3 ms·

That. I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps. A properly designed monolith on a

by dRaBoQ 7y ago

That. I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps. A properly designed monolith on a dedicated server/VM can easily serve tens of thousands of users just fine and will be far easier to maintain than this mess (plus way cheaper as well). The main advantage of those tools is when you have a number of distributed teams and you want to scale to millions of users. For nearly anything else, a far smaller setup is what you want.

joncrane 7y ago
I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. They know, and try to educate. The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  They might try to educate, but I don't think they engineer their products to make "getting it right" easy. It's not in their interests, but they _could_ make a product that is much easier to use correctly, cheaply, or both. AWS creates work, and creates spend, much more than it needs to.
  - iends 7y ago
    Yes, AWS incentives are not aligned with their customers. Any sufficiently sized organization on AWS ends up building custom tooling to help manage cost. They may also hire consultants to help optimize cost. This is all by design.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      My experience is that AWS is remarkably open to helping you get things right. They seem to focus on making things possible before easy, but (Enterprise) support is quite good and have specific incentives on spend efficiency that run counter to the short-term goals of Amazon. I can only imagine how the Oracle cloud must go for victims^Wcustomers. Systems engineering is hard, on-prem or in-cloud.
      - jacob019 7y ago
        TIL ^w
        pm90 7y ago
        I don't get it yet... what does it mean?
        detaro 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U
      - nostrebored 7y ago
        AWS TAMs I know spend a sizable portion of their time making sure that their costs are low for their customers, monitoring monthly spend and looking for inefficiencies. Business and Enterprise support customers also receive full access to Trusted Advisor, an automated tool which checks your account for spending inefficiencies and best practice violations.
      - Macha 7y ago
        Enterprise support has saved our team from our own screwups in the past, so I've also had positive experiences with them.
      - secabeen 7y ago
        When your profit margin is 25%+, the bigger risk is not people reducing spend, it's moving to a different cloud. Helping people decrease spend by increasing complexity is a form of vendor lock-in, and preserves the long-term revenue.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses. What is there to say? There are huge scale inefficiencies in maintaining a small datacenter.
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    > What is there to say? There are huge scale inefficiencies in maintaining a small datacenter. At $dayjob we have a small DC (8 racks). We’re facing chiller, UPS, and core switching/cabling replacements all within the next two years. We did the math, public Cloud is cheaper for us, especially since about 80% of our instances can be shut down outside business hours.
    - joncrane 7y ago
      Nice. It's always nice to see grass roots use cases for Cloud.
- matwood 7y ago
  > I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. Agreed. I've spoken with a few companies that could save quite a bit of money by buying RIs with a few clicks. With a little bit of work they could save a lot more moving large parts of their workload to spot instances. Almost feels like they want to brag about the AWS bill size...
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
I would think it makes a ton of sense for a graduating student to use managed micro services instead of their own monolith they need to continually support.
mgkimsal 7y ago
> I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps possibly because that's what most of the job postings are requiring?
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’m an AWS true believer, but in that case if I were on a budget, I would scrounge up enough cheap used hardware, setup my own home network and host everything myself just to learn.
tfigment 7y ago
I used to host in savvis then IT team pushed me into their datacenter for cost reasons but they are so terrible with changes and support that azure/aws are very attractive to improve my dev speed even if it means i have to do all the ops work. Probably more expensive than colo but i have to use them if i do that but i have more freedom in the cloud (until they figure that out i'm sure).
raxxorrax 7y ago
Or you go for even smaller use cases. I host some stuff for some companies to share business information with external suppliers for example. These apps serve < 100 users a month. Still, they all get a load balance configuration to grab the free TLS certs with auto renewal while keeping configuration simple. While I would not recommend premature TLS termination for critical business data, it is sufficient for many applications. Admins get their familiar AWS console to configure the apps and I can make sure these are bundled in a way to be deployed on many different systems. If I wanted to, I could use AWS identity provider like cognito and have it all in one place. I think the main argument for cloud provider is the utility and convenience they provide for small projects. While I do not like the business practices of Amazon and would never like to work for them on AWS, I am also lazy and cannot say I that they didn't develop something very useful. Generally companies don't really care if a solution is 70$ or 3,50$ a month. They do care about my wage much more. Unjustifiable! Sure, you could dump it all on a server somewhere without using any external micro services. But in my experience these project are much more likely to start to randomly haunt you from the past. And worse, I so actually have to maintain the servers. And the price difference for inefficiently used services is mostly between 5$ and 15$. But these extra 10$ a month can easily be set off for reduced development or administration time. If after ~40 years the service is still active, I would freely admit to that mistake. Granted, this isn't applicable for application that do actually need to be scaled. But the time to launch for standard solutions that nudge a few bits here and there can be reduced quite a bit thanks to infrastructure like this. And it may be in use anyway since all the Google Home/Alexa IOT stuff.

by dRaBoQ 7y ago

joncrane 7y ago

I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. They know, and try to educate. The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses.

danpalmer 7y ago
They might try to educate, but I don't think they engineer their products to make "getting it right" easy. It's not in their interests, but they _could_ make a product that is much easier to use correctly, cheaply, or both. AWS creates work, and creates spend, much more than it needs to.
- iends 7y ago
  Yes, AWS incentives are not aligned with their customers. Any sufficiently sized organization on AWS ends up building custom tooling to help manage cost. They may also hire consultants to help optimize cost. This is all by design.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    My experience is that AWS is remarkably open to helping you get things right. They seem to focus on making things possible before easy, but (Enterprise) support is quite good and have specific incentives on spend efficiency that run counter to the short-term goals of Amazon. I can only imagine how the Oracle cloud must go for victims^Wcustomers. Systems engineering is hard, on-prem or in-cloud.
    - jacob019 7y ago
      TIL ^w
      - pm90 7y ago
        I don't get it yet... what does it mean?
        detaro 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U
    - nostrebored 7y ago
      AWS TAMs I know spend a sizable portion of their time making sure that their costs are low for their customers, monitoring monthly spend and looking for inefficiencies. Business and Enterprise support customers also receive full access to Trusted Advisor, an automated tool which checks your account for spending inefficiencies and best practice violations.
    - Macha 7y ago
      Enterprise support has saved our team from our own screwups in the past, so I've also had positive experiences with them.
    - secabeen 7y ago
      When your profit margin is 25%+, the bigger risk is not people reducing spend, it's moving to a different cloud. Helping people decrease spend by increasing complexity is a form of vendor lock-in, and preserves the long-term revenue.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> The crazy thing is, even used inefficiently, the Cloud is still a very good value prop for a lot of businesses. What is there to say? There are huge scale inefficiencies in maintaining a small datacenter.
- tatersolid 7y ago
  > What is there to say? There are huge scale inefficiencies in maintaining a small datacenter. At $dayjob we have a small DC (8 racks). We’re facing chiller, UPS, and core switching/cabling replacements all within the next two years. We did the math, public Cloud is cheaper for us, especially since about 80% of our instances can be shut down outside business hours.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    Nice. It's always nice to see grass roots use cases for Cloud.
matwood 7y ago
> I would argue that the majority of AWS' profits come from inefficiencies of their customers. Agreed. I've spoken with a few companies that could save quite a bit of money by buying RIs with a few clicks. With a little bit of work they could save a lot more moving large parts of their workload to spot instances. Almost feels like they want to brag about the AWS bill size...

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

I would think it makes a ton of sense for a graduating student to use managed micro services instead of their own monolith they need to continually support.

mgkimsal 7y ago

> I see tons of posts of under/fresh grads trying to use microservices, k8s and TerraForm for their tiny < 100 qps apps possibly because that's what most of the job postings are requiring?

scarface74 7y ago
I’m an AWS true believer, but in that case if I were on a budget, I would scrounge up enough cheap used hardware, setup my own home network and host everything myself just to learn.

tfigment 7y ago

I used to host in savvis then IT team pushed me into their datacenter for cost reasons but they are so terrible with changes and support that azure/aws are very attractive to improve my dev speed even if it means i have to do all the ops work. Probably more expensive than colo but i have to use them if i do that but i have more freedom in the cloud (until they figure that out i'm sure).

raxxorrax 7y ago

Or you go for even smaller use cases. I host some stuff for some companies to share business information with external suppliers for example. These apps serve < 100 users a month. Still, they all get a load balance configuration to grab the free TLS certs with auto renewal while keeping configuration simple. While I would not recommend premature TLS termination for critical business data, it is sufficient for many applications. Admins get their familiar AWS console to configure the apps and I can make sure these are bundled in a way to be deployed on many different systems. If I wanted to, I could use AWS identity provider like cognito and have it all in one place. I think the main argument for cloud provider is the utility and convenience they provide for small projects. While I do not like the business practices of Amazon and would never like to work for them on AWS, I am also lazy and cannot say I that they didn't develop something very useful. Generally companies don't really care if a solution is 70$ or 3,50$ a month. They do care about my wage much more. Unjustifiable! Sure, you could dump it all on a server somewhere without using any external micro services. But in my experience these project are much more likely to start to randomly haunt you from the past. And worse, I so actually have to maintain the servers. And the price difference for inefficiently used services is mostly between 5$ and 15$. But these extra 10$ a month can easily be set off for reduced development or administration time. If after ~40 years the service is still active, I would freely admit to that mistake. Granted, this isn't applicable for application that do actually need to be scaled. But the time to launch for standard solutions that nudge a few bits here and there can be reduced quite a bit thanks to infrastructure like this. And it may be in use anyway since all the Google Home/Alexa IOT stuff.