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and in 6 months they can turn around and claim they will save 30% of their hosting costs by migrating to bare metal. It's just a game to keep VC's and other pe

by damm 8y ago

and in 6 months they can turn around and claim they will save 30% of their hosting costs by migrating to bare metal. It's just a game to keep VC's and other people happy. ---- Hey ma! look I cut our costs by 25%

antonvs 8y ago
It's real money being saved. I've been involved in such efforts at four companies now, and in every case the savings have been very significant. The claim you should be suspicious of is the one that says you can save money migrating to bare metal. That may be possible in some cases, but not in any typical large company.
- kuschku 8y ago
  If you can save money by moving to AWS at its publicly listed prices, your company has absolutely mismanaged its IT infrastructure. You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers. EDIT: If you’re paying silicon valley wages, and target a global audience with your site/product, and can get from AWS something cheaper than the publicly listed prices, then AWS very likely will be a good deal for you. But many companies have different needs than these, and may be able to save money by dropping things they don’t need.
  - leonroy 8y ago
    Care to share on where savings can be made with a DIY approach vs AWS?
    - kuschku 8y ago
      The largest factor is bandwidth. In the EU you can get bandwidth a factor 100x cheaper in most situations than with AWS. The second factor is levels of abstraction. It's cheaper to run your own virtualization software on rented dedicated hardware than to use EC2, and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS or GKE. The places where having external companies do it sabes the most is (a) in running the actual hardware and networks and (b) providing a platform for your software (e.g. Google app engine). Taking a bunch of rented dedicated servers and configuring kubernetes is cheaper than renting the computational power through GKE or EKS. But basically yeah, these are the same standard solutions to saving money with hosting that have been pretty much known for decades. EDIT: Be aware, this only applies for the publicly listed prices — if your company can get a deal like Snapchat did with Google, or Netflix with Amazon, then the math may work out entirely different. But I don't know what they pay so I can't comment on that.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Show me the DC which will provide bandwidth and collocation cheaper than AWS on a rack basis. Also keep in mind that ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption so there are many more hidden fees now.
        viraptor 8y ago
        > ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption Has it changed much? I haven't done real hardware in a while, but I remember the rack power to be a very limited resource years ago. (I.e. you could easily pack more hardware in the rack than you'd be allowed to power)
        dogma1138 8y ago
        What changed is that they are now agrresively charge you these days. In London area (city and outskirts like Oxford) its £1500-2000 per 10kw and they count the PSU rating regardless of what you actually use. And that is on paper only as many DCs limit a rack to 20A which gives 4.8kw only so if you need more you need to lease another rack which costs more money. And leasing adjacent racks also isn’t really cheap they usually give you maybe 2-3 ones if you need more than that well then you are now leasing floor space which means if you need say one rack with 15kw rated bare metal you may end up having to lease enough room to hold 10 racks if not more.
        chillydawg 8y ago
        Oxford is not outskirts of London. It's 50 miles of farmland and towns away.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Outskirts in this case is anything that is about an hour from the circular but that could be just me.
      - ukj 8y ago
  - sigi45 8y ago
    Its sometimes just easier to use AWS instead of finding those people and with those people, you have more dependency on those people. Now with AWS i can manage a whole infrastructre AND write code where you needed an admin team before.
    - kuschku 8y ago
      Sure, but that’s always a tradeoff. If you just use EC2, though, you’ll find many other providers of virtual or dedicated servers for rent for much cheaper, with similar performance and reliability. If you’re fully integrated in the AWS ecosystem, it is much more convenient, but also of course more expensive. That said, unless you’re in silicon valley, your hiring costs will be so much lower than amazon’s that even your own admin team might end up cheaper than using Amazon’s.
      - Rapzid 8y ago
        Your avg hire comp may be quite a bit lower outside of the major tech cities, but your still gonna pay a lot for the really good people. You may need less of those people and at a later point with AWS though, depending.
      - bpicolo 8y ago
        Just using EC2 is a corner case. The huge benefit is the wide variety of hosted services you get to take advantage of and not roll on your own.
  - matwood 8y ago
    > You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers. Are you really replicating AWS or just EC2? How do you replicate S3? Glacier? What about Aurora (DB replication that actually works!). If all I need is raw compute, I can go back to building machines and beat AWS prices but I will have no where near the same level of functionality, flexibility, and now it is up to me to maintain them.
    - kuschku 8y ago
      That’s the entire point. If you don’t use all the same services, or use them differently, you can make tradeoffs that AWS can’t.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    Really? What if you have an occasionaly peaky load with BIG peaks? You have to keep enough hardware on hand to satisfy that even if it only happens, say, 10% of the time. That’s a lot of wasted infrastructure and time managing it.
sitharus 8y ago
You are correct, if you have no need to add additional servers or scale the platform, have predictable bandwidth and storage requirements, and your sysadmins don't mind patching all the base OS instead of just rolling new VMs. However AWS allows you to accomodate uneven growth and load. You can create new machines in minutes (or half an hour for Windows). The virtual nature allows you to quickly ditch a broken host for a good one. You can also save money on development infrastructure by switching it off, or run background jobs on spot machines. Then there's the other services available such as S3 and Lambda. Of course there are other clouds worth considering, but the advantage of cloud infrastructure is the ability to call it up without months of lead time.
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  I think your points are sound but it’s worth pointing out that you can roll new host OS’s and VMs without patching on-prem too. You just have to have the discipline to run your internal data center the way cloud providers do. You can even take advantage of one of the few benefits of on-prem and roll a fresh host OS without downtime for the VMs running on it by using live migrations.
  - NathanKP 8y ago
    > You just have to have the discipline to run your internal data center the way cloud providers do. AWS employee here, so I am obviously cloud provider biased, but in my viewpoint having that discipline only comes from having very good, expensive engineers. It's hard to get people who really know how to run a datacenter well, especially when most of the good ones would probably prefer to work for a larger cloud provider since than is more interesting and impactful than running a smaller datacenter for a single company. The forgotten / underestimated cost is the salaries of these people to set things up well in the first place, be on call to fix things when they break, and perform those upgrades in the same way that cloud providers do. A single engineer salary can get you a LOT of cloud compute power on AWS. If a cloud provider allows you to build the same thing with two fewer engineers then that's probably an extra $400k or so for the infrastructure budget after you factor in these engineer's salaries, taxes, benefits, etc. And $400k can get you an incredible amount of AWS cloud compute.
empath75 8y ago
You can get benefits in terms of speed of deployment, etc, by going to AWS, and then gradually start moving stuff back off of AWS to cheaper services or your own datacenter as it makes sense for money savings. Both moves can be a win.

by damm 8y ago

antonvs 8y ago

It's real money being saved. I've been involved in such efforts at four companies now, and in every case the savings have been very significant. The claim you should be suspicious of is the one that says you can save money migrating to bare metal. That may be possible in some cases, but not in any typical large company.

kuschku 8y ago
If you can save money by moving to AWS at its publicly listed prices, your company has absolutely mismanaged its IT infrastructure. You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers. EDIT: If you’re paying silicon valley wages, and target a global audience with your site/product, and can get from AWS something cheaper than the publicly listed prices, then AWS very likely will be a good deal for you. But many companies have different needs than these, and may be able to save money by dropping things they don’t need.
- leonroy 8y ago
  Care to share on where savings can be made with a DIY approach vs AWS?
  - kuschku 8y ago
    The largest factor is bandwidth. In the EU you can get bandwidth a factor 100x cheaper in most situations than with AWS. The second factor is levels of abstraction. It's cheaper to run your own virtualization software on rented dedicated hardware than to use EC2, and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS or GKE. The places where having external companies do it sabes the most is (a) in running the actual hardware and networks and (b) providing a platform for your software (e.g. Google app engine). Taking a bunch of rented dedicated servers and configuring kubernetes is cheaper than renting the computational power through GKE or EKS. But basically yeah, these are the same standard solutions to saving money with hosting that have been pretty much known for decades. EDIT: Be aware, this only applies for the publicly listed prices — if your company can get a deal like Snapchat did with Google, or Netflix with Amazon, then the math may work out entirely different. But I don't know what they pay so I can't comment on that.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Show me the DC which will provide bandwidth and collocation cheaper than AWS on a rack basis. Also keep in mind that ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption so there are many more hidden fees now.
      - viraptor 8y ago
        > ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption Has it changed much? I haven't done real hardware in a while, but I remember the rack power to be a very limited resource years ago. (I.e. you could easily pack more hardware in the rack than you'd be allowed to power)
        dogma1138 8y ago
        What changed is that they are now agrresively charge you these days. In London area (city and outskirts like Oxford) its £1500-2000 per 10kw and they count the PSU rating regardless of what you actually use. And that is on paper only as many DCs limit a rack to 20A which gives 4.8kw only so if you need more you need to lease another rack which costs more money. And leasing adjacent racks also isn’t really cheap they usually give you maybe 2-3 ones if you need more than that well then you are now leasing floor space which means if you need say one rack with 15kw rated bare metal you may end up having to lease enough room to hold 10 racks if not more.
        chillydawg 8y ago
        Oxford is not outskirts of London. It's 50 miles of farmland and towns away.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Outskirts in this case is anything that is about an hour from the circular but that could be just me.
    - ukj 8y ago
- sigi45 8y ago
  Its sometimes just easier to use AWS instead of finding those people and with those people, you have more dependency on those people. Now with AWS i can manage a whole infrastructre AND write code where you needed an admin team before.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Sure, but that’s always a tradeoff. If you just use EC2, though, you’ll find many other providers of virtual or dedicated servers for rent for much cheaper, with similar performance and reliability. If you’re fully integrated in the AWS ecosystem, it is much more convenient, but also of course more expensive. That said, unless you’re in silicon valley, your hiring costs will be so much lower than amazon’s that even your own admin team might end up cheaper than using Amazon’s.
    - Rapzid 8y ago
      Your avg hire comp may be quite a bit lower outside of the major tech cities, but your still gonna pay a lot for the really good people. You may need less of those people and at a later point with AWS though, depending.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      Just using EC2 is a corner case. The huge benefit is the wide variety of hosted services you get to take advantage of and not roll on your own.
- matwood 8y ago
  > You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers. Are you really replicating AWS or just EC2? How do you replicate S3? Glacier? What about Aurora (DB replication that actually works!). If all I need is raw compute, I can go back to building machines and beat AWS prices but I will have no where near the same level of functionality, flexibility, and now it is up to me to maintain them.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    That’s the entire point. If you don’t use all the same services, or use them differently, you can make tradeoffs that AWS can’t.
- MBCook 8y ago
  Really? What if you have an occasionaly peaky load with BIG peaks? You have to keep enough hardware on hand to satisfy that even if it only happens, say, 10% of the time. That’s a lot of wasted infrastructure and time managing it.

sitharus 8y ago

You are correct, if you have no need to add additional servers or scale the platform, have predictable bandwidth and storage requirements, and your sysadmins don't mind patching all the base OS instead of just rolling new VMs. However AWS allows you to accomodate uneven growth and load. You can create new machines in minutes (or half an hour for Windows). The virtual nature allows you to quickly ditch a broken host for a good one. You can also save money on development infrastructure by switching it off, or run background jobs on spot machines. Then there's the other services available such as S3 and Lambda. Of course there are other clouds worth considering, but the advantage of cloud infrastructure is the ability to call it up without months of lead time.

brazzledazzle 8y ago
I think your points are sound but it’s worth pointing out that you can roll new host OS’s and VMs without patching on-prem too. You just have to have the discipline to run your internal data center the way cloud providers do. You can even take advantage of one of the few benefits of on-prem and roll a fresh host OS without downtime for the VMs running on it by using live migrations.
- NathanKP 8y ago
  > You just have to have the discipline to run your internal data center the way cloud providers do. AWS employee here, so I am obviously cloud provider biased, but in my viewpoint having that discipline only comes from having very good, expensive engineers. It's hard to get people who really know how to run a datacenter well, especially when most of the good ones would probably prefer to work for a larger cloud provider since than is more interesting and impactful than running a smaller datacenter for a single company. The forgotten / underestimated cost is the salaries of these people to set things up well in the first place, be on call to fix things when they break, and perform those upgrades in the same way that cloud providers do. A single engineer salary can get you a LOT of cloud compute power on AWS. If a cloud provider allows you to build the same thing with two fewer engineers then that's probably an extra $400k or so for the infrastructure budget after you factor in these engineer's salaries, taxes, benefits, etc. And $400k can get you an incredible amount of AWS cloud compute.

empath75 8y ago

You can get benefits in terms of speed of deployment, etc, by going to AWS, and then gradually start moving stuff back off of AWS to cheaper services or your own datacenter as it makes sense for money savings. Both moves can be a win.