternatives.
From our experience, you can actually end up in a situation that requires less engineering effort and be more stable, while saving on costs, if you dare to go to a bit lower abstraction layers. Sometimes being closer to the metal is simpler, not more complex. And in practice complexity is much more often the cause of outages rather than hardware reliability.
If you are having a company that warrants building a data center, then AWS does not add much.
Other wise you face the 'if you want to build apple pie from scratch, you need to first invent the universe' problem. Simply put you can get started right on day one, in a pay as you go model. Like you can write code, deploy and ship from the very first day, instead of having to go deep down the infrastructure rabbit hole.
Plus shutting down things is easy as well. Things don't workout? Good news! You can shut down the infrastructure that very day instead of having to worry about the capital expenditure spent to build infrastructure, and without having to worry about its use later.
Simply put, AWS is infrastructure you can hire and fire at will.
Agreed, there's definitely a heavy element of that to it.
But, at the risk of again being labelled as an AWS Shill - there's also other benefits.
If your organisation needs to deploy some kind of security/compliance tools to help with getting (say) SOC2 certification - then there's a bunch of tools out there to help with that. All you have to do then is plug them into your AWS organisation. They can run a whole bunch of automated policy checks to say you're complying with whatever audit requirements.
If you're self-hosting, or using Hetzner - well, you're going to spend a whole lot more time providing evidence to auditors.
Same goes with integrating with vendors.
Maybe you want someone to load/save data for you - no problems, create an AWS S3 bucket and hand them an AWS IAM Role and they can do that. No handing over of creds.
There's a bunch of semi-managed services where a vendor will spin up EC2 instances running their special software, but since it's running in your account - you get more control/visiblity into it. Again, hand over an AWS IAM Role and off you go.
It's the Slack of IAAS - it might not be the fastest, it's definitely not the cheapest, and you can roll your own for sure. But then you miss out on all these integrations that make life easier.
Using a cloud platform means that while your needs are small, you're overpaying. Where it pays off is when you have a new requirement that needs to be met quickly.
I've done my share of managing database instances in the past. I can spin up a new RDS Postgres instance in much less time than I can configure one from scratch, though. Do we need a read replica? Multi-site failover? Do we need to connect it to Okta, or Formal, so we can stand up a process to provision access to specific databases, tables, or even columns? All of those things I can do significantly faster and more quickly on AWS than I can do it by hand.
What if a NoSQL database is the right solution for us? I have much less experience adminning those, so will either have to allocate a fair amount of my time to skill up or hire someone who already has those skills.
Need a scheduled task? Sure, I could set up a Jenkins server somewhere and we could use that... or we could just add an ECS scheduled task to our existing cluster.
Need an API endpoint to handle inbound Zoom events and forward them to an internal queue? Sure, I can set up a new VPC for that... that'll be a couple of days... or we whip up a Lambda, hook it up to API Gateway, and be up and running in a couple of hours.
AWS helps me do more in less time - and my time is a cost to the business. It's also extremely flexible, and will let us add things far more quickly than we otherwise could.
IMO, the correct comparison isn't "what would it cost to run this platform on Hetzner?" - it's "What would it cost to run it, plus what would cost to acquire the talent to build it, plus retain that talent to maintain it?"
AWS isn't competing with other infrastructure providers. They're competing with other providers and the salaries of the engineers you need to make them work.
And if you are willing to pay, you can significantly over-provision dedicated servers, solving much of the scaling problem as well.