5 ms·

Software for bare metal is catching up - you can buy couple of dedicated servers, install something like Kubernetes and will be shaking your head in disbelief h

by elcct 10y ago

Software for bare metal is catching up - you can buy couple of dedicated servers, install something like Kubernetes and will be shaking your head in disbelief how much you over paid for AWS.

0xmohit 10y ago
And shake your head in disbelief further when you find the new setup performs much better.
rubber_duck 10y ago
>you can buy couple of dedicated servers You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)
- dx034 10y ago
  OVH is another decent host at similar prices. They have a larger range of servers and more datacenters, but are slightly more expensive. But they also offer renting older servers at kimsufi (similar to Hetzner's server bidding).
  - elcct 10y ago
    Online.net also offers great value for money
  - tachion 10y ago
    'Friends dont let friends use OVH'. Just google OVH and how horrible they are, every few months they have some gigantic filure - last time I've heard it was taking people money and not delivering servers for MONTHS.
    - mootothemax 10y ago
      Counterpoint: I've been delighted with the last couple of years at OVH, as have several people I know who use them for dedicated servers. I also host a few servers at Hetzner and have nothing but praise for them. I've found network performance to be way better at OVH - think it may be a your mileage may vary thing, though.
    - tobltobs 10y ago
      'Friends don't confuse friends with anecdotal evidence'. My anecdotal evidence is that I am a satisfied customer. Great prices, good customer service.
      - tachion 10y ago
        That would be anecdotal if it wouldn't happened to me twice. I won't ever use them again, nor recommend them to anyone, unless they're masochists in nature ;)
    - zapu 10y ago
      ~3 year OVH user here, multiple dedicated servers. No problems whatsoever, and DDOS protection that actually saved us a few times.
    - napsterbr 10y ago
      Same as all replies. 3 years using OVH and not a single regret. Don't confuse dedicated ovh servers with their sister brands kimsufi and soyoustart, which has less uptime guarantees. Also OVH VMs suck, from my experience. But their dedicated server line is completely reliable. I use T3 servers and will start testing T4 servers (everything redundant) next few months.
    - paulfurtado 10y ago
      I have no clue about the reliability of OVH, but I would definitely not say AWS is short on failures. At a scale of ~2000 instances, it's really not uncommon to encounter a bunch of AWS instance failures every week. Multiple times per year we see a massive failure that affects a large number of servers. The saving grace with AWS is that usually the problems are limited to a single availability zone so as long as you're redundant across multiple availability zones you can survive.
- elcct 10y ago
  I actually meant renting - thanks for pointing that out.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gerhardhaering 10y ago
  You cannot really compare cloud providers to classic bare metal providers like Hetzner. FWIW we're in the middle of going 100 % AWS after having used a dual setup with Hetzner for base load and AWS for dynamic load. Using spot instances for base load and autoscaling groups for dynamic load proved to be competitive in machine cost with Hetzner. Plus there's a lot less management overhead with AWS on our scale (50+ machines). And the security of VPC and IAM cannot be replicated on Hetzner. Plus as always, it's the integration of all AWS services that's hard to beat. And we really need to be multi-region anyways (5 regions and counting).
TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity") I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled them a couple of times after making changes to the AMI. The clusters are in ASGs and will scale based on resource usage. I can't do that with bare metal.
- windowsworkstoo 10y ago
  This argument always comes out when someone points out how much bare metal stomps AWS. Here are some counterpoints a) A large portion of AWS hosted stuff probably doesnt need that level of sudden, burst scaling b) With something like SoftLayer/IBM you can scale physical servers, usually within 30 - 60 minutes c) If your burst scaling requirement are temporary, if you are located in a decent DC, you can probably spin up some infra in AWS and access your physical stuff over a private network connection and get the best of both worlds. As always, use what's best for your environment.
  - TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
    a) I don't really have a good enough sample size but I'd imagine a lot don't. The biggest selling point of AWS is everything around it. You don't just get EC2, you get Route53, ELB, VPC, RDS, S3, CloudFront (although it's kinda expensive), ECS, etc... If I can pay AWS to do something instead of building it, I'll do it.
- dx034 10y ago
  Most startups hope that they'll suddenly need to increase capacity by 100x, but it nearly never happens. Most vendors can provide dedicated servers within a few minutes (if you don't order too many at once), so scaling is still possible in the vast majority of cases. Even if you always have to scale up for 1-2 hours per day, using dedicated hardware that's idle the rest of the day is probably cheaper in most cases.
csomar 10y ago
DockerCloud allows you to deploy to AWS/DigitalOcean. It is server hosting agnostic. That is if the Ocean is cheaper, you can simply switch from the Amazon. This will be a deal breaker in the future. Amazon is being disrupted with the same tech it used for disrupting the other players.
- moondev 10y ago
  So is Kubernetes
riprowan 10y ago
'til your RAID array fails...
cagataygurturk 10y ago
AWS is not a virtual machine company. Virtual machines are just one of its offering. At AWS you must architect your software to use other AWS services as much as possible, and spin up minimum count of virtual machines, only when you really need it. Only in that way you pay really what you use and in most cases you will see that the final cost is cheaper than any other infrastructure. This applies to the most of companies at small and medium scale. If you are at huge scale it might not apply to you.

by elcct 10y ago

Software for bare metal is catching up - you can buy couple of dedicated servers, install something like Kubernetes and will be shaking your head in disbelief how much you over paid for AWS.

0xmohit 10y ago

And shake your head in disbelief further when you find the new setup performs much better.

rubber_duck 10y ago

>you can buy couple of dedicated servers You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)

dx034 10y ago
OVH is another decent host at similar prices. They have a larger range of servers and more datacenters, but are slightly more expensive. But they also offer renting older servers at kimsufi (similar to Hetzner's server bidding).
- elcct 10y ago
  Online.net also offers great value for money
- tachion 10y ago
  'Friends dont let friends use OVH'. Just google OVH and how horrible they are, every few months they have some gigantic filure - last time I've heard it was taking people money and not delivering servers for MONTHS.
  - mootothemax 10y ago
    Counterpoint: I've been delighted with the last couple of years at OVH, as have several people I know who use them for dedicated servers. I also host a few servers at Hetzner and have nothing but praise for them. I've found network performance to be way better at OVH - think it may be a your mileage may vary thing, though.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    'Friends don't confuse friends with anecdotal evidence'. My anecdotal evidence is that I am a satisfied customer. Great prices, good customer service.
    - tachion 10y ago
      That would be anecdotal if it wouldn't happened to me twice. I won't ever use them again, nor recommend them to anyone, unless they're masochists in nature ;)
  - zapu 10y ago
    ~3 year OVH user here, multiple dedicated servers. No problems whatsoever, and DDOS protection that actually saved us a few times.
  - napsterbr 10y ago
    Same as all replies. 3 years using OVH and not a single regret. Don't confuse dedicated ovh servers with their sister brands kimsufi and soyoustart, which has less uptime guarantees. Also OVH VMs suck, from my experience. But their dedicated server line is completely reliable. I use T3 servers and will start testing T4 servers (everything redundant) next few months.
  - paulfurtado 10y ago
    I have no clue about the reliability of OVH, but I would definitely not say AWS is short on failures. At a scale of ~2000 instances, it's really not uncommon to encounter a bunch of AWS instance failures every week. Multiple times per year we see a massive failure that affects a large number of servers. The saving grace with AWS is that usually the problems are limited to a single availability zone so as long as you're redundant across multiple availability zones you can survive.
elcct 10y ago
I actually meant renting - thanks for pointing that out.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gerhardhaering 10y ago
You cannot really compare cloud providers to classic bare metal providers like Hetzner. FWIW we're in the middle of going 100 % AWS after having used a dual setup with Hetzner for base load and AWS for dynamic load. Using spot instances for base load and autoscaling groups for dynamic load proved to be competitive in machine cost with Hetzner. Plus there's a lot less management overhead with AWS on our scale (50+ machines). And the security of VPC and IAM cannot be replicated on Hetzner. Plus as always, it's the integration of all AWS services that's hard to beat. And we really need to be multi-region anyways (5 regions and counting).

TheHydroImpulse 10y ago

Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity") I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled them a couple of times after making changes to the AMI. The clusters are in ASGs and will scale based on resource usage. I can't do that with bare metal.

windowsworkstoo 10y ago
This argument always comes out when someone points out how much bare metal stomps AWS. Here are some counterpoints a) A large portion of AWS hosted stuff probably doesnt need that level of sudden, burst scaling b) With something like SoftLayer/IBM you can scale physical servers, usually within 30 - 60 minutes c) If your burst scaling requirement are temporary, if you are located in a decent DC, you can probably spin up some infra in AWS and access your physical stuff over a private network connection and get the best of both worlds. As always, use what's best for your environment.
- TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
  a) I don't really have a good enough sample size but I'd imagine a lot don't. The biggest selling point of AWS is everything around it. You don't just get EC2, you get Route53, ELB, VPC, RDS, S3, CloudFront (although it's kinda expensive), ECS, etc... If I can pay AWS to do something instead of building it, I'll do it.
dx034 10y ago
Most startups hope that they'll suddenly need to increase capacity by 100x, but it nearly never happens. Most vendors can provide dedicated servers within a few minutes (if you don't order too many at once), so scaling is still possible in the vast majority of cases. Even if you always have to scale up for 1-2 hours per day, using dedicated hardware that's idle the rest of the day is probably cheaper in most cases.

csomar 10y ago

DockerCloud allows you to deploy to AWS/DigitalOcean. It is server hosting agnostic. That is if the Ocean is cheaper, you can simply switch from the Amazon. This will be a deal breaker in the future. Amazon is being disrupted with the same tech it used for disrupting the other players.

moondev 10y ago
So is Kubernetes

riprowan 10y ago

'til your RAID array fails...

cagataygurturk 10y ago

AWS is not a virtual machine company. Virtual machines are just one of its offering. At AWS you must architect your software to use other AWS services as much as possible, and spin up minimum count of virtual machines, only when you really need it. Only in that way you pay really what you use and in most cases you will see that the final cost is cheaper than any other infrastructure. This applies to the most of companies at small and medium scale. If you are at huge scale it might not apply to you.