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I did exactly this project for a high traffic site about 10 years ago. We got datacenter rooms wholesale that included power and cooling. Did everything else ou

I did exactly this project for a high traffic site about 10 years ago. We got datacenter rooms wholesale that included power and cooling. Did everything else ourselves and cut our burn rate in half. However, we were totally open source so no licensing costs. Even after leasing all the hardware, hiring the staff, getting the transit brought in, we still cut our compute costs in half. Even so, we ended up keeping cloudfront+S3 for serving static content because we couldn't beat the price they offered.

CodesInChaos 5y ago
I'm surprised that static content is where AWS is competitive for you, considering the high egress pricing ($20/TB is the lowest advertised price for cloudfront).
- fooblat 5y ago
  It is highly negotiable when you get to large volumes. We got a term where CloudFront fetches from EC2 were free for objects <101K (or something like that) and free for EC2 from S3. We were able to take great advantage of that with the way we built our app. It was a long while ago so I may be off on the exact details.
harpratap 5y ago
> However, we were totally open source so no licensing costs. This is not a healthy opinion to have, not for the open source community and neither for the company using open source projects. All the bugs and missing features of the open source project you use are also a part of your technical debt now, you can either donate to project to keep it healthy or hire FTE working on contributing to these projects, which is just indirect form of payment and should absolutely be a part of your budget
- fooblat 5y ago
  You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions simply because we chose freely available open source. To have a business depend on software you either need a support service or you support it yourself. We chose the latter and made sure the team had the skills to do so. Of course we contributed our bug fixes back and even released our own tools open source.
  - harpratap 5y ago
    Good but those two things aren't nearly enough. Then people wonder how we end up with HeartBleed bug, Elastic & Grafana moving to stricter licenses, Mozilla dying in favor of FAANG provided software.

CodesInChaos 5y ago

I'm surprised that static content is where AWS is competitive for you, considering the high egress pricing ($20/TB is the lowest advertised price for cloudfront).

fooblat 5y ago
It is highly negotiable when you get to large volumes. We got a term where CloudFront fetches from EC2 were free for objects <101K (or something like that) and free for EC2 from S3. We were able to take great advantage of that with the way we built our app. It was a long while ago so I may be off on the exact details.

harpratap 5y ago

> However, we were totally open source so no licensing costs. This is not a healthy opinion to have, not for the open source community and neither for the company using open source projects. All the bugs and missing features of the open source project you use are also a part of your technical debt now, you can either donate to project to keep it healthy or hire FTE working on contributing to these projects, which is just indirect form of payment and should absolutely be a part of your budget

fooblat 5y ago
You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions simply because we chose freely available open source. To have a business depend on software you either need a support service or you support it yourself. We chose the latter and made sure the team had the skills to do so. Of course we contributed our bug fixes back and even released our own tools open source.
- harpratap 5y ago
  Good but those two things aren't nearly enough. Then people wonder how we end up with HeartBleed bug, Elastic & Grafana moving to stricter licenses, Mozilla dying in favor of FAANG provided software.