3 ms·

Disclaimer: My experience is with growing startups younger than 5 years. So everything I say needs to be seen in that context. From what did you transition to

Disclaimer: My experience is with growing startups younger than 5 years. So everything I say needs to be seen in that context. From what did you transition to what? 20% sounds like a very small markup, from my experience and from other people experiences documented on the web it's much much larger (at 10x?) than your experience. So I would be rather interested in more details as many people ask me about Amazon transitioning, and 20% markup would be killer. "Some typical network/infrastructure elements, in particular firewalling, load balancing, and network management don't necessarily belong to the "rocket science" type of application;" I surely do not know your demands, but firewalling, load balanicng etc. looks rather easy to me today for everyone except Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, AirBnB and 99% of startups are not one of these. "I'm very skeptical for example, that the 5x figure includes hardware for the above network equipment and management." Not sure what you are using, the hardware would be around $40 per month for that kind of network architecture (FW,HAProxy,Nginx,...). In my last job we had large NetScalers which where much more powerful then HAProxy/Nginx on a rented server, and I assume AWS is as powerful, but for most of my clients this would be huge overkill.

pizza234 9y ago
I'll write two answers. This is a description of the infrastructure. Our base environment (we have several) has 4 servers, 2 of whom are used for the app servers and load balancers, and 2 for data stores and queue processors. Each server is the typical (as someone in this thread named) "8k" server (a bit more costly, actually). Generally speaking, the servers are significantly overprovisioned. There are a couple of factors that made the conversion to AWS cheap (~20+). The first is that the base unit of a metal server is very large (1 server). Although it's cheap to scale vertically, scaling horizontally, for HA purposes, is expensive, because it costs at least 2 units. For example, the total power of our app servers is overprovisioned in the 20x range (CPU and memory are cheap, right?). Even with minimal speccing, a metal server still costs around 3/4k, you need 2, that's 6/8k. In AWS, we can work with very small units. So maybe we end up paying the same amount, but we don't need that excessive power, and, crucial, we have networking for free (or almost). The second factor is networking and hosting costs, which are not trivial. We rent managed firewalls and load balancers, which in AWS are for free or almost. Also, it's important to spread the servers cost over the time - any metal server won't last forever. If you buy one for 9.6k, it's 100$ a month for 8 years. When it breaks, HA goes temporarily out of the window until it gets fixed (or you buy a new one, or you move services around). The big pain point of AWS [for us] is RDS, which is madly expensive. It accounts for something like 50% of our AWS costs. A very gross estimation of the monthly costs of each metal server could be: - 80$: server - 80$: hosting - 80$: managed networking For 4 servers, that's almost 1000$. Adding 20%, with a budget of 1200$, with AWS, we have a less powerful but also correspondingly less wasteful infrastructure, with lots of baked-in functionality (including, more flexible HA).
pizza234 9y ago
Not sure what you are using, the hardware would be around $40 per month for that kind of network architecture (FW,HAProxy,Nginx,...). The LBs you're talking about are software. I was referring to hardware solutions; a soft load balancer is still a good solution, but brings back to the problem I've made before - unit granularity. Do you refer to two (two is the minimum required for HA purposes) dedicated load balancing machines, or mixed services? In the former case, metal is not very convenient, as the minimal unit even for a pure LB machine, is still expensive. In the latter case, it's hard to say, buy I think there is plenty of middle ground between a small startup and Amazon, where the cloud granularity is helpful and cost-effective (I'm not implying that it's generally cheaper than metal, though).

pizza234 9y ago

I'll write two answers. This is a description of the infrastructure. Our base environment (we have several) has 4 servers, 2 of whom are used for the app servers and load balancers, and 2 for data stores and queue processors. Each server is the typical (as someone in this thread named) "8k" server (a bit more costly, actually). Generally speaking, the servers are significantly overprovisioned. There are a couple of factors that made the conversion to AWS cheap (~20+). The first is that the base unit of a metal server is very large (1 server). Although it's cheap to scale vertically, scaling horizontally, for HA purposes, is expensive, because it costs at least 2 units. For example, the total power of our app servers is overprovisioned in the 20x range (CPU and memory are cheap, right?). Even with minimal speccing, a metal server still costs around 3/4k, you need 2, that's 6/8k. In AWS, we can work with very small units. So maybe we end up paying the same amount, but we don't need that excessive power, and, crucial, we have networking for free (or almost). The second factor is networking and hosting costs, which are not trivial. We rent managed firewalls and load balancers, which in AWS are for free or almost. Also, it's important to spread the servers cost over the time - any metal server won't last forever. If you buy one for 9.6k, it's 100$ a month for 8 years. When it breaks, HA goes temporarily out of the window until it gets fixed (or you buy a new one, or you move services around). The big pain point of AWS [for us] is RDS, which is madly expensive. It accounts for something like 50% of our AWS costs. A very gross estimation of the monthly costs of each metal server could be: - 80$: server - 80$: hosting - 80$: managed networking For 4 servers, that's almost 1000$. Adding 20%, with a budget of 1200$, with AWS, we have a less powerful but also correspondingly less wasteful infrastructure, with lots of baked-in functionality (including, more flexible HA).

pizza234 9y ago

Not sure what you are using, the hardware would be around $40 per month for that kind of network architecture (FW,HAProxy,Nginx,...). The LBs you're talking about are software. I was referring to hardware solutions; a soft load balancer is still a good solution, but brings back to the problem I've made before - unit granularity. Do you refer to two (two is the minimum required for HA purposes) dedicated load balancing machines, or mixed services? In the former case, metal is not very convenient, as the minimal unit even for a pure LB machine, is still expensive. In the latter case, it's hard to say, buy I think there is plenty of middle ground between a small startup and Amazon, where the cloud granularity is helpful and cost-effective (I'm not implying that it's generally cheaper than metal, though).