5 ms·

This amazes me it's so much easier at that scale to deal with 6-10 boxes vs all the crap that comes with AWS. Don't want to deal with managing them there are co

by qaq 7y ago

This amazes me it's so much easier at that scale to deal with 6-10 boxes vs all the crap that comes with AWS. Don't want to deal with managing them there are companies that will do it for you and you will have an actual on call people that are accountable to you. Unless you are doing 6+ figures a month in AWS spend have fun trying to have same level of service.

dfsegoat 7y ago
I genuinely want to understand the point you are presumably making here, but I’m honestly having a tough time with understanding what it is.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  "If you use their boxes, they own your data. Don't use their boxes."
AmericanChopper 7y ago
I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have bursty loads, or sudden increases in utilization, then scaling is going to be painful, because it will require hardware procurement, which is a slow process. There’s situations where it makes sense, but there’s way more factors than you’re considering in this comment, and you’ve completely misrepresented what the trade offs are.
- qaq 7y ago
  I am not only not dreaming I've being running workloads like that for a long time. Both in cloud and colo. If it's my money sanity or ass on the line colo is my strong pref. I def. do not want to replicate developer experience of AWS in Colo as AWS has s ton more moving pieces which are black boxes and have arbitrary limits. Scaling is a disingenuous point for most e-commerce apps as you generally have RDBMS that do not scale horizontally so cloud or no cloud your bottleneck is the same. The price point at which say Spanner would outperform a cluster of RDBMS on high end boxes is way south of 100K/month and no of the shelf e-commerce software would support it anyway.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    Say you completely ignore scaling. The two things you simply cannot replicate at that scale are redundancy and operational resource. AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. There is simply no way you could ever dream of replicating those service levels with such a small operation, and if you were to even attempt it, it would require an absurd level of over provisioning. As I said, you’re completely misrepresenting what the actual trade offs are, and there’s no possible way your claims about replicating AWS service levels is even remotely plausible.
    - qaq 7y ago
      AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their control layer. They had outages that lasted many hours in a row multiple times. You need to carefully separate marketing claims from operational reality and actual track record. When US East has major issues there is not enough spare capacity to spin up everything that was running there in other regions.
      - AmericanChopper 7y ago
        Amazon has some of the best uptime in the world, especially for basic services like EC2, even if you’re only considering the least reliable regions like US East. Their last major event was in 2017. There are few providers in the world that can compete with them in that respect, and there’s nothing that you or I or anybody else could build with 6-10 servers that could come close. If you were planning to try exceed their service levels yourself, there is no conceivable use case where a small to medium sized company could justify the requisite expenses to provide the redundancy and operational coverage necessary. What you are actually talking about is that you can meet your own needs without AWS, which is entirely plausible, but completely different from the absurd claims that you can build a low budget infrastructure that exceeds their service levels. That claim is so ridiculous, you might as well be saying that you can make a car faster than Toyota can, or that you can run a two minute mile.
- 1_person 7y ago
  The CDN will be fronting most of the load, behind that 10 decently specced servers running sanely architected code can scale to millions, if not tens of millions of requests per second. Drop the servers in HA sets of 2-3 nodes across 3-4 regions, anycast your service endpoint from each cluster. The hardest thing to replicate without AWS is the 6-7 figure bills.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    What you’re describing is “good enough service levels for what I need” not “the same level of service as AWS” (or a superior level, as the parent comment implied). If some sanely architected code was all you needed, then you’d expect at least other cloud/IaaS providers to be able to match AWS service levels. Which they can’t, and which some little software shop most certainly cannot either.
    - qaq 7y ago
      Look at actual downtime of US East over the years.
  - all_blue_chucks 7y ago
    So what do you do when you are featured on CNN or whatever and you need to scale up massively in a matter of minutes? Do you just let all those sales go?

by qaq 7y ago

dfsegoat 7y ago

I genuinely want to understand the point you are presumably making here, but I’m honestly having a tough time with understanding what it is.

CamperBob2 7y ago
"If you use their boxes, they own your data. Don't use their boxes."

AmericanChopper 7y ago

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have bursty loads, or sudden increases in utilization, then scaling is going to be painful, because it will require hardware procurement, which is a slow process. There’s situations where it makes sense, but there’s way more factors than you’re considering in this comment, and you’ve completely misrepresented what the trade offs are.

qaq 7y ago
I am not only not dreaming I've being running workloads like that for a long time. Both in cloud and colo. If it's my money sanity or ass on the line colo is my strong pref. I def. do not want to replicate developer experience of AWS in Colo as AWS has s ton more moving pieces which are black boxes and have arbitrary limits. Scaling is a disingenuous point for most e-commerce apps as you generally have RDBMS that do not scale horizontally so cloud or no cloud your bottleneck is the same. The price point at which say Spanner would outperform a cluster of RDBMS on high end boxes is way south of 100K/month and no of the shelf e-commerce software would support it anyway.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Say you completely ignore scaling. The two things you simply cannot replicate at that scale are redundancy and operational resource. AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. There is simply no way you could ever dream of replicating those service levels with such a small operation, and if you were to even attempt it, it would require an absurd level of over provisioning. As I said, you’re completely misrepresenting what the actual trade offs are, and there’s no possible way your claims about replicating AWS service levels is even remotely plausible.
  - qaq 7y ago
    AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their control layer. They had outages that lasted many hours in a row multiple times. You need to carefully separate marketing claims from operational reality and actual track record. When US East has major issues there is not enough spare capacity to spin up everything that was running there in other regions.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      Amazon has some of the best uptime in the world, especially for basic services like EC2, even if you’re only considering the least reliable regions like US East. Their last major event was in 2017. There are few providers in the world that can compete with them in that respect, and there’s nothing that you or I or anybody else could build with 6-10 servers that could come close. If you were planning to try exceed their service levels yourself, there is no conceivable use case where a small to medium sized company could justify the requisite expenses to provide the redundancy and operational coverage necessary. What you are actually talking about is that you can meet your own needs without AWS, which is entirely plausible, but completely different from the absurd claims that you can build a low budget infrastructure that exceeds their service levels. That claim is so ridiculous, you might as well be saying that you can make a car faster than Toyota can, or that you can run a two minute mile.
1_person 7y ago
The CDN will be fronting most of the load, behind that 10 decently specced servers running sanely architected code can scale to millions, if not tens of millions of requests per second. Drop the servers in HA sets of 2-3 nodes across 3-4 regions, anycast your service endpoint from each cluster. The hardest thing to replicate without AWS is the 6-7 figure bills.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  What you’re describing is “good enough service levels for what I need” not “the same level of service as AWS” (or a superior level, as the parent comment implied). If some sanely architected code was all you needed, then you’d expect at least other cloud/IaaS providers to be able to match AWS service levels. Which they can’t, and which some little software shop most certainly cannot either.
  - qaq 7y ago
    Look at actual downtime of US East over the years.
- all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  So what do you do when you are featured on CNN or whatever and you need to scale up massively in a matter of minutes? Do you just let all those sales go?