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you still have to run the cache from somewhere, and you probably want to be able to deploy during peak load times. Not sure about the price, to me $75 for a de

by rtpg 9y ago

you still have to run the cache from somewhere, and you probably want to be able to deploy during peak load times. Not sure about the price, to me $75 for a decently beefy server seems low? Compared to the cheap stuff that most people use because most people are only at like 1 or 2 r/s. Also serverless might sound silly but isn't it nice to not have to do ops works? Surely worth $200/month.

kogepathic 9y ago
> Not sure about the price, to me $75 for a decently beefy server seems low? You can argue whether Hetzner is reputable hosting or not, but $75/month will get you a v3 Xeon with 32GB of ECC RAM. > Also serverless might sound silly but isn't it nice to not have to do ops works? Surely worth $200/month. Hosting something on Amazon doesn't absolve you of operations work, it's just a different kind of operations. Instead of managing the OS/software updates, you need to manage S3, IAM, CloudWatch, optimise time/memory consumption to reduce cost, etc. Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc Thank you. Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience - a growing but much smaller pool of people, ime. Getting IAM permissions correct for complex stuff is just not simple, for example, and there's some use cases IAM stuff doesn't (or didn't) cover. Had a client who couldn't give me EC2 access because - at least at the time - they'd have to give me access to all their EC2 instances, not just the ones I needed. Now... this may have been IAM-inexperience, although, at the time, my digging seemed to indicate it was the correct conclusion.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    I keep recommending people look at places like Hetzner over AWS. People keep wanting to do AWS anyway, and then end up paying 2x-3x as much for the servers and more for the ops work. I shouldn't complain - people who opt for AWS even when it doesn't make sense are what my profit margin is made of. (I have clients I recommend AWS to as well, but reducing ops time and/or reduced cost are rarely if ever part of those discussions; AWS is the luxury option)
    - rtpg 9y ago
      out of curiosity: What makes you recommend AWS in those cases?
      - vidarh 9y ago
        It would typically be if they have use cases where they either want to do large batch jobs, or have other needs where "add-on" services AWS provides is worthwhile. Often it's a matter of urgency, and AWS will be a good first approximation, and we can start migrating onto a hybrid or fully dedicated environment depending on what's most cost effective down the road when they know more about what they actually need. Sometimes it's a matter of politics and trst - AWS is trusted, and if their hosting cost doesn't add up to much of their total costs, then that trust is sometimes more worthwhile than squeezing the cost down. E.g. I'm working on a project for a VC now, and their yearly hosting costs are likely to be below what I'm charging them for the initial development of their system, so spending time selling them on a cheaper provider is just not worth it for either them or me.
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience Yes, and too many companies don't realize that by moving to AWS, they are not only narrowing the pool of developers/operations people they can hire from, but the salary of these people is higher. I'm not against AWS, there are absolutely businesses where AWS makes sense (as the article describes). However it's more than just a question of dollars and cents to move to AWS, you also have to factor in the HR consequences of losing access to dime a dozen developers/sysadmins. For most businesses I have worked with, I would argue losing access to developer/sysadmin talent outweighs their perceived benefits of moving to serverless.
- rtpg 9y ago
  OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of: - making sure you don't run out of inodes - having to manage DB backups - making sure your cache didn't stop working - updating your box for security updates (beyond just your application requirements) It's a tradeoff (architecturally as well), and for a lot of stuff you'll end up wanting full-ish control of your box. But for getting the ball rolling it's nice to not have to first spend a bunch of time getting postgres to start consistently on boot. You still have to actually manage deploys themselves, of course. And keep an eye on costs, too. But a lot of these services are getting close to "the code that you are running locally, but in the cloud". A far cry from "OK, first lets get apache up, then set up some proxy servers, then set up supervisor" etc etc.
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of I wasn't trying to list every bit of ops work for server/serverless. My point is that as a business you cannot expect that once you move to serverless you don't need anyone to manage it anymore, or that the time to manage it drops to zero. Yes, serverless does have its distinct advantages over rolling your own, there is no question about that. But serverless still requires experienced people to configure/manage/monitor it. I've seen way too many managers get giddy at the thought of having their developer/ops time completely free to perform other tasks, and that's not the case. You still have to budget for people and time to manage serverless architecture.
mattmanser 9y ago
We use Azure, when you deploy it actually goes down, like proper down-down, timeout errors. Long periods of down-time. That doesn't happen when I deploy on dedicated servers. It really does depend on your setup and cloud guarantees nothing. Also, 2.37s for parsing a HTML doc and then making it more readable is awfully slow, assuming it gets sent the HTML doc.
- spdionis 9y ago
  Do you mean Azure goes down or your application?
- throwmeaway32 9y ago
  Do you mean if you do an in-place upgrade? or a VIP swap? A inplace should just go through the update domains so if you have your extra 20% provisioned as normal it should be fine and a VIP should be pretty quick and painless.
shimon_e 9y ago
I use linux on my desktop and have for almost 20 years. Managing a server is a piece of cake for me. AWS is much more difficult for me.

by rtpg 9y ago

kogepathic 9y ago

> Not sure about the price, to me $75 for a decently beefy server seems low? You can argue whether Hetzner is reputable hosting or not, but $75/month will get you a v3 Xeon with 32GB of ECC RAM. > Also serverless might sound silly but isn't it nice to not have to do ops works? Surely worth $200/month. Hosting something on Amazon doesn't absolve you of operations work, it's just a different kind of operations. Instead of managing the OS/software updates, you need to manage S3, IAM, CloudWatch, optimise time/memory consumption to reduce cost, etc. Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc.

mgkimsal 9y ago
> Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc Thank you. Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience - a growing but much smaller pool of people, ime. Getting IAM permissions correct for complex stuff is just not simple, for example, and there's some use cases IAM stuff doesn't (or didn't) cover. Had a client who couldn't give me EC2 access because - at least at the time - they'd have to give me access to all their EC2 instances, not just the ones I needed. Now... this may have been IAM-inexperience, although, at the time, my digging seemed to indicate it was the correct conclusion.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I keep recommending people look at places like Hetzner over AWS. People keep wanting to do AWS anyway, and then end up paying 2x-3x as much for the servers and more for the ops work. I shouldn't complain - people who opt for AWS even when it doesn't make sense are what my profit margin is made of. (I have clients I recommend AWS to as well, but reducing ops time and/or reduced cost are rarely if ever part of those discussions; AWS is the luxury option)
  - rtpg 9y ago
    out of curiosity: What makes you recommend AWS in those cases?
    - vidarh 9y ago
      It would typically be if they have use cases where they either want to do large batch jobs, or have other needs where "add-on" services AWS provides is worthwhile. Often it's a matter of urgency, and AWS will be a good first approximation, and we can start migrating onto a hybrid or fully dedicated environment depending on what's most cost effective down the road when they know more about what they actually need. Sometimes it's a matter of politics and trst - AWS is trusted, and if their hosting cost doesn't add up to much of their total costs, then that trust is sometimes more worthwhile than squeezing the cost down. E.g. I'm working on a project for a VC now, and their yearly hosting costs are likely to be below what I'm charging them for the initial development of their system, so spending time selling them on a cheaper provider is just not worth it for either them or me.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience Yes, and too many companies don't realize that by moving to AWS, they are not only narrowing the pool of developers/operations people they can hire from, but the salary of these people is higher. I'm not against AWS, there are absolutely businesses where AWS makes sense (as the article describes). However it's more than just a question of dollars and cents to move to AWS, you also have to factor in the HR consequences of losing access to dime a dozen developers/sysadmins. For most businesses I have worked with, I would argue losing access to developer/sysadmin talent outweighs their perceived benefits of moving to serverless.
rtpg 9y ago
OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of: - making sure you don't run out of inodes - having to manage DB backups - making sure your cache didn't stop working - updating your box for security updates (beyond just your application requirements) It's a tradeoff (architecturally as well), and for a lot of stuff you'll end up wanting full-ish control of your box. But for getting the ball rolling it's nice to not have to first spend a bunch of time getting postgres to start consistently on boot. You still have to actually manage deploys themselves, of course. And keep an eye on costs, too. But a lot of these services are getting close to "the code that you are running locally, but in the cloud". A far cry from "OK, first lets get apache up, then set up some proxy servers, then set up supervisor" etc etc.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of I wasn't trying to list every bit of ops work for server/serverless. My point is that as a business you cannot expect that once you move to serverless you don't need anyone to manage it anymore, or that the time to manage it drops to zero. Yes, serverless does have its distinct advantages over rolling your own, there is no question about that. But serverless still requires experienced people to configure/manage/monitor it. I've seen way too many managers get giddy at the thought of having their developer/ops time completely free to perform other tasks, and that's not the case. You still have to budget for people and time to manage serverless architecture.

mattmanser 9y ago

We use Azure, when you deploy it actually goes down, like proper down-down, timeout errors. Long periods of down-time. That doesn't happen when I deploy on dedicated servers. It really does depend on your setup and cloud guarantees nothing. Also, 2.37s for parsing a HTML doc and then making it more readable is awfully slow, assuming it gets sent the HTML doc.

spdionis 9y ago
Do you mean Azure goes down or your application?
throwmeaway32 9y ago
Do you mean if you do an in-place upgrade? or a VIP swap? A inplace should just go through the update domains so if you have your extra 20% provisioned as normal it should be fine and a VIP should be pretty quick and painless.

shimon_e 9y ago

I use linux on my desktop and have for almost 20 years. Managing a server is a piece of cake for me. AWS is much more difficult for me.