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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 th

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.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  I also haven't done baremetal server management, but my first concern with your first line is what do you do when as your services expand as does your dev team and the org needs more processes like log management, data warehousing, analytics, or whatever else AWS offers? I'll admit this isn't always true (looking at you, Neptune) but I find AWS' key strength is the huge community, so most of its services have 1) decent documentation and 2) many users to refer to with technical questions as well as filling out roles.
- IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
  buy as in own? Or rent monthly?
- topkai22 8y ago
  I do most of my work in large enterprises and there is definitely a point when you hit a complexity cliff managing your own systems. No one system causes this (major systems can often support a dedicated staff), but it looks like death by a thousand cuts when the HR interview system goes down after 7 years and no one is certain how to deal with its VMs/hardware/networking.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  I have to say, you're completely overlooking why AWS/GCP/Azure are good services in your answer. The value add from using these services is that you don't have to know how to run any of these things, building an SRE/devops/sysadmin organization is non trivial for a team of developers with a background in application development. Spending an extra 100k a year on AWS is likely cheaper than the cost of building out a team to do all of these things for you, including as things scale. If you're going to have a team of people deploying all of your own middleware software anyways on VMs, that completely defeats the cost savings from using cloud these days. It's much more of a PaaS business than a pure IaaS one.
  - arbie 8y ago
    I eagerly await CaaS (Cloud as a Service) so VPC, EC2 and EFS planning and deployment is automated.
zaarn 8y ago
AWS has a few pain points in the cost department; especially Traffic is insanely expensive compared to other providers. Hetzner costs about 1$ per TB of Traffic. EC2 costs 88$ for that amount of outgoing data, Cloudfront 80$, etc. That's not even accounting that Hetzner doesn't bill incoming and internal traffic, which AWS does. There is no way that the little work I need to put up a network on a Hetzner host is worth 80$ the Terabyte of Traffic. I have a regular Traffic usage of between 800GB and 1.4TB each month, AWS would easily double my monthly bill on that single item alone. When you need a lot of CPU and RAM, AWS starts to get very expensive too, I have 128GB of RAM with 12 vCPUs and 2TB storage for about 55$/m, AWS has no comparative offering at even the remotely same price. That is even including the hours I have to spend sysadmin'ing this specific box.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  This is great, how about adding reliability, availability, redundancy, SLA's and a few things more. How about needing to have a data warehouse, load balancers, SOC compliance? Not all the businesses go for the cheapest option and these decisions are rarely single dimensional. AWS is an integrated solutions for every aspects of an enterprise IT needs. If you try to compare a tiny slice of it with a single dimension comparison you can beat AWS but if you get the full picture it is getting harder to a point when you can't really beat it.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Availability over this year has been about 99.9% for the network, if I need more I can book a server in a different DC and do failovers. There is an SLA you can optionally book. I don't require a data warehouse, load balancers (beyond HAProxy on the same host) or SOC Compliance at the moment, if I need those, I can build them. Not all businesses go for the cheapest option but on the flipside if Amazon costs 80x of other providers, the business will probably just find two sysadmins and contract them for the work. Even if you need bigger, load balancers are available as hardware, they're fairly cheap compared to AWS offerings and come with in-built firewall. Incoming traffic remains free on these. Your ISP will probably peer much cheaper than AWS and Hetzner if you're bringing enough money to justify it. I know several corporations that do their entire IT out of AWS, some of them use inhouse and others scatter their usage across several cloud providers, AWS would likely increase their operating cost by 100x.
marcosdumay 8y ago
For large datacenters, excepting labor, on premises costs are usually an order or two of magnitude lower than Amazon, so you can ignore all the details. Specifically on labor, computers don't need that much of upkeep (unless you depend on flaky software, but then Amazon won't help you anyway), so it's a matter of having enough of them to justify hiring 2 people. if you do, you are better keeping them on premises. Besides, adapting your software for Amazon isn't free either. For small datacenters, there are plenty of VPS, server rentals and colos around with prices an order of magnitude lower than Amazon. The labor cost of setting those up is comparable to the cost of adapting your software for Amazon, with the added benefit that you aren't locked in. AWS has a few unique value propositions. If you require stuff very different from the usual (eg. a lot of disk with little CPU and RAM) it will let you personalize your system like no other place. If you have a very low mean resource usage with rare incredibly large peaks, the scaling will become interesting. But it is simply not a good choice for 90% of the folks out there. To go through your list, fault tolerance through Amazon is not that great, it need a lot of set-up (adapting your software), and adds enough complexity that I doubt it increases reliability; I don't know about compilance; about security, I only see problems; and integration is what AWS systems do worse, since network traffic is so expensive.
- acdha 8y ago
  > For large datacenters, excepting labor, on premises costs are usually an order or two of magnitude lower than Amazon, so you can ignore all the details. That’s too big a caveat to breeze by without a huge justification. If you look at the full cost that 1-2 orders of magnitude for many places goes negative and is a smaller margin for almost everyone else unless you have some combination of very high usage to amortize your staff costs over and/or the ability to change the problem (e.g. beating S3 with fewer copies or using cold storage, having simpler or slower ops or security, etc.). It can be done but I’ve seen far more people achieve it through incomplete comparisons than actual measured TCO, especially when you consider the first outage where they’re down for a week longer because they learned something important about how data centers can fail.

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.

castlecrasher2 8y ago
I also haven't done baremetal server management, but my first concern with your first line is what do you do when as your services expand as does your dev team and the org needs more processes like log management, data warehousing, analytics, or whatever else AWS offers? I'll admit this isn't always true (looking at you, Neptune) but I find AWS' key strength is the huge community, so most of its services have 1) decent documentation and 2) many users to refer to with technical questions as well as filling out roles.
IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
buy as in own? Or rent monthly?
topkai22 8y ago
I do most of my work in large enterprises and there is definitely a point when you hit a complexity cliff managing your own systems. No one system causes this (major systems can often support a dedicated staff), but it looks like death by a thousand cuts when the HR interview system goes down after 7 years and no one is certain how to deal with its VMs/hardware/networking.
zjaffee 8y ago
I have to say, you're completely overlooking why AWS/GCP/Azure are good services in your answer. The value add from using these services is that you don't have to know how to run any of these things, building an SRE/devops/sysadmin organization is non trivial for a team of developers with a background in application development. Spending an extra 100k a year on AWS is likely cheaper than the cost of building out a team to do all of these things for you, including as things scale. If you're going to have a team of people deploying all of your own middleware software anyways on VMs, that completely defeats the cost savings from using cloud these days. It's much more of a PaaS business than a pure IaaS one.
- arbie 8y ago
  I eagerly await CaaS (Cloud as a Service) so VPC, EC2 and EFS planning and deployment is automated.

zaarn 8y ago

AWS has a few pain points in the cost department; especially Traffic is insanely expensive compared to other providers. Hetzner costs about 1$ per TB of Traffic. EC2 costs 88$ for that amount of outgoing data, Cloudfront 80$, etc. That's not even accounting that Hetzner doesn't bill incoming and internal traffic, which AWS does. There is no way that the little work I need to put up a network on a Hetzner host is worth 80$ the Terabyte of Traffic. I have a regular Traffic usage of between 800GB and 1.4TB each month, AWS would easily double my monthly bill on that single item alone. When you need a lot of CPU and RAM, AWS starts to get very expensive too, I have 128GB of RAM with 12 vCPUs and 2TB storage for about 55$/m, AWS has no comparative offering at even the remotely same price. That is even including the hours I have to spend sysadmin'ing this specific box.

StreamBright 8y ago
This is great, how about adding reliability, availability, redundancy, SLA's and a few things more. How about needing to have a data warehouse, load balancers, SOC compliance? Not all the businesses go for the cheapest option and these decisions are rarely single dimensional. AWS is an integrated solutions for every aspects of an enterprise IT needs. If you try to compare a tiny slice of it with a single dimension comparison you can beat AWS but if you get the full picture it is getting harder to a point when you can't really beat it.
- zaarn 8y ago
  Availability over this year has been about 99.9% for the network, if I need more I can book a server in a different DC and do failovers. There is an SLA you can optionally book. I don't require a data warehouse, load balancers (beyond HAProxy on the same host) or SOC Compliance at the moment, if I need those, I can build them. Not all businesses go for the cheapest option but on the flipside if Amazon costs 80x of other providers, the business will probably just find two sysadmins and contract them for the work. Even if you need bigger, load balancers are available as hardware, they're fairly cheap compared to AWS offerings and come with in-built firewall. Incoming traffic remains free on these. Your ISP will probably peer much cheaper than AWS and Hetzner if you're bringing enough money to justify it. I know several corporations that do their entire IT out of AWS, some of them use inhouse and others scatter their usage across several cloud providers, AWS would likely increase their operating cost by 100x.

marcosdumay 8y ago

For large datacenters, excepting labor, on premises costs are usually an order or two of magnitude lower than Amazon, so you can ignore all the details. Specifically on labor, computers don't need that much of upkeep (unless you depend on flaky software, but then Amazon won't help you anyway), so it's a matter of having enough of them to justify hiring 2 people. if you do, you are better keeping them on premises. Besides, adapting your software for Amazon isn't free either. For small datacenters, there are plenty of VPS, server rentals and colos around with prices an order of magnitude lower than Amazon. The labor cost of setting those up is comparable to the cost of adapting your software for Amazon, with the added benefit that you aren't locked in. AWS has a few unique value propositions. If you require stuff very different from the usual (eg. a lot of disk with little CPU and RAM) it will let you personalize your system like no other place. If you have a very low mean resource usage with rare incredibly large peaks, the scaling will become interesting. But it is simply not a good choice for 90% of the folks out there. To go through your list, fault tolerance through Amazon is not that great, it need a lot of set-up (adapting your software), and adds enough complexity that I doubt it increases reliability; I don't know about compilance; about security, I only see problems; and integration is what AWS systems do worse, since network traffic is so expensive.

acdha 8y ago
> For large datacenters, excepting labor, on premises costs are usually an order or two of magnitude lower than Amazon, so you can ignore all the details. That’s too big a caveat to breeze by without a huge justification. If you look at the full cost that 1-2 orders of magnitude for many places goes negative and is a smaller margin for almost everyone else unless you have some combination of very high usage to amortize your staff costs over and/or the ability to change the problem (e.g. beating S3 with fewer copies or using cold storage, having simpler or slower ops or security, etc.). It can be done but I’ve seen far more people achieve it through incomplete comparisons than actual measured TCO, especially when you consider the first outage where they’re down for a week longer because they learned something important about how data centers can fail.