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Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had up to 40 servers with this method and devoted similarly trivial amounts of time to it. If you wa

Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had up to 40 servers with this method and devoted similarly trivial amounts of time to it. If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. If your goal is to be the next billion dollar company, it probably doesn't matter that much. But if you're self-funding and need a sustainable business model from the beginning, there's a huge growth phase (mid-sized) where the cost savings from doing this sort of thing can be large enough to be worthwhile. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware. Back in the early 2000s it definitely felt more commonplace for developers to be able to deal with it. Maybe it's because we grew up having to deal with our own in the form of desktops. Nowadays it seems like lots of people just use a macbook. And that's their only exposure to hardware

scarface74 6y ago
If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware I want to develop. Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had to manage servers, load balancers, and even an elevated “server” room with a SAN with whopping 3TBs of storage back in the early 2000s. But in my old age, my time is valuable. I’ve done the on call thing before where our database server went down in the middle of the night when the night operations crew was working. I won’t work for a company that is not on a cloud provider and doesn’t have a dedicated ops team. But, if you are a small company. Why are you spending a lot on AWS? Two EC2 instances behind a load balancer and a hosted database shouldn’t cost you over $500 a month and that includes a decent amount of traffic and miscellaneous other charges. Heck if you are that small, just use Lightsail and when you grow, peer your Lightsail VPC that you probably didn’t know existed to a real VPC.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  ...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe less. I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.
  - sk5t 6y ago
    What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time? Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't interested in software development? I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it requires just the right set of circumstances for sustainability. Like, maybe it is your own startup or family business, or one is not particular good at sysop'ing and wants to learn more.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - scarface74 6y ago
      When I first started working at my current company, my manager wanted a highly available SFTP solution that would automatically sync with S3. I designed a relatively straightforward solution on paper involving a network load balancer, autoscaling group [1] with two instances and a SMB share (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/CreatingAnSMBFileShare.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/...) and gave him an estimated cost. He said okay go for it. But then I said, or we can just throw some money at AWS and use the more expensive (on paper excluding babysitting time), AWS SFTP service. I gave him both solutions as a test to see where his head was at. He chose AWS SFTP. We are a small high margin B2B company and sign long term contracts that are worth yearly in the six figures. We are very much focused on outsourcing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so we can focus on development and sales. [1] Autoscaling would not have been used to scale on demand. We set a min/max of two so if one server fails a health check, another instance will be brought up.

scarface74 6y ago

If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware I want to develop. Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had to manage servers, load balancers, and even an elevated “server” room with a SAN with whopping 3TBs of storage back in the early 2000s. But in my old age, my time is valuable. I’ve done the on call thing before where our database server went down in the middle of the night when the night operations crew was working. I won’t work for a company that is not on a cloud provider and doesn’t have a dedicated ops team. But, if you are a small company. Why are you spending a lot on AWS? Two EC2 instances behind a load balancer and a hosted database shouldn’t cost you over $500 a month and that includes a decent amount of traffic and miscellaneous other charges. Heck if you are that small, just use Lightsail and when you grow, peer your Lightsail VPC that you probably didn’t know existed to a real VPC.

koheripbal 6y ago
...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe less. I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.
- sk5t 6y ago
  What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time? Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't interested in software development? I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it requires just the right set of circumstances for sustainability. Like, maybe it is your own startup or family business, or one is not particular good at sysop'ing and wants to learn more.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarface74 6y ago
    When I first started working at my current company, my manager wanted a highly available SFTP solution that would automatically sync with S3. I designed a relatively straightforward solution on paper involving a network load balancer, autoscaling group [1] with two instances and a SMB share (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/CreatingAnSMBFileShare.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/...) and gave him an estimated cost. He said okay go for it. But then I said, or we can just throw some money at AWS and use the more expensive (on paper excluding babysitting time), AWS SFTP service. I gave him both solutions as a test to see where his head was at. He chose AWS SFTP. We are a small high margin B2B company and sign long term contracts that are worth yearly in the six figures. We are very much focused on outsourcing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so we can focus on development and sales. [1] Autoscaling would not have been used to scale on demand. We set a min/max of two so if one server fails a health check, another instance will be brought up.