5 ms·

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
  Does your model factor in the cost of human time, availability, agility and management complexity? How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x?
  - kuschku 8y ago
    > How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x? Who needs to scale 100x in a matter of hours? For those companies, AWS may be very useful. My entire point is that not everyone needs all the functionality AWS provides, and that’s where you can save the money.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Scaling really isn't that big of a deal. 99.99% of companies do not "scale" very fast at all. Most large deployments are grown organically over months or years. Flexibility is a much bigger factor in using the cloud.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ukj 8y ago
      It is one an the same problem - money/time trade-off. Which one is worth more to you? It depends. I've worked at organisations where "get N extra servers" was a 6-8 month process. Because of this you have to be extremely good at capacity planning. And very few organisations are good at these guessing games. Either you over-provision with a generous safety margin; or you don't - and your fail to handle peak loads.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- oblio 8y ago
  Can’t you just use a CDN and get cheaper bandwidth that way?
  - kuschku 8y ago
    For static content, of course! But if you have highly dynamic content, that gets quite a bit more complicated.
- edf13 8y ago
  Agree - bandwidth is the biggest factor by far. This applies to AWS and GCP
- nova22033 8y ago
  > and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS That's an interesting data point considering EKS isn't GA yet.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Premise 1: You can find cheaper hosters than EC2. Now we can make a simple case differentiation: (a) EKS is more expensive than EC2. Due to Premise 1, that means EKS is more expensive than alternative hosters. QED. (b) EKS is cheaper than EC2. Possible, but very unlikely, and I’m betting against this.

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
Does your model factor in the cost of human time, availability, agility and management complexity? How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x?
- kuschku 8y ago
  > How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x? Who needs to scale 100x in a matter of hours? For those companies, AWS may be very useful. My entire point is that not everyone needs all the functionality AWS provides, and that’s where you can save the money.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Scaling really isn't that big of a deal. 99.99% of companies do not "scale" very fast at all. Most large deployments are grown organically over months or years. Flexibility is a much bigger factor in using the cloud.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ukj 8y ago
    It is one an the same problem - money/time trade-off. Which one is worth more to you? It depends. I've worked at organisations where "get N extra servers" was a 6-8 month process. Because of this you have to be extremely good at capacity planning. And very few organisations are good at these guessing games. Either you over-provision with a generous safety margin; or you don't - and your fail to handle peak loads.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
oblio 8y ago
Can’t you just use a CDN and get cheaper bandwidth that way?
- kuschku 8y ago
  For static content, of course! But if you have highly dynamic content, that gets quite a bit more complicated.
edf13 8y ago
Agree - bandwidth is the biggest factor by far. This applies to AWS and GCP
nova22033 8y ago
> and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS That's an interesting data point considering EKS isn't GA yet.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Premise 1: You can find cheaper hosters than EC2. Now we can make a simple case differentiation: (a) EKS is more expensive than EC2. Due to Premise 1, that means EKS is more expensive than alternative hosters. QED. (b) EKS is cheaper than EC2. Possible, but very unlikely, and I’m betting against this.