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You still have to tune the configuration of RDS instances, and they can make some administrative tasks more difficult because they don't grant SUPER and/or don'

You still have to tune the configuration of RDS instances, and they can make some administrative tasks more difficult because they don't grant SUPER and/or don't allow system-level access. For example, you can't use innobackupex/xtrabackup on an RDS instance. I appreciate that it is often worthwhile to just pay someone else to handle things for your company, but I think people are too quick to flip the switch one way or the other; they either run everything "in the cloud" or nothing there. The truth is that as with most things, there is a happy medium tailored to each company's specific circumstances. AWS is very expensive. People underestimate how expensive it is. When we switched to AWS, our monthly bill was about 70% the total cost to buy (not rent, buy) all the machines in our old bare-metal datacenter, which were still perfectly performant (we switched because the execs wanted to be super-duper cool cloud users, not because of any real technical limitation, though there are pros and cons to it). I have to think this is fairly common. I hear a popular trick to net a big savings in your first year as CFO is to just force the tech guys to cut out Amazon and replace it with a cheaper cloud provider or colocated bare-metal.

sokoloff 11y ago
The financial picture of AWS only makes sense if you are using it to reduce (either in absolute terms or in growth rate) your spend on IT staffing costs. If you're paying 100% of your old IT staffing costs and paying the AWS bill, you're double paying part of it, IMO.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Sure, that's an argument that I'm sure crosses the threshold sometimes. However, with the amount of money we're paying AWS, we could've easily brought on several new full-time, dedicated guys to handle datacenter, hardware, colo, and sysadmin stuff and still come out ahead. AWS is very expensive. People underestimate how expensive it is. I don't preclude the possibility that it's cost-effective for someone out there, but I seriously doubt that's the case for most of its users.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle for 51 weeks. But if you know you'll need a car every day, it's much cheaper to buy or long-term lease one rather than rent at the daily rate. AWS is the daily-rate car rental. It's great when you have 1) highly variable load, and 2) your entire infrastructure is instrumented to scale up and down quickly with minimal manual intervention. If, for example, you are running a large e-commerce site -- the case it was designed for -- AWS is great. Your load will be average most of the year, then go up a lot for Christmas shopping in November, then go up even more in December... then load goes back down to average for the remaining 10 months. Part of the issue is also cultural. Younger developers who grew up hearing "cloud is awesome" every day think the very idea of colocating hardware is archaic and ridiculous, and won't even consider it.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. HR, payroll, benefits/401K, management, staffing an on-call rotation for hardware issues (you still have to staff software on-call in either case), dealing with vacations, sickness, training, etc. It's surprisingly expensive to run a full complement of web-facing IT services. Amazon (and Azure/GCE/RS/others) just make that calculus more explicit and in your face. (I also acknowledge that they are running AWS as a profitable and profit-seeking enterprise, so yes, they are marking things up beyond the lowest possible cost.) For us, AWS is absolutely more expensive on a headline number basis. It's also decreased our latency of prod delivery and increased our agility as compared to on-prem solutions. We can get products in front of customers in hours/days that used to take weeks/months.
nucleardog 11y ago
AWS is a platform. If all you want is a VPS, it's overpriced and underperformant (or so I hear). If you just took a load off of bare metal and moved it to AWS, I don't doubt it got significantly more expensive... but that's a terrible mis-use of the platform. When you develop an app around the products they offer, it starts to look a lot more reasonable. Especially at a small scale. When I need a durable messaging service in my app, I don't need to go read up on rabbitmq, find a couple servers somewhere, set up some sort of redundant message queue so I get some level of durability, set up monitoring, deal with updates, debugging problems, etc. I just make some API calls to SQS and it's already there for me. If "cut out Amazon and replace it with colocated bare-metal" is really that simple, then chances are you're not making very good use of the platform and you should absolutely switch off of it.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Right, I said that there wasn't really a technical reason for the move and that it was primarily motivated by political concerns. I'm not defending it. I think you're right that a piecemeal approach is best. If you're using SQS because you identified it as a component that could be quickly and easily integrated at a lower cost than it would take to run apt-get install rabbitmq-server, then great. That may sound like a trivialization but for many companies the reality is that their "Linux guy" is a noob who can barely wield apt-get, and in these cases, something like SQS is indeed a good offering. In our case, it's definitely easier/cheaper/better to install RabbitMQ. The ideal infrastructure combination is going to vary between companies based on the technical resources they have available and the technical requirements of their applications, but what I'm saying is that in general, there shouldn't be a default position of "all cloud" (super expensive, and also potentially time consuming) or "all metal" (super time consuming, and thus expensive). I have to admit that there is something persistently annoying about your comment. I think it's the implication that if we switched everything to pure Amazon, it would somehow suddenly become a financially beneficial option. I think that is absurd and the only explanation for such a position is fanboyism. Like I said, I'm sure that for some companies, money can be saved by using an appropriate combination of AWS services, but it shouldn't be taken as an implicit truth that it will apply to your circumstances, and that if it doesn't, you just need to further intertwine into Amazon's platform until it appears to becomes impractical to move off of it. I'm sure at that point you will be "saving money" by staying on Amazon, but only because you've created such a massive dependency on an external third-party for your company's operation that it'd take months to walk it back. One last note. I do use an AWS service for my side project: Route53. It costs me less than $2/mo and provides a quick, easy, and powerful way to manipulate DNS records for my domains. For me, this makes a lot more sense than using the registrar's free DNS servers that take up to an hour to update or trying to run BIND myself. I'm completely open to using other AWS services when it makes sense.
vacri 11y ago
Bare metal is cheaper than cloud (not just AWS), sure. But you also have to know how to do bare metal right - you need the knowledge base, and that is a critical point. You don't want to be training up new developers in how to properly install and monitor raid cards, for example. But if you only see AWS as "virtualised servers", you're probably not using them to the best you can.

sokoloff 11y ago

The financial picture of AWS only makes sense if you are using it to reduce (either in absolute terms or in growth rate) your spend on IT staffing costs. If you're paying 100% of your old IT staffing costs and paying the AWS bill, you're double paying part of it, IMO.

cookiecaper 11y ago
Sure, that's an argument that I'm sure crosses the threshold sometimes. However, with the amount of money we're paying AWS, we could've easily brought on several new full-time, dedicated guys to handle datacenter, hardware, colo, and sysadmin stuff and still come out ahead. AWS is very expensive. People underestimate how expensive it is. I don't preclude the possibility that it's cost-effective for someone out there, but I seriously doubt that's the case for most of its users.
- pjlegato 11y ago
  AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle for 51 weeks. But if you know you'll need a car every day, it's much cheaper to buy or long-term lease one rather than rent at the daily rate. AWS is the daily-rate car rental. It's great when you have 1) highly variable load, and 2) your entire infrastructure is instrumented to scale up and down quickly with minimal manual intervention. If, for example, you are running a large e-commerce site -- the case it was designed for -- AWS is great. Your load will be average most of the year, then go up a lot for Christmas shopping in November, then go up even more in December... then load goes back down to average for the remaining 10 months. Part of the issue is also cultural. Younger developers who grew up hearing "cloud is awesome" every day think the very idea of colocating hardware is archaic and ridiculous, and won't even consider it.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. HR, payroll, benefits/401K, management, staffing an on-call rotation for hardware issues (you still have to staff software on-call in either case), dealing with vacations, sickness, training, etc. It's surprisingly expensive to run a full complement of web-facing IT services. Amazon (and Azure/GCE/RS/others) just make that calculus more explicit and in your face. (I also acknowledge that they are running AWS as a profitable and profit-seeking enterprise, so yes, they are marking things up beyond the lowest possible cost.) For us, AWS is absolutely more expensive on a headline number basis. It's also decreased our latency of prod delivery and increased our agility as compared to on-prem solutions. We can get products in front of customers in hours/days that used to take weeks/months.

nucleardog 11y ago

AWS is a platform. If all you want is a VPS, it's overpriced and underperformant (or so I hear). If you just took a load off of bare metal and moved it to AWS, I don't doubt it got significantly more expensive... but that's a terrible mis-use of the platform. When you develop an app around the products they offer, it starts to look a lot more reasonable. Especially at a small scale. When I need a durable messaging service in my app, I don't need to go read up on rabbitmq, find a couple servers somewhere, set up some sort of redundant message queue so I get some level of durability, set up monitoring, deal with updates, debugging problems, etc. I just make some API calls to SQS and it's already there for me. If "cut out Amazon and replace it with colocated bare-metal" is really that simple, then chances are you're not making very good use of the platform and you should absolutely switch off of it.

cookiecaper 11y ago
Right, I said that there wasn't really a technical reason for the move and that it was primarily motivated by political concerns. I'm not defending it. I think you're right that a piecemeal approach is best. If you're using SQS because you identified it as a component that could be quickly and easily integrated at a lower cost than it would take to run apt-get install rabbitmq-server, then great. That may sound like a trivialization but for many companies the reality is that their "Linux guy" is a noob who can barely wield apt-get, and in these cases, something like SQS is indeed a good offering. In our case, it's definitely easier/cheaper/better to install RabbitMQ. The ideal infrastructure combination is going to vary between companies based on the technical resources they have available and the technical requirements of their applications, but what I'm saying is that in general, there shouldn't be a default position of "all cloud" (super expensive, and also potentially time consuming) or "all metal" (super time consuming, and thus expensive). I have to admit that there is something persistently annoying about your comment. I think it's the implication that if we switched everything to pure Amazon, it would somehow suddenly become a financially beneficial option. I think that is absurd and the only explanation for such a position is fanboyism. Like I said, I'm sure that for some companies, money can be saved by using an appropriate combination of AWS services, but it shouldn't be taken as an implicit truth that it will apply to your circumstances, and that if it doesn't, you just need to further intertwine into Amazon's platform until it appears to becomes impractical to move off of it. I'm sure at that point you will be "saving money" by staying on Amazon, but only because you've created such a massive dependency on an external third-party for your company's operation that it'd take months to walk it back. One last note. I do use an AWS service for my side project: Route53. It costs me less than $2/mo and provides a quick, easy, and powerful way to manipulate DNS records for my domains. For me, this makes a lot more sense than using the registrar's free DNS servers that take up to an hour to update or trying to run BIND myself. I'm completely open to using other AWS services when it makes sense.

vacri 11y ago

Bare metal is cheaper than cloud (not just AWS), sure. But you also have to know how to do bare metal right - you need the knowledge base, and that is a critical point. You don't want to be training up new developers in how to properly install and monitor raid cards, for example. But if you only see AWS as "virtualised servers", you're probably not using them to the best you can.