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I did work for a YC startup that replaced my ~$100/mo Heroku app with a $5,000/mo AWS stack that nobody in the place knew how to manage. Their site was so ridi

I did work for a YC startup that replaced my ~$100/mo Heroku app with a $5,000/mo AWS stack that nobody in the place knew how to manage. Their site was so ridiculously low traffic that I did some napkin math and figured out they were paying around $0.10 per web request.

jrochkind1 6y ago
Huh, making a manual AWS stack 50 times more expensive than a heroku setup seems like a real trick to me! I'm used to heroku being more expensive than running it yourself -- as I would expect, since you're paying them for a lot of management.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Heroku is both incredibly cheap and incredibly expensive. It's only $7/month to deploy a web application. More if you want some of the paid features and a database instance. It all works out of the box with instant deployment out of the box, it's fantastic. Then it suddenly goes $50 more per gigabyte of RAM, which makes it massively expensive for any serious workload. It's crazy hot much they can try to charge, makes AWS looks like a bunch of clowns in comparison.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Well Heroku is running on top of AWS. So you are basically paying an extra premium on top of the premium from AWS. Although whether it is worth it depends on your view. ( I keep thinking SalesForces is just not a good fit for Heroku, they should have sold it to MS or Google )
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    If it saves you a FTE or two from managing your own infrastructure, there is a lot of headroom before it's a losing proposition. Which is what I think the OP misses discussing in as much detail as they could with AWS -- are there ways AWS is saving some customers developer/ops staff time over the cheaper alternatives? Cause that is often more expensive than the resources themselves. Could just be "because that's what we're familiar with" (and that's not illegitimate as cost savings), but could be actually better dashboard UIs, APIs, integrations, whatever. [I am currently investigating heroku for our low-traffic tiny-team app, after we had our sysadmin/devops position eliminated. The performance characteristics are surprising me negatively (I can't figure out how anyone gets by with a `standard` instead of `performance` dyno, even for a small low-traffic app; currently writing up my findings for public consumption), but the value of the management they are doing so we don't have to is meeting and exceeding my expectations. (We currently manage our own AWS resources directly, so I know what it is we can't do sustainably anymore with the eliminated position, and the value we're getting from not having to do it).]
    - vidarh 6y ago
      My experience - from doing devops consulting and moving clients off AWS every chance I get - is that it's bad business for devops consultants to move clients off AWS in terms of short term billable hours, because clients spent more money on me when they're on AWS. If I was after maximising billable hours in the short term, then I'd recommend AWS all the time... As such a lot of devops consultants certainly have all the wrong incentives to recommend it, and these days most of them also lack experience of how to price out alternatives. E.g. a typical beginners mistake is to think you'd price out a one-to-one match of servers between AWS and an alternative, but one of the benefits of picking other options is that you're able to look at your app and design a setup that fits your needs better. Network latency matters. Ability to add enough RAM to fit your database working set in RAM if at all possible matters. And so on. With AWS this is often possible but often at the cost of scaling out other things too that you don't need. And most developers won't do it if you don't give them budget responsibility and make them justify the cost and then cut their budget. Development teams used to AWS tends to spin up instance after instance instead of actually measuring and figuring out why they're running into limits to keep costs down. Giving dev teams control over infra without having someone with extensive operations experience is an absolute disaster if you want to manage costs. I work for a VC now. When I evaluate the tech teams of people who apply to us, it's perfectly fine if they use AWS, but it's a massive red flag to me if they don't understand the costs and the costs of alternatives. Usually the ones who do know they're paying for speed and convenience, and have thoughts on how to cut costs by moving parts or all of their services off AWS as they scale, or they have a rationale for why their hosting is never going to be a big part of their overall cost base. The only case where AWS is cost effective is if you get big enough to negotiate really hefty discounts. It's possible - I've heard examples. But if you're paying AWS list prices, chances are sooner or later you'll come across a competitor that isn't.
      - jrochkind1 6y ago
        When you're talking about clients spending more on you as a consultant when they are on AWS... compared to what? Alternatives like GCS? Or actual on-premises hardware? Or what? When you "move clients off AWS every chance you get", you are moving them to what instead? I'm having trouble following your theory of why having clients stay on AWS ends up leading to more consultant billable hours, I think because I don't understand what alternatives you are comparing it to. I am pretty sure it is not heroku, as in the earlier part of the thread? Or are you talking about compared to simpler "vps" hosts like, say, linode? Doesn't that require a lot more ops skillset and time to set up and run compared to aws, or you don't think it does?
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Many (startup) SaaS companies (except metrics collectors e.g) have very low traffic from logged in users. When I moved from an ecommerce company with 1000 logins/sec to a SaaS company I could not believe the low traffic :-)
NikolaeVarius 6y ago
Thats just incompetence.
fourseventy 6y ago
I've seen this exact same thing happen to a company I used to work for. They had an enterprise B2B app that had extremely low traffic. The Heroku app worked fine but the CTO spent a year building a super complicated AWS stack as an exercise in resume building. After the AWS stack launch filed miserably and we had to switch back to Heroku the CTO quit and still has "migrated company to infrastructure as code AWS stack" on their Linkedin profile.

jrochkind1 6y ago

Huh, making a manual AWS stack 50 times more expensive than a heroku setup seems like a real trick to me! I'm used to heroku being more expensive than running it yourself -- as I would expect, since you're paying them for a lot of management.

user5994461 6y ago
Heroku is both incredibly cheap and incredibly expensive. It's only $7/month to deploy a web application. More if you want some of the paid features and a database instance. It all works out of the box with instant deployment out of the box, it's fantastic. Then it suddenly goes $50 more per gigabyte of RAM, which makes it massively expensive for any serious workload. It's crazy hot much they can try to charge, makes AWS looks like a bunch of clowns in comparison.
- ksec 6y ago
  Well Heroku is running on top of AWS. So you are basically paying an extra premium on top of the premium from AWS. Although whether it is worth it depends on your view. ( I keep thinking SalesForces is just not a good fit for Heroku, they should have sold it to MS or Google )
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  If it saves you a FTE or two from managing your own infrastructure, there is a lot of headroom before it's a losing proposition. Which is what I think the OP misses discussing in as much detail as they could with AWS -- are there ways AWS is saving some customers developer/ops staff time over the cheaper alternatives? Cause that is often more expensive than the resources themselves. Could just be "because that's what we're familiar with" (and that's not illegitimate as cost savings), but could be actually better dashboard UIs, APIs, integrations, whatever. [I am currently investigating heroku for our low-traffic tiny-team app, after we had our sysadmin/devops position eliminated. The performance characteristics are surprising me negatively (I can't figure out how anyone gets by with a `standard` instead of `performance` dyno, even for a small low-traffic app; currently writing up my findings for public consumption), but the value of the management they are doing so we don't have to is meeting and exceeding my expectations. (We currently manage our own AWS resources directly, so I know what it is we can't do sustainably anymore with the eliminated position, and the value we're getting from not having to do it).]
  - vidarh 6y ago
    My experience - from doing devops consulting and moving clients off AWS every chance I get - is that it's bad business for devops consultants to move clients off AWS in terms of short term billable hours, because clients spent more money on me when they're on AWS. If I was after maximising billable hours in the short term, then I'd recommend AWS all the time... As such a lot of devops consultants certainly have all the wrong incentives to recommend it, and these days most of them also lack experience of how to price out alternatives. E.g. a typical beginners mistake is to think you'd price out a one-to-one match of servers between AWS and an alternative, but one of the benefits of picking other options is that you're able to look at your app and design a setup that fits your needs better. Network latency matters. Ability to add enough RAM to fit your database working set in RAM if at all possible matters. And so on. With AWS this is often possible but often at the cost of scaling out other things too that you don't need. And most developers won't do it if you don't give them budget responsibility and make them justify the cost and then cut their budget. Development teams used to AWS tends to spin up instance after instance instead of actually measuring and figuring out why they're running into limits to keep costs down. Giving dev teams control over infra without having someone with extensive operations experience is an absolute disaster if you want to manage costs. I work for a VC now. When I evaluate the tech teams of people who apply to us, it's perfectly fine if they use AWS, but it's a massive red flag to me if they don't understand the costs and the costs of alternatives. Usually the ones who do know they're paying for speed and convenience, and have thoughts on how to cut costs by moving parts or all of their services off AWS as they scale, or they have a rationale for why their hosting is never going to be a big part of their overall cost base. The only case where AWS is cost effective is if you get big enough to negotiate really hefty discounts. It's possible - I've heard examples. But if you're paying AWS list prices, chances are sooner or later you'll come across a competitor that isn't.
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      When you're talking about clients spending more on you as a consultant when they are on AWS... compared to what? Alternatives like GCS? Or actual on-premises hardware? Or what? When you "move clients off AWS every chance you get", you are moving them to what instead? I'm having trouble following your theory of why having clients stay on AWS ends up leading to more consultant billable hours, I think because I don't understand what alternatives you are comparing it to. I am pretty sure it is not heroku, as in the earlier part of the thread? Or are you talking about compared to simpler "vps" hosts like, say, linode? Doesn't that require a lot more ops skillset and time to set up and run compared to aws, or you don't think it does?

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Many (startup) SaaS companies (except metrics collectors e.g) have very low traffic from logged in users. When I moved from an ecommerce company with 1000 logins/sec to a SaaS company I could not believe the low traffic :-)

NikolaeVarius 6y ago

Thats just incompetence.

fourseventy 6y ago

I've seen this exact same thing happen to a company I used to work for. They had an enterprise B2B app that had extremely low traffic. The Heroku app worked fine but the CTO spent a year building a super complicated AWS stack as an exercise in resume building. After the AWS stack launch filed miserably and we had to switch back to Heroku the CTO quit and still has "migrated company to infrastructure as code AWS stack" on their Linkedin profile.