7 ms·
I can confirm that first hand; We're just moving our whole stack from AWS to GC and right now we're running everything in parallel with roughly the same amount
by tzaman 10y ago
I can confirm that first hand; We're just moving our whole stack from AWS to GC and right now we're running everything in parallel with roughly the same amount of resources. AWS monthly bill: ~$1000, GC monthly bill: ~$600
- toomuchtodo 10y agoHow many months will you need to run in GC to break even on the engineer time spent moving at $400/month savings?
- chronic6l 10y agoAssuming a $400/month engineer, 1 month.
- user5994461 10y agoHow many servers did you have to move? I'd assume that you can count them on your fingers if the bill is only $1000/month. That's a "reasonably" small scale migration, if not locked in on AWS services.
- notyourwork 10y agoYep, we spend around $45-$50k/month and are quite happy with our support from AWS.
- tzaman 10y agoAgreed, we have 10 instances on AWS, but it's hard to judge the complexity of the migration just based on that because these servers vary in size, requirements, and purpose. But all in all, yes, it is a fairly small scale migration.
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoGenerally speaking, the number of servers has very little to do with complexity of migration or existential threat from downtime, relative to company size.
- user5994461 10y agoGenerally speaking, the numbers of server is a good indicator of the amount of services, which has much to do with the complexity of a migration.
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoServers used to be beautiful snowflakes. That's not so true anymore, especially at EC2 or GCE.
- tzaman 10y agoI would say around 8, but then again, the goal was to use Kubernetes (which we do on GKE), so much of the time was spent configuring it, and we'd use at least some of that time even if we stayed on AWS's container service. [EDIT] Plus I'm the technical founder, so enjoy this stuff, which means a lot of the work was done in my free time.
- notyourwork 10y agoThere is no such thing as "free time".
- imperialdrive 10y agoYou're just missing it. Take a walk around the block some time. Time is more than free when it is your own, especially if you're learning something new or enjoying yourself.
- notyourwork 10y agoI disagree. Taking a walk around the block is time spent doing something that could be spent otherwise. Everything in life has a cost associated with it. I am not saying a walk around the block or spending extra time at work are bad decision. My point is no time is free, you are always trading one thing for another. Going to the gym, you could be studying. Studying, you could be growing your business. Growing your business you could be spending time with family. Its all a balance in life but to claim your time is free is naive of reality. edit: To those down voting you are welcome to present a different perspective. A down vote by itself doesn't mean much but I welcome criticism and feedback on my point of view.
- seangrogg 10y agoI'll bite. I didn't downvote, but I feel that your thinking is relatively binary and doesn't take the dynamism of humans into account. I can throw study material onto a playlist and hit the gym. I can go to my kid's dance recital and hit up the other bored parents there with business prospects. I can turn over programming ideas while I'm taking a shower. In many cases, taking a break from the task at hand has great effects on resetting the fatigue that builds up when you focus too hard on a narrow set of problems. I wouldn't consider those breaks a "cost" when they're ultimately used to allow you to more efficiently use your time while at the same time reducing burnout. Don't get me wrong - time is finite and it shouldn't be squandered. But at the same time, perhaps what looks like a walk around the block is much more than a 15 minute "cost".
- bluecmd 10y agoIf you always require a short-term win, you will lose in the long-term. When the company is 100x the size it is today, the savings are quite substantial.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoOdds are low almost all startups will be 100x the size they are today. Most fail. Don't optimize prematurely.
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoTrue, but if you DO hit that magic growth factor, it'll probably be too late to make a change of such magnitude. Better to get optimization experimentation out of the way (relatively) early.
- AbrahamParangi 10y agoFor nearly all businesses the cost of service hosting is going to be similar to the amount spent on snacks. This seems about as useful as optimizing the brand of cereal you buy.
- nine_k 10y ago...which you should, for it's the quality of life that counts :)
- gonyea 10y agoThat's a great problem to have. Pro: Can't make hot cakes fast enough. Con: I wish I could switch ovens; a white one matches my kitchen's decor.
- giis 10y agoJust curious, what type of AWS instances you use? And also is it on-demand instance or reserved instances? I'm using AWS for couple of years, exploring other options.
- tzaman 10y agoOn demand: m1.medium mostly for Rails and Node apps and db.m3.medium for RDS (Postgres). Now on GCE, we use Kubernetes, which means the type of instances is rather insignificant as they can be instantly scaled up when more resources are needed for containers.
- nodesocket 10y agoSeriously this is worse than premature optimization, I like to call it developer frugalness optimization. A $600 savings is not even worth the effort.
- grzm 10y agoFor one month, likely. How many months are they going to be running? Will they scale up? When do you decide the investment is worthwhile?
- tschellenbach 10y agowhy is anyone downvoting this?, comment author has a point.
- tzaman 10y agoAgreed - primary motivation weren't savings, but much smoother UX with Kubernetes on Google. We're adopting container-based approach to development (and DevOps), so we explored alternatives, and chose Google Cloud.
- ignoramous 10y agoThanks for sharing your experience. Why, acc to you, is Kubernetes on AWS a non-starter? Is it too difficult to setup? Or maintain? Or simply isn't the first class citizen, like it's on GCP? Or does it just make sense to stick with GCP since K8s has Google's blessing? Or...
- tzaman 10y agoTwo reasons really, the first is that AWS has become this bloated mess of "stuff", making it increasingly harder to use, because so much time is needed to either constantly look at it to see what's new/changed or vigilantly document everything. GKE, based on my experience, uses more "convention over configuration" approach, so the UI is much less cluttered, easier to understand, and comes with good defaults out of the box. And yes, K8s is a first class citizen on GKE and it overall fits nicely in the google compute engine environment. The only downside is that Google Cloud doesn't have a hosted DB offering for PostgreSQL, like AWS RDS, so it took me a while to set up everything properly. Finally, from a purely subjective point of view, Google's Material design is easy on the eyes. This is roughly what we ended up with for our stack: https://cl.ly/1z141g0e1w38 https://cl.ly/1z141g0e1w38 (The top three instances are K8S, then two GlusterFS instances which hold persistent volumes for pods and finally three PSQL instances that also run Redis Sentinels with a quorum of 2 - Redis itself is on Kubernetes as a DaemonSet)