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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 ma

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.
- elcct 10y ago
  You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.
  - TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
    Unfortunately, mixing and matching ends up really complicating things especially with security in mind. Many people run within a VPC and bridging to another private network is, well, I don't really want to think about it at this time.
    - kchoudhu 10y ago
      We've found OpenVPN to be our friend here: create an overlay network that doesn't really care if nodes are bare metal or "cloud".
      - gerhardhaering 10y ago
        I thought about that too, but as far as I see with OpenVPN you have the single OpenVPN server as single point of failure and all the traffic goes through the server, which quickly becomes a chokepoint. If I needed this again, I'd try out tinc first. It does not appear to have the single point of failure issue.
        kchoudhu 10y ago
        We have multiple standby servers to prevent the SPOF issue. One problem we HAVE seen is a reduction in maximum bandwidth. Since we're CPU limited, however, it hasn't really been an issue.
    - elcct 10y ago
      That's the thing - it is much easier nowadays. Kubernetes requires your containers to run on flat shared networking namespace, so your new machine joins that network. It is like running within VPC. Software like Rancher makes the process of adding new server a matter of executing a one liner on server.
hueving 10y ago
"Sure, you could just buy a toyota corolla and get to and from work without much hassle. However, I commute in a lamborghini gallardo in case I need to get from 0-60mph in 2.8 seconds to snag a narrow spot on the expressway from an onramp. I can't do that with a toyota corolla." I can't wait until the day that we mature as an industry enough to consider running any kind of baseline workload on EC2 negligent.
- TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
  I'm talking about _my_ use case for using AWS. I'm sure other people have similar requirements. We manage hundreds of servers, process over 50 billion events/month and losing data is unacceptable. In the HN echo chamber, you might think everyone just has a SPA and just needs a Digital Ocean droplet. Everyone has different requirements and AWS fits those for many people.

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.

elcct 10y ago
You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.
- TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
  Unfortunately, mixing and matching ends up really complicating things especially with security in mind. Many people run within a VPC and bridging to another private network is, well, I don't really want to think about it at this time.
  - kchoudhu 10y ago
    We've found OpenVPN to be our friend here: create an overlay network that doesn't really care if nodes are bare metal or "cloud".
    - gerhardhaering 10y ago
      I thought about that too, but as far as I see with OpenVPN you have the single OpenVPN server as single point of failure and all the traffic goes through the server, which quickly becomes a chokepoint. If I needed this again, I'd try out tinc first. It does not appear to have the single point of failure issue.
      - kchoudhu 10y ago
        We have multiple standby servers to prevent the SPOF issue. One problem we HAVE seen is a reduction in maximum bandwidth. Since we're CPU limited, however, it hasn't really been an issue.
  - elcct 10y ago
    That's the thing - it is much easier nowadays. Kubernetes requires your containers to run on flat shared networking namespace, so your new machine joins that network. It is like running within VPC. Software like Rancher makes the process of adding new server a matter of executing a one liner on server.

hueving 10y ago

"Sure, you could just buy a toyota corolla and get to and from work without much hassle. However, I commute in a lamborghini gallardo in case I need to get from 0-60mph in 2.8 seconds to snag a narrow spot on the expressway from an onramp. I can't do that with a toyota corolla." I can't wait until the day that we mature as an industry enough to consider running any kind of baseline workload on EC2 negligent.

TheHydroImpulse 10y ago
I'm talking about _my_ use case for using AWS. I'm sure other people have similar requirements. We manage hundreds of servers, process over 50 billion events/month and losing data is unacceptable. In the HN echo chamber, you might think everyone just has a SPA and just needs a Digital Ocean droplet. Everyone has different requirements and AWS fits those for many people.