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It's always more expensive to have someone else run your infrastructure than to do it yourself unless it's something you only use intermittently. If you need 5
by AndrewDucker 5y ago
It's always more expensive to have someone else run your infrastructure than to do it yourself unless it's something you only use intermittently.
If you need 5 seconds of compute time per day then running that as a Lambda makes perfect sense. If you need a database server that's available 24/7 then I can't see how hosting that on Amazon could be cheaper.
(Unless you're employing a full time ops person to look after that one server, in which case you'll have to do your own maths.)
- hughrr 5y agoYep that. Lambda is a massive win for me personally. I have some scraping and processing stuff that runs daily. Costs me $0.60 a month to run it even outside of free tier which is less than a cheap DO or linode box and I don’t have to look after the OS.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoSame. Powershell script that collects links from Pinboard and posts them to my blog. It would be massively overkill to run a whole server for that. (And Microsoft charges me about £0.15 per month)
- l33tman 5y agoWell that 24/7 db server is not going to back up itself and maintain itself when the HW fails or the power goes out. This is not trivial/cheap to assure and maintain. Likewise with hosting your own S3. The value is not in the HW really (and the cloud providers know this when pricing). I have this setup on AWS and look at "bringing it home" every year but the nightmare of having to assure a good level of availability is not worth the saving of a few extra $1000 per year for us at least. Completely different issues not related to your HW can happen, your office internet simply goes down or power goes out while you're on vacation etc.. At least there is major competition between a lot of cloud providers nowadays so nobody can get away with insane prices anymore. Though, would be cool to see some kind of standardised price comparision metric for medium/high complexity cloud setups. Sort of how you compare grocery prices, you have a standard purchase list.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago> Well that 24/7 db server is not going to back up itself and maintain itself when the HW fails or the power goes out. Uh, yeah, that's why you pay IT people to do that sort of thing. Hiring your own will almost certainly be less expensive than paying Amazon's people, and provides you more control and more options in the event of any problems. It's not like AWS never has problems, and when it does all you can do is twiddle your thumbs until someone else fixes it.
- Daishiman 5y agoIn what world do you live in where competent IT support for production infrastructure is cheap?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoThe one that doesn't live in SV.
- hughrr 5y agoIt’s cheaper for us to bring our own staff and licenses than pay for RDS at our scale :)
- WaxProlix 5y agoOnce you hit that point, AWS will almost always cut you some specific pricing deals to ensure that your pain point is competitively priced, since they want you in the ecosystem anyways.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoPrevious job, I ran website on RDS for about 7 years and only touched the control panel to restore from a backup when we'd screwed up the data, and to tell it when to upgrade. That was worth quite a lot in ops time and piece of mind.
- habibur 5y agoDatabase crashing on a hosted service is such a rate event unless you mess it up yourself running rouge queries. No surprise there. It doesn't have to be AWS though. Can be Digital Ocean or anything else.