14 ms·

Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something othe

Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement. I think I'm not only doing them a service by avoiding lock-in to AWS specific "stuff", but also our industry and society at large by maintaining software diversity and openness. Often they also save a nontrivial amount of money by not using AWS (RDS has been particularly egregious). Just making suggestions (rather than demands or whatever) is very powerful, particularly if they respect you and there is some solid logic behind your suggestion.

dokalanyi 8y ago
What alternatives to AWS could save a non trivial amount of money? Especially for RDS? I think we're getting to the point where servers cost quite a bit
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.
  - chopin 8y ago
    But that's trading lock-in to AWS for lock-in to Microsoft.
    - roman030 8y ago
      Still kind of diversifying
  - nostrebored 8y ago
    I've literally never heard this from anyone who's used both at an enterprise level. Personally I recommended azure a few years ago rather than aws for a docker based microservice app but the biggest drawback was the cost. What exactly are you running that's cheaper?
- ksec 8y ago
  I am hoping DO will up the game in that. [1] I am not sure how big the market is for a only VM + DBaaS, because from my limited scope that is like 90% of what I need. The other 10% I am happy to have DNS, Transitional Emails, Register, CDN all under different companies to avoid putting all eggs in one basket. I do wish there is an UI to integrate all of it though. ( Yes I know that is exactly like Heroku, but I am cheap, Heroku is already much more expensive than AWS, I often wonder what if Heroku runs on top of DO ) [1] https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/ https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/
- snaky 8y ago
  https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme Substract VAT from the price, add HDD for WAL, and setup PostgreSQL on a couple of them.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Install Kubernetes and make your own cloud. It really depends on your workload whether that's better than managed cloud services with elastic scaling: * your software has a startup time that takes too long - cannot scale down easily * you have a constant base load with only moderate peaks * you'd rather run other background tasks at times with low load than scaling down - this way you get a bunch of "free" compute power you can use for other things
    - tasubotadas 8y ago
      Installing kunernetes is something you can only suggest if you haven't done yourself. Getting it right is extremely non trivial
      - lmilcin 8y ago
        Having set up couple of clusters myself, professionally, I can say setup is extremely easy relative to the functionality you are getting if you wanted to get it by traditional means (traditional = pre-cloud tech). What is complicated is that this absolutely does not absolve you from having to understand everything that is happening under the hood. If you feel Kubernetes replaces that requirement you are doomed first time a non-trivial issue happens.
      - m_mueller 8y ago
        Could you share some insights on what you think is "extremely non trivial"? In what way is Kubernetes harder than what's to be expected of a technology that orchestrates serverside software? Doesn't this rather depend on the actual services you want to run rather than Kubernetes itself? Obviously it won't reduce complexity of what you want to run, but it makes deployments of it pretty straight forward as far as I can tell.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  The Google cloud solutions are very competitive in price with the AWS ones.
  - mijamo 8y ago
    The lock in is the same though. We are having A LOT of troubles due to lock in with Google Cloud (particularly GAE and Datastore, but also Pub/Sub) and it is really not fun at all...
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      You can always design around that. I know I'm mostly locked in when I deploy a classic GAE application or when I use the datastore (there is AppScale, if you need). If what you are running is a virtualized version of your physical DC infrastructure, you can probably deploy it anywhere with very little trouble.
  - agopaul 8y ago
    Google doesn't seem to be serious with their managed DBMS solutions. The PostgreSQL version is still 9.6 even though 11 has been released, whereas AWS already has pg 11 available.
- ori_b 8y ago
  > Especially for RDS? Run your own servers, instead of paying Amazon to do your system administration. At small sizes, Amazon is a cheap sysadmin. At scale, paying them as sysadmins is expensive.
  - mjlee 8y ago
    Even at quite large sizes, RDS is a fantastic product. I think I'd opt to use it even with full time Database Administrators on staff.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    I just moved one of the largest (5+PB) data warehouses of Europe to AWS and we saved 35% of a huge (1M+ / year) budget while increased reliability, availability and security. I am not sure why people think that AWS is expensive. Running on a traditional hosting was a nightmare with constant downtimes because of issues outside of our control. Cooling, networking, security you name it. AWS makes these non-existent or very easy to tackle. For example of networking, there are several teams of network engineers oncall for AWS the handle routing issues etc. and you just get an email about it. With the previous vendor we found about the issue, tried to reach the vendor and we had to convince them that there is an issue and it took them 2 days to recover. I am planning to move to AWS more entreprise clients for saving significant money on IT. AWS is most definitely a competitive option for this.
    - pritambaral 8y ago
      You seem to be talking about EC2, or at least services available with EC2. You parent was talking about RDS and sysadmins who manage Postgres on RDS.
- ernsheong 8y ago
  Consider if most data in RDS should be in a data warehouse instead. Google’s BigQuery can help offset costs. Not to mention GCP is now a strong contender to AWS’s offerings.
greyskull 8y ago
I started my professional career in AWS so I have zero experience in non-cloud businesses (i.e the vast majority of software jobs), but I always wonder about the cost argument people make against AWS (or any major cloud provider). It's very easy to overspend, sure. But say we're considering how well you execute in terms of picking the right tools for your case and utilizing the right cost saving measures. In the optimal to average case, does AWS really lose out when considering the cost in human time to match against the feature set you get? e.g. Hardware and software maintenance, fault tolerance, scaling, compliance, security, integrations, etc.? I'm asking out of ignorance here. I don't mean to say that every business needs a large feature set (the vast majority probably do not), but there's value in not having to do all of these things on your own. Or even having the freedom to go make an arbitrarily complex application, or expand what you already have, with relatively low barrier to entry.
- oblio 8y ago
  If you have a simple business or website, AWS is not cost efficient compared to an old school shared hosting and it's not even more convenient. Those have slightly better control panels than the AWS Console and for crying out loud, AWS doesn't even offer automatic backups for their VMs as part of their offering.
  - hrez 8y ago
    They do now. See Snapshot Lifecycle Policy.
- rjzzleep 8y ago
  You can buy a 16-32 core machine with 64GB Ram for less than a hundred bucks on Hetzner. You can run SmartOS, proxmox, danubecloud or whatever other solution there, and for some of them you should be able to use terraform. There is a little extra upfront cost to set these things up, but once you have it, it's fine. You can do your zfs snapshots to hetzners backup infrastructure. A lot of people try to throw all their stuff on kubernetes, for that you can buy a few machines and provision them with ansible. It's not like AWS devops engineers are the cheapest of all engineers, so there are a couple of solutions, which are mostly cheaper than their cloud alternatives. Contrary to the parent I actually don't recommend going that route, mostly because I want to deliver a project and then have them be able to manage it on their own. E.g. an ECS cluster is simple to manage and maintain IMHO. I do tell them about the options that they have and them decide though.
nova22033 8y ago
>Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement. so what do you recommend instead of Amazon?
- akudha 8y ago
  I too am interested in this. Alternatives, and the reasons for it. It isn't easy convincing suits - nobody is gonna get fired for suggesting AWS, so unless they are presented with a strong alternative, it isn't easy convincing managers not to go with AWS
- foxhop 8y ago
  I recommend Joyent (acquired by Samsung). They open source all their software (and make it easy to install and use). Their hypervisor operating system (SmartOS) rocks so hard. They also released Manta (S3 alternative object store). If Joyent ever changed direction, or shut down, I have an unlocked path forward with a community to help me continue on my own hardware. I can build my own cloud if push comes to shove.
- ernsheong 8y ago
  GCP, Azure... I personally really like GCP, it’s optimized for simplicity and thus developer happiness.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  I recommend DigitalOcean. Enough of the stuff you need, without the annoyances that come with dealing with AWS. That said, when meltdown / spectre was announced AWS was already patched. The rest of us on hipster VPS providers had to cross our fingers. One of the main things I dislike about per-minute billing for servers is that it's too easy for bad actors to cycle through if there is some sort of side channel attack. I remember when I first heard of the concept of VPSes. My initial reaction was "seems risky" but I was young and lots of older, smarter people assured me it was ok. Now I've grown used to them and all the luxury goodness they provide and I don't want to go back. It's like car ownership and finding out that all that cycling around town before you were old enough to get a license was what kept you looking fit.

dokalanyi 8y ago

What alternatives to AWS could save a non trivial amount of money? Especially for RDS? I think we're getting to the point where servers cost quite a bit

ComputerGuru 8y ago
Azure is both comparable to and cheaper than (and subjectively better) AWS.
- chopin 8y ago
  But that's trading lock-in to AWS for lock-in to Microsoft.
  - roman030 8y ago
    Still kind of diversifying
- nostrebored 8y ago
  I've literally never heard this from anyone who's used both at an enterprise level. Personally I recommended azure a few years ago rather than aws for a docker based microservice app but the biggest drawback was the cost. What exactly are you running that's cheaper?
ksec 8y ago
I am hoping DO will up the game in that. [1] I am not sure how big the market is for a only VM + DBaaS, because from my limited scope that is like 90% of what I need. The other 10% I am happy to have DNS, Transitional Emails, Register, CDN all under different companies to avoid putting all eggs in one basket. I do wish there is an UI to integrate all of it though. ( Yes I know that is exactly like Heroku, but I am cheap, Heroku is already much more expensive than AWS, I often wonder what if Heroku runs on top of DO ) [1] https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/ https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/
snaky 8y ago
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px61-nvme Substract VAT from the price, add HDD for WAL, and setup PostgreSQL on a couple of them.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Install Kubernetes and make your own cloud. It really depends on your workload whether that's better than managed cloud services with elastic scaling: * your software has a startup time that takes too long - cannot scale down easily * you have a constant base load with only moderate peaks * you'd rather run other background tasks at times with low load than scaling down - this way you get a bunch of "free" compute power you can use for other things
  - tasubotadas 8y ago
    Installing kunernetes is something you can only suggest if you haven't done yourself. Getting it right is extremely non trivial
    - lmilcin 8y ago
      Having set up couple of clusters myself, professionally, I can say setup is extremely easy relative to the functionality you are getting if you wanted to get it by traditional means (traditional = pre-cloud tech). What is complicated is that this absolutely does not absolve you from having to understand everything that is happening under the hood. If you feel Kubernetes replaces that requirement you are doomed first time a non-trivial issue happens.
    - m_mueller 8y ago
      Could you share some insights on what you think is "extremely non trivial"? In what way is Kubernetes harder than what's to be expected of a technology that orchestrates serverside software? Doesn't this rather depend on the actual services you want to run rather than Kubernetes itself? Obviously it won't reduce complexity of what you want to run, but it makes deployments of it pretty straight forward as far as I can tell.
rbanffy 8y ago
The Google cloud solutions are very competitive in price with the AWS ones.
- mijamo 8y ago
  The lock in is the same though. We are having A LOT of troubles due to lock in with Google Cloud (particularly GAE and Datastore, but also Pub/Sub) and it is really not fun at all...
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    You can always design around that. I know I'm mostly locked in when I deploy a classic GAE application or when I use the datastore (there is AppScale, if you need). If what you are running is a virtualized version of your physical DC infrastructure, you can probably deploy it anywhere with very little trouble.
- agopaul 8y ago
  Google doesn't seem to be serious with their managed DBMS solutions. The PostgreSQL version is still 9.6 even though 11 has been released, whereas AWS already has pg 11 available.
ori_b 8y ago
> Especially for RDS? Run your own servers, instead of paying Amazon to do your system administration. At small sizes, Amazon is a cheap sysadmin. At scale, paying them as sysadmins is expensive.
- mjlee 8y ago
  Even at quite large sizes, RDS is a fantastic product. I think I'd opt to use it even with full time Database Administrators on staff.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  I just moved one of the largest (5+PB) data warehouses of Europe to AWS and we saved 35% of a huge (1M+ / year) budget while increased reliability, availability and security. I am not sure why people think that AWS is expensive. Running on a traditional hosting was a nightmare with constant downtimes because of issues outside of our control. Cooling, networking, security you name it. AWS makes these non-existent or very easy to tackle. For example of networking, there are several teams of network engineers oncall for AWS the handle routing issues etc. and you just get an email about it. With the previous vendor we found about the issue, tried to reach the vendor and we had to convince them that there is an issue and it took them 2 days to recover. I am planning to move to AWS more entreprise clients for saving significant money on IT. AWS is most definitely a competitive option for this.
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    You seem to be talking about EC2, or at least services available with EC2. You parent was talking about RDS and sysadmins who manage Postgres on RDS.
ernsheong 8y ago
Consider if most data in RDS should be in a data warehouse instead. Google’s BigQuery can help offset costs. Not to mention GCP is now a strong contender to AWS’s offerings.

greyskull 8y ago

I started my professional career in AWS so I have zero experience in non-cloud businesses (i.e the vast majority of software jobs), but I always wonder about the cost argument people make against AWS (or any major cloud provider). It's very easy to overspend, sure. But say we're considering how well you execute in terms of picking the right tools for your case and utilizing the right cost saving measures. In the optimal to average case, does AWS really lose out when considering the cost in human time to match against the feature set you get? e.g. Hardware and software maintenance, fault tolerance, scaling, compliance, security, integrations, etc.? I'm asking out of ignorance here. I don't mean to say that every business needs a large feature set (the vast majority probably do not), but there's value in not having to do all of these things on your own. Or even having the freedom to go make an arbitrarily complex application, or expand what you already have, with relatively low barrier to entry.

oblio 8y ago
If you have a simple business or website, AWS is not cost efficient compared to an old school shared hosting and it's not even more convenient. Those have slightly better control panels than the AWS Console and for crying out loud, AWS doesn't even offer automatic backups for their VMs as part of their offering.
- hrez 8y ago
  They do now. See Snapshot Lifecycle Policy.
rjzzleep 8y ago
You can buy a 16-32 core machine with 64GB Ram for less than a hundred bucks on Hetzner. You can run SmartOS, proxmox, danubecloud or whatever other solution there, and for some of them you should be able to use terraform. There is a little extra upfront cost to set these things up, but once you have it, it's fine. You can do your zfs snapshots to hetzners backup infrastructure. A lot of people try to throw all their stuff on kubernetes, for that you can buy a few machines and provision them with ansible. It's not like AWS devops engineers are the cheapest of all engineers, so there are a couple of solutions, which are mostly cheaper than their cloud alternatives. Contrary to the parent I actually don't recommend going that route, mostly because I want to deliver a project and then have them be able to manage it on their own. E.g. an ECS cluster is simple to manage and maintain IMHO. I do tell them about the options that they have and them decide though.

nova22033 8y ago

>Dozens of small companies (ranging from a couple of people to a couple dozen) rely on me to decide and direct their tech stacks; I always suggest something other than Amazon even where Amazon is suggested first by them; the vast majority defer to my judgement. so what do you recommend instead of Amazon?

akudha 8y ago
I too am interested in this. Alternatives, and the reasons for it. It isn't easy convincing suits - nobody is gonna get fired for suggesting AWS, so unless they are presented with a strong alternative, it isn't easy convincing managers not to go with AWS
foxhop 8y ago
I recommend Joyent (acquired by Samsung). They open source all their software (and make it easy to install and use). Their hypervisor operating system (SmartOS) rocks so hard. They also released Manta (S3 alternative object store). If Joyent ever changed direction, or shut down, I have an unlocked path forward with a community to help me continue on my own hardware. I can build my own cloud if push comes to shove.
ernsheong 8y ago
GCP, Azure... I personally really like GCP, it’s optimized for simplicity and thus developer happiness.
3pt14159 8y ago
I recommend DigitalOcean. Enough of the stuff you need, without the annoyances that come with dealing with AWS. That said, when meltdown / spectre was announced AWS was already patched. The rest of us on hipster VPS providers had to cross our fingers. One of the main things I dislike about per-minute billing for servers is that it's too easy for bad actors to cycle through if there is some sort of side channel attack. I remember when I first heard of the concept of VPSes. My initial reaction was "seems risky" but I was young and lots of older, smarter people assured me it was ok. Now I've grown used to them and all the luxury goodness they provide and I don't want to go back. It's like car ownership and finding out that all that cycling around town before you were old enough to get a license was what kept you looking fit.