7 ms·

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoD

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't necessary and will be a lot more expensive than that $20k/ month you could have been paying to Amazon.

late2part 11y ago
False. Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. With AWS you pay more the larger you get.
- eva1984 11y ago
  What? Implement RDS/SQS/Redshift myself? That is not easy, believe me.
  - ma2rten 11y ago
    It's not easy, but also not every difficult. The company I work for has two Dev Ops (only one until a year ago) and runs on AWS serving millions of users. We are using MySQL RDS, but are migrating to self-managed Cassandra. We use RabbitMQ instead of SQS. We use Hive/Presto instead of Redshift.
    - eva1984 11y ago
      You sure can adapt the open-sourced solution, though I don't think Cassandra/Presto can match up to what RDS/Redshift can offer. The key point is, running those things yourself, you are likely to lose all the nice failover mechanisms/monitoring/auto-snapshotting stuff that AWS offers. To live up to that, it will require you to not only have extensive understanding of the software you are running, but also a considerable amount of your time will be dedicated to Ops side, which can lead to some really big frustration from time to time. In that sense, I don't think you can re-IMPLEMENT something by assuming too much of comprises.
      - wsh91 11y ago
        Cassandra in particular doesn't compete with RDS as much as DynamoDB and, respectfully, setting up failover and monitoring and autosnapshotting isn't actually that difficult. I'm a big fan of outsourcing that stuff--the new system I'm building uses AWS Lambda, for example--but when using a managed solution requires compromising on features or tying yourself into knots to make things work, hosting your own is doable, especially in the age of devops. Automation is your friend!
    - tie_ 11y ago
      It is very difficult to run it at AWS's scalability, reliability, security and automation level. These all cost money and/or time. Not all companies require these features to the same extent, of course, so AWS is not always the right choice, but it isn't always the wrong choice either.
- BraveNewCurency 11y ago
  > Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. This is fundamentally not understanding what AWS is. - You could say "EC2 is just Xen". But next time there is a 0-day exploit, I'll have AWS working all weekend to patch my servers. And Xen still doesn't have an API for scaling physical hardware.. - You could say "S3 is just Apache". But I will never see a "disk full" message, I will never get paged if something is borked (but it will still get fixed), I will never worry about DDOS attacks, etc. > Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. That's like saying "it's cheaper if you change your own oil". Might be true, but doesn't matter. I'm still taking my car in. Lots of other people do. You might try asking them why.
  - late2part 11y ago
    Some services are unique. EMR and RDS are not. Others are not. Outsource if you want. When your bill hits $500k/mo and you realize you're paying for things you can do yourself, your position may change. Have you been through an AWS outage and been paged? It happens. When you realize your business depends on an opaque organization you may want to diversify. If you're small it makes sense to outsource sometimes. Not always and not forever.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    I am especially curious to see that 'cheaper if you do it' done for their databases offers. I'm using them in prod already, and trying to create a similar setup on real hardware for enterprise customers using pg, pgpool2 and haproxy is already a pain, and yet you couldn't autorecover them as conveniently when they go belly up.
hosh 11y ago
Or even VPC. I'd like to be able to run a small Kubernetes cluster on Linode at some point, but I'm not sure I'd want to run it without a VPC. I'm involved in two different startups, one on Linode (because that's all it can afford) and the other on AWS. For it's current offering, Linode is great for MVPs, and you like your servers as pets, but it's doubtful we'd stay with Linode once we start having to scale.
comex 11y ago
$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I did, I would avoid the locked-in services like the plague, out of principle. But I'm curious.)
- bbrazil 11y ago
  It depends on which services, but for simpler services with well understood open source equivalents (e.g. route53 and BIND) you can probably manage two per sysadmin at a similar quality to AWS with a basic API. For something like RDS or Redshift, if you're very lucky you'll get away with one sysadmin per service. This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the systems, feature additions, bug fixes and keeping up with the state of the art. Services like RDS are an amazing net cost saving for small to medium users. Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going. Raw EC2 is nearer break even.
  - BogusIKnow 11y ago
    "Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going." We've used CDNs in the past, way below a million/year for a medium, growing startup. care to elaborate?
    - cachesking 11y ago
      Ti believe the context is running a CDN as opposed to using.
- bfung 11y ago
  From a management standpoint, it takes at least 2 developers to run something equivalent. Perhaps not full time, but it doesn't scale out that much - not more than 10 highly available services per team. A good example of this is roughly a 3 instance RabbitMQ cluster used by ~100 people. 1. The "Bus Factor" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor 2. Context switching - if you have a developer that also works on coding or other things. So maybe it's not a full $240k/year for only 1 service, but the price in the door IS that. 2 to 3 extra services will cost no more - that's where AWS will make the money.

late2part 11y ago

False. Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. With AWS you pay more the larger you get.

eva1984 11y ago
What? Implement RDS/SQS/Redshift myself? That is not easy, believe me.
- ma2rten 11y ago
  It's not easy, but also not every difficult. The company I work for has two Dev Ops (only one until a year ago) and runs on AWS serving millions of users. We are using MySQL RDS, but are migrating to self-managed Cassandra. We use RabbitMQ instead of SQS. We use Hive/Presto instead of Redshift.
  - eva1984 11y ago
    You sure can adapt the open-sourced solution, though I don't think Cassandra/Presto can match up to what RDS/Redshift can offer. The key point is, running those things yourself, you are likely to lose all the nice failover mechanisms/monitoring/auto-snapshotting stuff that AWS offers. To live up to that, it will require you to not only have extensive understanding of the software you are running, but also a considerable amount of your time will be dedicated to Ops side, which can lead to some really big frustration from time to time. In that sense, I don't think you can re-IMPLEMENT something by assuming too much of comprises.
    - wsh91 11y ago
      Cassandra in particular doesn't compete with RDS as much as DynamoDB and, respectfully, setting up failover and monitoring and autosnapshotting isn't actually that difficult. I'm a big fan of outsourcing that stuff--the new system I'm building uses AWS Lambda, for example--but when using a managed solution requires compromising on features or tying yourself into knots to make things work, hosting your own is doable, especially in the age of devops. Automation is your friend!
  - tie_ 11y ago
    It is very difficult to run it at AWS's scalability, reliability, security and automation level. These all cost money and/or time. Not all companies require these features to the same extent, of course, so AWS is not always the right choice, but it isn't always the wrong choice either.
BraveNewCurency 11y ago
> Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. This is fundamentally not understanding what AWS is. - You could say "EC2 is just Xen". But next time there is a 0-day exploit, I'll have AWS working all weekend to patch my servers. And Xen still doesn't have an API for scaling physical hardware.. - You could say "S3 is just Apache". But I will never see a "disk full" message, I will never get paged if something is borked (but it will still get fixed), I will never worry about DDOS attacks, etc. > Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. That's like saying "it's cheaper if you change your own oil". Might be true, but doesn't matter. I'm still taking my car in. Lots of other people do. You might try asking them why.
- late2part 11y ago
  Some services are unique. EMR and RDS are not. Others are not. Outsource if you want. When your bill hits $500k/mo and you realize you're paying for things you can do yourself, your position may change. Have you been through an AWS outage and been paged? It happens. When you realize your business depends on an opaque organization you may want to diversify. If you're small it makes sense to outsource sometimes. Not always and not forever.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  I am especially curious to see that 'cheaper if you do it' done for their databases offers. I'm using them in prod already, and trying to create a similar setup on real hardware for enterprise customers using pg, pgpool2 and haproxy is already a pain, and yet you couldn't autorecover them as conveniently when they go belly up.

hosh 11y ago

Or even VPC. I'd like to be able to run a small Kubernetes cluster on Linode at some point, but I'm not sure I'd want to run it without a VPC. I'm involved in two different startups, one on Linode (because that's all it can afford) and the other on AWS. For it's current offering, Linode is great for MVPs, and you like your servers as pets, but it's doubtful we'd stay with Linode once we start having to scale.

comex 11y ago

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is at least two developer salaries. Do you really need two full time devops/whatever to manage the open source equivalents to the AWS services? Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not? (I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I did, I would avoid the locked-in services like the plague, out of principle. But I'm curious.)

bbrazil 11y ago
It depends on which services, but for simpler services with well understood open source equivalents (e.g. route53 and BIND) you can probably manage two per sysadmin at a similar quality to AWS with a basic API. For something like RDS or Redshift, if you're very lucky you'll get away with one sysadmin per service. This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the systems, feature additions, bug fixes and keeping up with the state of the art. Services like RDS are an amazing net cost saving for small to medium users. Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going. Raw EC2 is nearer break even.
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  "Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going." We've used CDNs in the past, way below a million/year for a medium, growing startup. care to elaborate?
  - cachesking 11y ago
    Ti believe the context is running a CDN as opposed to using.
bfung 11y ago
From a management standpoint, it takes at least 2 developers to run something equivalent. Perhaps not full time, but it doesn't scale out that much - not more than 10 highly available services per team. A good example of this is roughly a 3 instance RabbitMQ cluster used by ~100 people. 1. The "Bus Factor" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor 2. Context switching - if you have a developer that also works on coding or other things. So maybe it's not a full $240k/year for only 1 service, but the price in the door IS that. 2 to 3 extra services will cost no more - that's where AWS will make the money.