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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,

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.

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.