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Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? I've had similar problems in the past with Amazon shutting down services and providing little to no support

Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? I've had similar problems in the past with Amazon shutting down services and providing little to no support to get it remediated. Even after paying for technical support, it was impossible to recover (in our case, it was a billing issue that was entirely Amazon's fault). My general recommendations are: - be sure you have fully scripted your deployment process, - be sure you are making remote backups of critical data (often times this is as easy as setting up simple replication of S3 to GCS or Azure's Cloud Storage) - rely as little as possible on their "value added" features - if you do rely on their value added features, be sure you still have someone on staff who can quickly replace it with something minimal (e.g. know how to install your own mysql) At the very least, this will put you in a position where you aren't 100% locked out of your data, or have to completely rewrite your application in order to move to another provider. You don't have to go crazy with some kind of hot failover, or active-active deployment. Just have daily snapshots of your data and mitigate the risk of your PaaS provider. No matter who your hosting provider is, you should probably have this sketched out as part of a "disaster recovery" plan.

CaptSpify 10y ago
> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimizing their code. The next year they were bleeding cash. So, speaking from my experience: It's more expensive, less configurable, and unreliable. Why do people keep buying the cloud lie?
- markstos 10y ago
  I worked on a project that costs about $5k/month to self-host. After moving it to AWS, it was about $2k/month. So $36k/year savings in hosting costs. In our case outgoing bandwidth at AWS was about 10x cheaper than what our ISP offered. Having spent years help running a physical hosting company, working with virtualized servers saves LOTS of time. I still find it amazing and much, much cheaper in staff-hours to reboot a cluster and have it come back up on 2x larger hardware when a project grows.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - oneloop 10y ago
      > And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself. Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        Depends if you mean for work or home. For work, we have a DC. For home, yes, I keep them in my office.
        oneloop 10y ago
        You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Yikes. Interesting concept though. So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then?
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        > You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Not really. Just a normal home connection. If you design your services sanely, and don't have much traffic, it's not really an issue. > So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then? Well, it depends. You really should do a cost-benefit analysis, because each product is different. But if it makes sense, then yes.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab. Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a power failure and it took down our entire datacenter, I'd rather let Amazon deal with that while I failover to my backup servers in another AZ or region. And my 100mbit ethernet handoff with a DS3 backup doesn't give me much clout with the teleco when the network is down, but AWS's multiple OC-192's (?) gives them a lot more leverage and more redundancy. Owning your own infrastructure doens't mean that you don't have to deal with a third party provider, but it does ensure that you're caught in the middle of it more often.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Nobody said it eliminates problems, but moving to the cloud doesnt either, it just hides them away. If that's what you want, that's OK, but at the same time, don't expect much sympathy when you make a blog-post like this and bitch about the lack of transparency on a system you don't manage. You may want to give up control of your infrastructure to someone else, but my personal (not statistical, mind you) experience is that you end up with less control, for more cost.
    - Johnny555 10y ago
      I have my primary services spread across 3 separate datacenters (AZ's), and backup services across 3 separate AZ's in a region on the opposite side of the country. I pay far less than I would if I put my equipment in only 3 datacenters (2 primary + one secondary) since most of my backup infrastructure is powered off. And I have far more control than I had with colocated equipment, if I find I need to scale up my services by 2X, 5X or 10X, all it takes is a little more money during the time I need the extra hardware (i.e. end of month processing, plus holiday shopping season), I don't need to order hardware a month or two in advance and pay for it all even when I don't need it. What I used to pay for my network infrastructure alone (hardware + support + network engineers) pays for most of my entire AWS compute infrastructure.
- arbitrarytech 10y ago
  IMHO, I think this misses the larger motivator for moving to these services. I don't think you can approach the Cloud as just "a less expensive data center", because you're missing what I believe is the real motivator, "developer productivity". And I don't think this is just Cloud, it's DevOps, Microservices, CI/CD, Serverless, etc. I consult in these areas at large enterprises and have a front row seat to how a lot of these problems are approached. What's particularly interesting is the common thread of developers moving faster by automating human processes outside development. For example, if you have mature CI/CD, you've automated all your testing to the point you no longer need a QA team of manual testers. If you move to the Cloud, you no longer need a data center team. Etc. Now it's obvious that companies just want to save money, but another reality is that those human processes just cannot compete on the service they offer to their customers, developers. You could have the best QA team in the world, but compared to a dev team armed with mature testing practices and CI, it's seconds vs. hours for developers to get the feedback they need in order to ship. Infrastructure hardware is cheaper than ever these days in order to compete with the Cloud, while good developers are at an all time premium. When infrastructure is no longer a slow, scarce resource, it enables developers to spend more time perfecting their applications and experimenting with new approaches. So I suggest you not approach the Cloud as purely a cost saving measure for the infrastructure department, and really think about how transformative it can be in changing your IT processes.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    oh absolutely. But you can also do the same thing with equipment you own. I run mostly VM's because it's easy to spin one up, test something, and kill it. My problem isn't virtualized infrastructure, it's letting go of control, for no actual gain.
oneloop 10y ago
> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? In my last work place we had paid AWS customer service, and they were outstanding.

CaptSpify 10y ago

> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimizing their code. The next year they were bleeding cash. So, speaking from my experience: It's more expensive, less configurable, and unreliable. Why do people keep buying the cloud lie?

markstos 10y ago
I worked on a project that costs about $5k/month to self-host. After moving it to AWS, it was about $2k/month. So $36k/year savings in hosting costs. In our case outgoing bandwidth at AWS was about 10x cheaper than what our ISP offered. Having spent years help running a physical hosting company, working with virtualized servers saves LOTS of time. I still find it amazing and much, much cheaper in staff-hours to reboot a cluster and have it come back up on 2x larger hardware when a project grows.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - oneloop 10y ago
    > And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself. Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Depends if you mean for work or home. For work, we have a DC. For home, yes, I keep them in my office.
      - oneloop 10y ago
        You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Yikes. Interesting concept though. So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then?
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        > You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Not really. Just a normal home connection. If you design your services sanely, and don't have much traffic, it's not really an issue. > So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then? Well, it depends. You really should do a cost-benefit analysis, because each product is different. But if it makes sense, then yes.
Johnny555 10y ago
Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab. Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a power failure and it took down our entire datacenter, I'd rather let Amazon deal with that while I failover to my backup servers in another AZ or region. And my 100mbit ethernet handoff with a DS3 backup doesn't give me much clout with the teleco when the network is down, but AWS's multiple OC-192's (?) gives them a lot more leverage and more redundancy. Owning your own infrastructure doens't mean that you don't have to deal with a third party provider, but it does ensure that you're caught in the middle of it more often.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Nobody said it eliminates problems, but moving to the cloud doesnt either, it just hides them away. If that's what you want, that's OK, but at the same time, don't expect much sympathy when you make a blog-post like this and bitch about the lack of transparency on a system you don't manage. You may want to give up control of your infrastructure to someone else, but my personal (not statistical, mind you) experience is that you end up with less control, for more cost.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    I have my primary services spread across 3 separate datacenters (AZ's), and backup services across 3 separate AZ's in a region on the opposite side of the country. I pay far less than I would if I put my equipment in only 3 datacenters (2 primary + one secondary) since most of my backup infrastructure is powered off. And I have far more control than I had with colocated equipment, if I find I need to scale up my services by 2X, 5X or 10X, all it takes is a little more money during the time I need the extra hardware (i.e. end of month processing, plus holiday shopping season), I don't need to order hardware a month or two in advance and pay for it all even when I don't need it. What I used to pay for my network infrastructure alone (hardware + support + network engineers) pays for most of my entire AWS compute infrastructure.
arbitrarytech 10y ago
IMHO, I think this misses the larger motivator for moving to these services. I don't think you can approach the Cloud as just "a less expensive data center", because you're missing what I believe is the real motivator, "developer productivity". And I don't think this is just Cloud, it's DevOps, Microservices, CI/CD, Serverless, etc. I consult in these areas at large enterprises and have a front row seat to how a lot of these problems are approached. What's particularly interesting is the common thread of developers moving faster by automating human processes outside development. For example, if you have mature CI/CD, you've automated all your testing to the point you no longer need a QA team of manual testers. If you move to the Cloud, you no longer need a data center team. Etc. Now it's obvious that companies just want to save money, but another reality is that those human processes just cannot compete on the service they offer to their customers, developers. You could have the best QA team in the world, but compared to a dev team armed with mature testing practices and CI, it's seconds vs. hours for developers to get the feedback they need in order to ship. Infrastructure hardware is cheaper than ever these days in order to compete with the Cloud, while good developers are at an all time premium. When infrastructure is no longer a slow, scarce resource, it enables developers to spend more time perfecting their applications and experimenting with new approaches. So I suggest you not approach the Cloud as purely a cost saving measure for the infrastructure department, and really think about how transformative it can be in changing your IT processes.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  oh absolutely. But you can also do the same thing with equipment you own. I run mostly VM's because it's easy to spin one up, test something, and kill it. My problem isn't virtualized infrastructure, it's letting go of control, for no actual gain.

oneloop 10y ago

> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? In my last work place we had paid AWS customer service, and they were outstanding.