8 ms·

Wish they would have given an idea of how much this helped improve their AWS bill. Hard to judge the value of this implementation without knowing the $$$ saved.

welder 5y ago
Our S3 costs were between $400/mo. - $800/mo. After SSDB it's more stable around $200/mo, so a conservative number is $200/mo savings. A related comment about our costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740911
- justinclift 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, have you compared SSDB via MinIO (as another commenter mentions)? Asking because we use MinIO, and for us (a small online place with a single actually active MinIO server) it's been pretty good + super stable.
  - welder 5y ago
    Hadn't heard of MinIO. We looked into another S3 caching solution that someone linked in comments here, but it came down to we already used SSDB in production. Also, a personal preference of mine is to keep all logic in the same layer: Python. For ex: We use SQLAlchemy as the source of truth for our relational database schema, and we use Alembic to manage database schema changes in Python. We even shard our Postgres tables in Python [1]. It fits with my preference to keep this caching logic also in Python, by reading/writing directly to the cache and S3 from the Python app and workers. [1] https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/issues/6055#issuecomment-801132820 https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/issues/6055#issueco...
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    Can Minio act as a caching proxy? Or do you do something manual like publishing to minio first, and then later publishing to S3 in batch or something? edit: Found this https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-gateway-for-s3.html https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-gateway-for-s3.html Awesome! So minio can actually act as a caching proxy for S3. Very cool.
- __jem 5y ago
  How is $200/mo savings worth spending more than like 10 seconds of engineering time on? If you have to support the solution at all you wipe out all the savings almost instantly.
  - welder 5y ago
    We're a one-man shop, so the cost savings made sense in the long run. I already use SSDB and Redis in production so I'm very familiar with supporting it.
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      From business growth perspective: if you have paying customers - then such low cost savings are counter intuitive, for a one man shop. A one man shop with paying customers shouldn't spend time on optimization, unless it's just for fun. If I'm a customer - I'd rather see more value added functionality, rather than cheaper data storage. But that is my opinion, hope that your customers appreciate you spending time on this.
      - pengaru 5y ago
        they're not mutually exclusive
        jrh206 5y ago
        They kind of are. A one-man shop can only do one thing at once. Either they save costs on data storage, or they spend that time doing something else.
        welder 5y ago
        No, pengaru's right. They're not mutually exclusive. For ex: making the site faster and more stable means I spend less time fixing and keeping things running and more time building new features.
- mi100hael 5y ago
  I remember seeing your comment on that previous post. I enjoy seeing those sorts of "behind the curtain" details that break down stack & cost of applicaitons. I'm curious if you've tested what it would cost to just host on EC2 (or something potentially even cheaper in AWS like ECS Fargate) with a savings plan. At a glance, it looks like AWS would be cheaper than DO if you can commit to 1-yr reserved instances. That would seem like an easier (and possibly more effective) way to get around costly AWS outbound data costs compared to running a separate cache and sending data across the internet between cloud providers just to save $200/mo.
  - welder 5y ago
    Back in the day I did use EC2, but to get the same performance (especially SSD IOPs) it cost a lot more than DigitalOcean. Back then, the monthly bill for EC2 was over $3,000/mo. Switching to DigitalOcean we got better performance for under $1k/mo.
- knightofmars 5y ago
  How much time is spent updating these services and addressing CVEs and other security issues when they arise?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

welder 5y ago

Our S3 costs were between $400/mo. - $800/mo. After SSDB it's more stable around $200/mo, so a conservative number is $200/mo savings. A related comment about our costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740911

justinclift 5y ago
Out of curiosity, have you compared SSDB via MinIO (as another commenter mentions)? Asking because we use MinIO, and for us (a small online place with a single actually active MinIO server) it's been pretty good + super stable.
- welder 5y ago
  Hadn't heard of MinIO. We looked into another S3 caching solution that someone linked in comments here, but it came down to we already used SSDB in production. Also, a personal preference of mine is to keep all logic in the same layer: Python. For ex: We use SQLAlchemy as the source of truth for our relational database schema, and we use Alembic to manage database schema changes in Python. We even shard our Postgres tables in Python [1]. It fits with my preference to keep this caching logic also in Python, by reading/writing directly to the cache and S3 from the Python app and workers. [1] https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/issues/6055#issuecomment-801132820 https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/issues/6055#issueco...
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Can Minio act as a caching proxy? Or do you do something manual like publishing to minio first, and then later publishing to S3 in batch or something? edit: Found this https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-gateway-for-s3.html https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-gateway-for-s3.html Awesome! So minio can actually act as a caching proxy for S3. Very cool.
__jem 5y ago
How is $200/mo savings worth spending more than like 10 seconds of engineering time on? If you have to support the solution at all you wipe out all the savings almost instantly.
- welder 5y ago
  We're a one-man shop, so the cost savings made sense in the long run. I already use SSDB and Redis in production so I'm very familiar with supporting it.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    From business growth perspective: if you have paying customers - then such low cost savings are counter intuitive, for a one man shop. A one man shop with paying customers shouldn't spend time on optimization, unless it's just for fun. If I'm a customer - I'd rather see more value added functionality, rather than cheaper data storage. But that is my opinion, hope that your customers appreciate you spending time on this.
    - pengaru 5y ago
      they're not mutually exclusive
      - jrh206 5y ago
        They kind of are. A one-man shop can only do one thing at once. Either they save costs on data storage, or they spend that time doing something else.
        welder 5y ago
        No, pengaru's right. They're not mutually exclusive. For ex: making the site faster and more stable means I spend less time fixing and keeping things running and more time building new features.
mi100hael 5y ago
I remember seeing your comment on that previous post. I enjoy seeing those sorts of "behind the curtain" details that break down stack & cost of applicaitons. I'm curious if you've tested what it would cost to just host on EC2 (or something potentially even cheaper in AWS like ECS Fargate) with a savings plan. At a glance, it looks like AWS would be cheaper than DO if you can commit to 1-yr reserved instances. That would seem like an easier (and possibly more effective) way to get around costly AWS outbound data costs compared to running a separate cache and sending data across the internet between cloud providers just to save $200/mo.
- welder 5y ago
  Back in the day I did use EC2, but to get the same performance (especially SSD IOPs) it cost a lot more than DigitalOcean. Back then, the monthly bill for EC2 was over $3,000/mo. Switching to DigitalOcean we got better performance for under $1k/mo.
knightofmars 5y ago
How much time is spent updating these services and addressing CVEs and other security issues when they arise?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]