9 ms·

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there

by chx 10y ago

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo to worth it but Examiner was ~75th on Quantcast and we ran it on a dozen dedicated boxes and colo would'v been ridiculously more expensive.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)
- chx 10y ago
  YAGNI.
  - problems 10y ago
    Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to physical hardware as needed. With this set up, you save massive cash and avoid vendor lock-in.
    - mrep 10y ago
      Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - cookiecaper 10y ago
        The expense of one's outlay to Amazon is not a persuasive statistic. It only shows that you have a lot of incentive to keep confirmation bias in gear. AWS is specifically designed to maximize instance count (that is, cost). The reason "devops" has exploded since EC2 hit critical mass is that before EC2, people were reasonable with the number of servers they needed. With EC2, it's all water, and it's so easy to press "create instance" that people just do it without thinking, and wonder how they ended up paying Amazon $100k/mo for something that used to cost them $5k/mo. I'm engaged on a project now that has similar figures to what you've quoted here. It could be done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers. I know because it was done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers before someone in the C suite felt left out and suggested some "modernization" via the cloud. I think that cloud zealots are mostly people who were either deathly afraid of sysadmin or people who were cutting their teeth as cloud got hyped, because there's no way any competent person who was doing this type of stuff before 2008-2009 can pretend that Amazon is not laughing all the way to the bank. This is not to say that cloud has no advantages or that its use is always inappropriate, but what you're describing is pure fantasy. Yes, a small team of coders should be more than capable of managing the servers that they need, especially if they are renting dedicated boxes from a professional datacenter facility that handles hardware swaps and similar failures for them.
        mrep 10y ago
        Our EC2 costs are about the same as S3, RDS is the most as I forgot to mention the backup servers we have in each region but we are trying to move all of that data to S3, and more than our SQS costs. I'm pretty new to the backend design cost/benefit (have only used AWS since I graduated college) but I'm curious to here about bare metal storage solutions for 500 TB of compressed json as I have not read any compelling solutions for that data requirement (Outside of MongoDB but I have heard good and bad things about that).
kkielhofner 10y ago
Also keep in mind that literally every hardware vendor has no problem giving great lease terms on actual hardware that you take possession of. Certainly more overhead, dev ops work, etc but yet another way to go about a desired technical approach while also being able to (largely) satisfy any policy/strategy/whatever with regard to capex.
bkeroack 10y ago
With public cloud, you're paying for the control plane. Period. Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale). This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really exciting, BTW. It's a control plane that you don't have to rent.
- chx 10y ago
  I really badly do not understand what EC2 gives you that a dedicated box doesn't. Yes, if you use all the other services, then there's a value but then again for example SQS is a particularly shitty queue.
  - elorant 10y ago
    It gives you dev ops out of the box. For small projects it has its merits. For most developers tinkering with the server isn't high in their priority list. I'm with you on dedicated but if I were to run an asynchronous crawler I'd rather go with AWS and save me the trouble of setting up the proper environment.
  - mrep 10y ago
    > SQS is a particularly shitty queue. Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?
    - chx 10y ago
      A million messages per minute ? How's that a problem? Please see http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/ http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/ Almost all of the systems tested hit 17k / s (aside from NSQ) -- on a laptop. NATS (gnatsd) hits 0.2M per second, that's a magnitude above what you need and that's a brokered system, if your task fits with a brokerless one then nanomsg is yet another magnitude. I do not particularly see where the problem really is?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ktta 10y ago
I would've agreed with you a couple years ago, but now things have changed. Clouds like AWS and GCE are increasingly offering services that one can't replicate on their own dedicated box. ML, Managed Databases, etc. can't really be replaced. Another thing is the skills one needs to efficiently manage and deploy everything. The sysadmin, devops positions in a startup have vanished because now that's AWS and GCE. Sure, AWS/GCE are expensive, but the developers don't need to worry about uptime, and if something happens to their instances, they just hit 'delete instance' and start up a new one. The new theme seems to be developer productivity rather than cost effectiveness. With the new automatic deploy tools, and automatic load balancing, there's not really a need for anyone to worry about managing systems. It might seem like premature optimization, but you're saving the paycheck that needs to be paid to the sysadmin who has to be there for 24/7 monitoring. This is all assuming one of the existing developers on the team isn't also a rockstar sysadmin, security guru and an insomniac who doesn't have a family.

by chx 10y ago

cookiecaper 10y ago

Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)

chx 10y ago
YAGNI.
- problems 10y ago
  Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to physical hardware as needed. With this set up, you save massive cash and avoid vendor lock-in.
  - mrep 10y ago
    Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      The expense of one's outlay to Amazon is not a persuasive statistic. It only shows that you have a lot of incentive to keep confirmation bias in gear. AWS is specifically designed to maximize instance count (that is, cost). The reason "devops" has exploded since EC2 hit critical mass is that before EC2, people were reasonable with the number of servers they needed. With EC2, it's all water, and it's so easy to press "create instance" that people just do it without thinking, and wonder how they ended up paying Amazon $100k/mo for something that used to cost them $5k/mo. I'm engaged on a project now that has similar figures to what you've quoted here. It could be done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers. I know because it was done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers before someone in the C suite felt left out and suggested some "modernization" via the cloud. I think that cloud zealots are mostly people who were either deathly afraid of sysadmin or people who were cutting their teeth as cloud got hyped, because there's no way any competent person who was doing this type of stuff before 2008-2009 can pretend that Amazon is not laughing all the way to the bank. This is not to say that cloud has no advantages or that its use is always inappropriate, but what you're describing is pure fantasy. Yes, a small team of coders should be more than capable of managing the servers that they need, especially if they are renting dedicated boxes from a professional datacenter facility that handles hardware swaps and similar failures for them.
      - mrep 10y ago
        Our EC2 costs are about the same as S3, RDS is the most as I forgot to mention the backup servers we have in each region but we are trying to move all of that data to S3, and more than our SQS costs. I'm pretty new to the backend design cost/benefit (have only used AWS since I graduated college) but I'm curious to here about bare metal storage solutions for 500 TB of compressed json as I have not read any compelling solutions for that data requirement (Outside of MongoDB but I have heard good and bad things about that).

kkielhofner 10y ago

Also keep in mind that literally every hardware vendor has no problem giving great lease terms on actual hardware that you take possession of. Certainly more overhead, dev ops work, etc but yet another way to go about a desired technical approach while also being able to (largely) satisfy any policy/strategy/whatever with regard to capex.

bkeroack 10y ago

With public cloud, you're paying for the control plane. Period. Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale). This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really exciting, BTW. It's a control plane that you don't have to rent.

chx 10y ago
I really badly do not understand what EC2 gives you that a dedicated box doesn't. Yes, if you use all the other services, then there's a value but then again for example SQS is a particularly shitty queue.
- elorant 10y ago
  It gives you dev ops out of the box. For small projects it has its merits. For most developers tinkering with the server isn't high in their priority list. I'm with you on dedicated but if I were to run an asynchronous crawler I'd rather go with AWS and save me the trouble of setting up the proper environment.
- mrep 10y ago
  > SQS is a particularly shitty queue. Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?
  - chx 10y ago
    A million messages per minute ? How's that a problem? Please see http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/ http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/ Almost all of the systems tested hit 17k / s (aside from NSQ) -- on a laptop. NATS (gnatsd) hits 0.2M per second, that's a magnitude above what you need and that's a brokered system, if your task fits with a brokerless one then nanomsg is yet another magnitude. I do not particularly see where the problem really is?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ktta 10y ago

I would've agreed with you a couple years ago, but now things have changed. Clouds like AWS and GCE are increasingly offering services that one can't replicate on their own dedicated box. ML, Managed Databases, etc. can't really be replaced. Another thing is the skills one needs to efficiently manage and deploy everything. The sysadmin, devops positions in a startup have vanished because now that's AWS and GCE. Sure, AWS/GCE are expensive, but the developers don't need to worry about uptime, and if something happens to their instances, they just hit 'delete instance' and start up a new one. The new theme seems to be developer productivity rather than cost effectiveness. With the new automatic deploy tools, and automatic load balancing, there's not really a need for anyone to worry about managing systems. It might seem like premature optimization, but you're saving the paycheck that needs to be paid to the sysadmin who has to be there for 24/7 monitoring. This is all assuming one of the existing developers on the team isn't also a rockstar sysadmin, security guru and an insomniac who doesn't have a family.