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Lock-in is one of the worst reasons to avoid serverless. If you're really putting in the effort to avoid lock-in, you're wasting engineering time that could be

Lock-in is one of the worst reasons to avoid serverless. If you're really putting in the effort to avoid lock-in, you're wasting engineering time that could be better spent on your product. AWS (or GCP, or whatever cloud provider you choose) has a number of really great products that ultimately save you time and help you get to market faster and better. It doesn't matter that you're locked-in, with slightly higher than wanted costs when you've failed due to poor priorities. Become successful, then worry about removing your lock-in if you actually need it (and you probably won't).

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
I'd disagree pretty strongly. You may evaluate the tradeoffs and decide to go all-in on a single cloud (and you should do that analysis!), but it's far from a given. You're not wasting engineering time if the costs get out of hand and bankrupt you. Managed services may accelerate your time to market, but they do so at the expense of lock-in and your bill. Context: I work at a startup that benefits enormously by avoiding AWS/GCP (for most cases) and renting cheap dedicated servers. It is context-dependent; our exact business doesn't benefit much from managed services and really needs big servers.
- ryan_lane 6y ago
  Just because you're using managed services doesn't mean it's going to be considerably more expensive, when you consider labor costs, and general reliability. Your service will likely be more reliable if you use DynamoDB or AuroraDB. Your service will probably be more reliable if you build it in a way that assumes nodes will die at any point, will automatically come back in, and can scale up/down. It'll likely be more reliable if you use SQS rather than your own message bus (and let's be honest, it'll probably be cheaper too). Yes, you should always evaluate the costs, but reliability and the amount of time you're going to spend maintaining something is something that somehow always gets left out of these evaluations.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    (Prices based on https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator and https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver?country=us) An AuroraDB db.r5.xlarge with 10TB of storage, reserved instances 1Y term but no up-front, costs 1,301.40 USD per month. Take a Hetzner AX161 with 4x3.84 TB SATA SSD, using RAIDZ for 11.52TB usable storage (and 4 times the RAM), at €297.00 per month... so 335.88 USD per month. That's a difference of 965 $/mo = 11,580 $/yr. If you have 10 of these, they'll pay for a full time sysadmin. Now, that's leaving out a lot of details (bandwith costs and application hosting come to mind), and assumes truly massive databases. On the other hand, as that sysadmin, I promise our databases don't take anything like my full attention, and you really should have some sort of sysadmin/ops team anyways (please do not make devs run your AWS infrastructure; it will end in tears for everyone). Every time this argument comes up, people do mention reliability and time spent on maintenance, but... it's really not bad. Hardware doesn't actually fail that much, postgres isn't that complicated to configure, OS patches aren't that hard to apply. Your mileage will vary, but sometimes it's just not worth using AWS. (And sometimes, it really is; if we didn't need to run oversized databases, I'd push us to use AWS in a heartbeat)
    - EB66 6y ago
      100% this. Cloud vendor lock-in is absolutely a relevant factor for consideration -- especially when the non-cloud alternatives are ~10x cheaper. At my company we made the decision to stick primarily with managed dedicated servers over AWS in our very early days. Now we're a decent size a few years later (25 employees) and the cost savings we're realizing are tremendous. We did the math and found that if we had gone with AWS in the early days then we would now conservatively be paying an extra $165,000 on our hosting bill annually. We still use AWS for some specialized services (e.g., Lex) but the bulk of our stack runs on gear that we now colocate for a fraction of the cost.
    - lewis1028282 6y ago
      Yeah but why pay someone to look after databases when I could get them do something else that'll have way more value. Using managed services just reduces how much money I have to spend upfront.
FuckButtons 6y ago
Getting to market faster is fine for an early startup, less so for a public company which needs to justify costs to its shareholders.
deleuze 6y ago
Not every company is a startup dude.
gchamonlive 6y ago
Not in the scenario I described. You implemented a solution using lambda and api gateway. Hundreds of microservices later you may realise you could save considerable money going unmanaged. By that time your lock in is costing you an unhealthy amount of money and there is no easy roadmap to mitigate it. Again, everything must be planned beforehand. Savings could also be marginal, but it could also be significant. In big enterprises, where billing is north of a couple of millions of dollars, every percentile you can save is justifiable.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

I'd disagree pretty strongly. You may evaluate the tradeoffs and decide to go all-in on a single cloud (and you should do that analysis!), but it's far from a given. You're not wasting engineering time if the costs get out of hand and bankrupt you. Managed services may accelerate your time to market, but they do so at the expense of lock-in and your bill. Context: I work at a startup that benefits enormously by avoiding AWS/GCP (for most cases) and renting cheap dedicated servers. It is context-dependent; our exact business doesn't benefit much from managed services and really needs big servers.

ryan_lane 6y ago
Just because you're using managed services doesn't mean it's going to be considerably more expensive, when you consider labor costs, and general reliability. Your service will likely be more reliable if you use DynamoDB or AuroraDB. Your service will probably be more reliable if you build it in a way that assumes nodes will die at any point, will automatically come back in, and can scale up/down. It'll likely be more reliable if you use SQS rather than your own message bus (and let's be honest, it'll probably be cheaper too). Yes, you should always evaluate the costs, but reliability and the amount of time you're going to spend maintaining something is something that somehow always gets left out of these evaluations.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  (Prices based on https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator and https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver?country=us) An AuroraDB db.r5.xlarge with 10TB of storage, reserved instances 1Y term but no up-front, costs 1,301.40 USD per month. Take a Hetzner AX161 with 4x3.84 TB SATA SSD, using RAIDZ for 11.52TB usable storage (and 4 times the RAM), at €297.00 per month... so 335.88 USD per month. That's a difference of 965 $/mo = 11,580 $/yr. If you have 10 of these, they'll pay for a full time sysadmin. Now, that's leaving out a lot of details (bandwith costs and application hosting come to mind), and assumes truly massive databases. On the other hand, as that sysadmin, I promise our databases don't take anything like my full attention, and you really should have some sort of sysadmin/ops team anyways (please do not make devs run your AWS infrastructure; it will end in tears for everyone). Every time this argument comes up, people do mention reliability and time spent on maintenance, but... it's really not bad. Hardware doesn't actually fail that much, postgres isn't that complicated to configure, OS patches aren't that hard to apply. Your mileage will vary, but sometimes it's just not worth using AWS. (And sometimes, it really is; if we didn't need to run oversized databases, I'd push us to use AWS in a heartbeat)
  - EB66 6y ago
    100% this. Cloud vendor lock-in is absolutely a relevant factor for consideration -- especially when the non-cloud alternatives are ~10x cheaper. At my company we made the decision to stick primarily with managed dedicated servers over AWS in our very early days. Now we're a decent size a few years later (25 employees) and the cost savings we're realizing are tremendous. We did the math and found that if we had gone with AWS in the early days then we would now conservatively be paying an extra $165,000 on our hosting bill annually. We still use AWS for some specialized services (e.g., Lex) but the bulk of our stack runs on gear that we now colocate for a fraction of the cost.
  - lewis1028282 6y ago
    Yeah but why pay someone to look after databases when I could get them do something else that'll have way more value. Using managed services just reduces how much money I have to spend upfront.

FuckButtons 6y ago

Getting to market faster is fine for an early startup, less so for a public company which needs to justify costs to its shareholders.

deleuze 6y ago

Not every company is a startup dude.

gchamonlive 6y ago

Not in the scenario I described. You implemented a solution using lambda and api gateway. Hundreds of microservices later you may realise you could save considerable money going unmanaged. By that time your lock in is costing you an unhealthy amount of money and there is no easy roadmap to mitigate it. Again, everything must be planned beforehand. Savings could also be marginal, but it could also be significant. In big enterprises, where billing is north of a couple of millions of dollars, every percentile you can save is justifiable.