MySQL performance optimization: 50% more work with 60% less latency variance

All of my instances in us-east-1 lost outbound connectivity Sunday morning for half an hour, and an hour last night. Tell me about this stellar stability and reliability.

As long as you design your application properly, it'll be reliable wether you run it in AWS, on OpenStack, or even bare metal. StackOverflow does it, you can do it too (they colo all of their equipment in NYC). I have not done this with Docker or OpenStack, but I have using Xen and KVM virtualization (Docker would be about the same as using lxc).

ELB? Haproxy. RDS? MySQL/Postgresql/MS SQL (in that order), unless you absolutely have zero management experience with it. I concede SQS and SNS have no open source counterpart; you'd have to roll your own.

> You could manage a thousand servers, but ONE PERSON just can't operate thousands of servers.

Yes, I literally managed AND operated ~5500 linux servers in a facility. Remote power management, serial console access, PXE booting. I would replace any failed hardware when convenient, usually after my morning coffee or in the evening if I wasn't in a rush to get home.

> also how did you managed file access in a scaling manner?

Shared NFS with work distributed to servers on-demand or scheduled, based on workload.

> and when yes how did you provided your developers that space?

Limited SSH access to their environment; diskspace was provisioned in minutes. Scheduled jobs could be executed using an open source scheduling framework.

> did you created some kind of infrastructure for that (libraries, etc)?

No, the majority of the tooling was a few thousand lines of bash scripting

> There are so many things, which just doesn't work out. As already said, you've just managed it. But other people did the work, that this could work out and they needed a lot of time to get things done. Take a look at google, they always try to bring costs down, through things like borg, kubernetes, etc. but they throw thousands of people at those problems, also at the networking thing, they have a huge team of PROGRAMMERS that try everything that the management of their network will be easier. also if you don't need things all the time, why should you buy it?

Not knowing how to do something does not make it impossible or hard, simply an unknown how to do it.

So I'm going to distill this into one post:

> Most of the world doesn't need hundreds or thousands of servers... most businesses need fewer than fifty or a hundred. And growing is pretty easy... Once you hit a certain scale it absolutely makes sense to consider migrating, but that's the point where you have teams of dedicated employees.

Fewer nodes actually means the cloud makes less sense not more...often you can get away with 10 1Us in different DCs. At that scale, "the cloud" makes even less sense than you think it does. Leasing dedicated servers is cheap compared to the cost of automated deployments of 50 VMs, especially in labor costs. At which point, we are just talking Active/Passive deployments across 2 datacenters and such.

Amazon really, at this scale, isn't giving you anything you can't do for yourself. The only time AWS seems to make sense is as a 1-2 man shop where you literally don't have enough time in the day or at extremely volatile loads where you can't capacity plan. Most businesses are neither of those.

> And even then the costs of moving off of the cloud solution may never be worth it.

Yes, that is called vendor lock in and that is what AWS, etc. rely on. If you don't develop the in-house talent, you can never move off without problems. Waking up one day and going "LOL I WANTS TO MOVE" is a bad idea.

> Really? could you elaborate on these other providers? I would expect at least, VPS, remote files (S3/Azure-Blob), distributed key-value store as a service, some SQL variant as a service, and load balancing as a service. Most of the alternatives I've seen don't offer those services, and most only do VPS.

Honestly, if you can't figure this out on your own without relying on AWS at the scale of 3 people...you have no business discussing this, frankly. This is a case of the blind assuming everyone else is.

I have hobbies with 99.5% uptime that essentially have all of those functions serviced for cheaper than AWS.

> Linode, and most alternatives, don't have S3/Blob storage as a service.. also missing are distributed key-value storage as a service and sql as a service.

...this is one of those times where I'm tempted to just run a site that includes all these things as a hobby just to point out how stupid this comment is. I don't really need more hobbies but this YC fanboy behavior is ridiculous. Well, except for the "kv/sql as a service" because that is just silly and can be done just fine with traditional clusters that have existed for years.

> Generally, with any given service as you can scale it makes sense to run your own instances.. but realistically someone who knows insert-tech better than AWS/Azure admins is a pretty rare breed, and having to in-source those specific skills costs in terms of time and money, redundancy even more so.

> If you have a team of 3-5 people, you can do far more with AWS or Azure than you can most alternatives... Employees aren't free.

It seems rare to you 'cause it isn't something you are good at. AWS/Azure simply aren't cost effective. Fully loaded sysadmins cost for someone compentent is like $30/hr. Setting up an internal cluster for any of those things is much, much cheaper than AWS is after a year for literally every business I've ever dealt with IRL.