20 ms·

You probably don’t need AWS and are better off without it

324 points by rl1987 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
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throwawayboise 4y ago
It's like running Oracle RDBMS. You probably don't need it. But if you do need it, you cannot hope to build it yourself. You need to know what you need.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Almost everyone who really does need it (and is not just ridiculously inefficient) eventually moves off of AWS, including most large startups. Revenue makes it possible to hire and build whatever you want.
  - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
    extremely incorrect. The benefits of cloud grow as the company grows. I've been in a few mega companies that from colo infra to cloud infra, it was a huge cost savings and helped enormously with product development speed.
    - shiftpgdn 4y ago
      I've never seen anyone save money by moving to AWS unless things were already a complete clusterfuck catastrophe.
      - MattGaiser 4y ago
        In my first job, it meant we got a dev back moving to Digital Ocean as they were no longer dealing with servers and infrastructure.
        shiftpgdn 4y ago
        Digital Ocean is a radically less complex offering than AWS.
      - jaywalk 4y ago
        My medium-sized company saved a considerable amount of money by moving to Azure from a managed dedicated server company. I wouldn't call the previous situation "a complete clusterfuck catastrophe" by any means, although I would say we were paying too much. Our Azure bill is just starting to approach what we were paying five years ago to the previous company, with far more things going on now plus all of the flexibility that The Cloud™ has to offer.
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    Netflix uses AWS heavily and they are probably one of the heaviest users in the world of compute. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/
  - AggroVanGogh 4y ago
    This might be the most ludicrous thing I've ever read on HN. Do you have any actual examples to back up the statement?
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Not GP, but Dropbox moved off AWS as they grew: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse-migration-cloud-own-data-centers-five-years https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse...
      - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        Dropbox makes sense. They're an egress-heavy business. Other than media companies (Netflix, Disney Plus, et al.) there aren't that many egress-heavy businesses, so AWS continues to make sense.
      - AggroVanGogh 4y ago
        Dropbox is not a relevant example to the original comment IMO - they clearly need cheap storage above all else; it should be no surprise that someone can self-host something so single-minded as a storage application without all the cloud provider baubles.
      - tempnow987 4y ago
        Is this true? I thought dropbox moved their 30PB+ data lake ONTO aws to get off of Hadoop or something because trying to do this on-prem, even with tons of tech talent and money, was not working. They complained about onprem requiring 3 YEAR forecasts for capacity planning given their scale. Here is what they said in 2020 for benefits of AWS: --------------------- Hosts 40 PB of analytics data and supports 1 PB of data growth a month Optimizes costs by moving cold data to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive Uses Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for 15–50% of compute capacity Doubles compute footprint using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Enables the testing of new technologies without damaging data or affecting users Improved performance by six times for some job types Deletes hundreds of files in a few seconds compared to 30–40 minutes Runs more than 100,000 analytics jobs and tens of thousands of one-time jobs daily --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x-XGJQwk2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x-XGJQwk2M Maybe this has changed since 2020
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Worst take ever
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    That's definitely not what we did at $TRENDCORP. We still use AWS all the time. The cost of netops dwarfs whatever discounts we'd get on colo costs. We're not an egress heavy business so we aren't eating bandwidth costs either. Do you have examples demonstrating your point?
  - lostcolony 4y ago
    ...some examples please? I literally can't even think of one, but can absolutely think of numerous companies that have moved to AWS (and other public clouds) and remained there.
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Does anyone actually need it when software like MySQL and PostgreSQL exist? Mature RDBMS already exists that you don't have to build yourself. Does Oracle have something special?
  - blowski 4y ago
    * Extremely granular permissions * integration with the rest of the Oracle suite. * compatibility with the Oracle database you’ve tightly coupled yourselves to over the last 30 years * Various incentives for purchasing influencers
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      Or, said another way: nobody is choosing Oracle when starting from scratch.
    - throwawayboise 4y ago
      Someone you can call 24/7 and get engineers working on your problem 24/7 until it's fixed.
  - mvanbaak 4y ago
    They are probably talking about building the cluster yourself, not the RDBMS itself. aws (and most other cloud providers) have this cluster management handled for you.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Most companies I know that were using Oracle didn't actually need it, they just didn't trust open source yet. One actually paid me to move their stuff from Postgres to Oracle "because we need enterprise support." This was in the early to mid 2000's.
me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
I hope I can scale my company to the point we need to use aws or equivalent offerings. Currently just using VMs, managed database, and services like firebase.
- mypalmike 4y ago
  Uh, it sounds like you are using an equivalent offering...?
devmor 4y ago
AWS replaces an entire ops team for me. It's invaluable. I would prefer not to need it, but for large complex applications with a lot of parts, it's a lifesaver.
- manquer 4y ago
  I don’t think this post is addressed for your usecase. He is not saying enterprises with ability or need to have large ops teams don’t need AWS. He is saying the average indie developer does not need it. The post closes with a 100$ example, for very early stage startups or small (most are) apps likely don’t need AWS is the premise .
- ecshafer 4y ago
  AWS doesn't really remove an ops team, it should change what ops are doing. Maybe on a very small scale it replaces the ops team that would otherwise run hardware and do updates. But once you scale up a good SRE/Devops/Production engineering team that can run the infra for the company on top of your cloud of choice is a game changer, since networking, database, system issues still show up.
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    So instead of an ops bill now there's a cloud bill plus an ops bill! :P
  - devmor 4y ago
    It absolutely replaces an ops team for me. Well, to be fair I end up doing a small amount of ops by monitoring things but for the most part, everything I used to have to manage for scaling and deployment is handled automatically by some config files in a .aws folder in my repos now.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > AWS replaces an entire ops team for me. It's invaluable. For me, it's more like they have an automated ops team that my systems can interact with.
- 4y ago
mountainriver 4y ago
I agree that there is weird cult-like thinking around AWS, when the reality is their base services like EC2 or s3 are pretty great but most of them are just mediocre. Yet, people will insist on using services just because AWS built it, mostly just brand mentality. Running things on prem or on something like Hetzner cloud can be much simpler in some cases, and with Kubernetes now you can provide a great platform anywhere. It just isn't the solution for every use case.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ramraj07 4y ago
  Agreed that you should be careful about all the auxiliary aws services but can you actually show real proof that on perm is cheaper as a whole while doing everything fast? For sure you pay a premium for ec2, but at the least you get good reliability. Your data won’t disappear off S3 unless you delete it. What level of rigor do you need to put in your on premise game to promise the same? Even for my side projects I nowadays just float an Elastic beanstalk flask app and a small rds instance. It costs 15 a month but I’m fine with that cost for the time it saves me. If you want to be truly cost conscious stick to lightsail. It’s a steal all things considered.
  - ericd 4y ago
    I think even on-prem should generally use S3 for the scalable storage parts like user image hosting, scaling storage sucks. But for app, database, or compute that’s anything but a one-off? Dedicated servers destroy in terms of cost/performance. And bandwidth on AWS is an incredible ripoff, so if you’re doing any heavyweight data hosting, you should absolutely bust out the calculator. OVH boxes with dedicated 1 gbit lines are just absurdly more cost efficient there.
    - mobilio 4y ago
      Just checking bill from customer. EC2 - $150 production plus few support instances = $500 Egress traffic - $4500
karmasimida 4y ago
You (as an indie dev developer) probably don't need AWS, would be a more accurate and less clickbaity title
paxys 4y ago
Is it that time of the week again?
dataminded 4y ago
Pricing isn't an actual concern when you are just getting started. Why would you be worried about vendor-lock if you haven't built anything? If you run your entire solution on a server that you manage, you are also on the hook for backups, recovery, and every other problem that AWS already solved.
- tppiotrowski 4y ago
  Shouldn't pricing be the main concern? If you're just getting started I assume you have $0 revenue to spend. Edit: unless you mean that you'll be within AWS free-tier for a while.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    You’re burning way, way more in labor (and/or opportunity cost of your own time) than you are likely to spend on your monthly cloud (or co-lo) bill. Anything that helps get you to MVP faster is a huge cost-saving.
    - tppiotrowski 4y ago
      You're right. My personal successes came from pecking away a few hours per week, keeping costs low (or free) and growing slowly over multiple years without the need to monetize early.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- neurotrace 4y ago
  > Why would you be worried about vendor-lock if you haven't built anything? When else would you worry about lock-in? The early stages of a project involve setting up the foundation. If you build your foundation on vendor-specific tech, you've just locked yourself in or signed yourself up for a very painful transition in the future
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
electroly 4y ago
The given alternatives include Linode/DO; I would suggest Amazon Lightsail instead. Then you have a clear on-ramp to AWS if you should grow to need it, and the pricing is on par with Linode/DO. The only real differentiator is egress cost once you exceed your included monthly allotment. That, and AWS has a massive scale that is useful even if you have a single server. When I was on Linode, they got DDoSed and the whole service was inaccessible, even though the DDoS wasn't targeted at my server. They didn't have enough capacity at their POPs to grunt through the DDoS. You can't do that to AWS.
asim 4y ago
I think I've beaten this dead horse for years, written multiple articles and even run a service called M3O (m3o.com) attempting to replace it for new use cases. Ultimately there's a generation of developers that have found AWS invaluable. There will be many MANY more companies who will adopt AWS because it's synonymous with cloud and the most mature solution. Yet for all it's worth I still don't think it's the end game. Throughout history we've seen industries and technologies evolve. I feel like AWS is the PalmPilot of this era and we're going to see a very disruptive evolution of Cloud soon.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Any ideas on what would drive that or what that looks like?
  - hatware 4y ago
    I'm not the person you responded to, but I think you're going to see more folks self hosting things and owning everything themselves, and enjoying the cost savings. AWS has made great strides in the last decade, but so has the open source community.
  - asim 4y ago
    I think we're essentially lacking a cloud operating system. Kubernetes isn't an end solution. There's no development model, there's no consumption model. If you look at every platform in existence, there some kind of OS that defines that experience and makes it readily available to developers and end users. I think cloud services are in their infancy and we'll see the emergence of a fully vertical solution including an OS that standardises the entire model as others did. What it looks like? Well I can only speculate and try out ideas myself but effectively it's going to have direct appeal to end consumers, not just devs and execs.
    - jmt_ 4y ago
      What about Amazon Linux?
mkl95 4y ago
To me AWS are the Apple of cloud computing. Expensive, reliable, opinionated, etc. I have been in very few situations where some AWS service was the ideal tool to solve a problem, but those times it just worked.
daenz 4y ago
>Furthermore, AWS billing is uncapped, which has significant potential for trouble. Two words: billing alarms. If you have stuff on AWS, and you don't have billing alarms for actual and predicted costs, you have nobody to blame but yourself for extra charges. EDIT>> I see they address billing alarms but claim that they only fire after you've lost the money. This is simply not true with the predictive alarms. I get the sense that this author is not using AWS correctly in general.
- deleted 4y ago
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- danial 4y ago
  Billing alarms only work if you have static usage. I had to constantly adjust their alarms and eventually gave up.
  - daenz 4y ago
    Make a billing alarm for 50% of your budget. If it fires before halfway through the month, you're burning too fast.
    - hayd 4y ago
      But if traffic is high in the beginning of the month does this mean you should be allocated more budget? How much? Such an alarm doesn't really give you any insight into where the additional costs might be, or where/whether it's worth spending engineering time optimizing! And that's if you even have a budget :)
      - daenz 4y ago
        If you don't have a budget, then that's what you should establish first. If you can't get a handle on your budget, then no set of tools and techniques is going to save you.
        4y ago
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I spent the last few years developing software on AWS. I honestly cannot imagine not using it. Once you get good at infrastructure as code (CDK), microservices, and how everything wires together, any other technical stack is just painful. I still believe that engineers are completely underestimating productivity gains in people that are good at AWS. There is just so much less BS in terms of systems working, everything clicks together, you arent stitching a million open source libraries to build a stack. Billions of dollars of effort are behind making it as seamless as possible.
- elorant 4y ago
  Would you recommend any resources/book for someone who hasn't got a clue what all the services at AWS are about?
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    I would start by understanding the infrastructure as code paradigm, built by CDK. With CDK, I would build some kind of webapp, incrementally adding more resources (lambdas, databases, etc). The true value is that you should never modify resources you provision in the console and only do it through code. Once you start developing software like this, it will be very hard to go back to the old way.
    - lambdaba 4y ago
      Where does this sit in relation with Terraform? Is Terraform not able to do everything this does? I was aware of something from AWS called CloudFormation templates or something but I heard that was too low-level and idiosyncratic, also JSON-based and not expressive enough. Sorry if this is a bit confused, just want some clarification, and thought that Terraform was the gold standard.
      - pojzon 4y ago
        Terraform is using a delarative DSL. CloudFormation is similar in that regard. Using a declarative language is both a pro and con. Pros of that solution is that you are restricted in what you can do, which often results in simplier and cleaner code. Cons are that again you are restricted in what you can do. Now about CDK is just your preferred language library to write infrastructure in imperative way. For example you write java code that deploys infrastructure. When using a real programming language you have ofcourse a lot more freedom in what you do, but ofcourse that comes at the cost of complexity. If your developers are “creative” it can be very hard to understand wth is happening in code. —- So yes many ppl consider Terraform as a golden standard (me included) but after many years of working with it, like anything in IT it has own flaws and you may want to consider other solutions for specific projects.
uuyi 4y ago
I don’t know about that. AWS makes me a hell of a lot of money selling solutions to people who don’t need it and could solve the same problem cheaper elsewhere.
zthrowaway 4y ago
If you're small enough of an operation to get by with one physical server, then yeah you probably don't need AWS. If anything, use DigitalOcean. I agree on that aspect. Anything larger than that though, the value of AWS starts to grow.
hayd 4y ago
IMO The best thing about AWS: The deprecation cycle. It's either never or some time in the distant future (and then pushed back multiple times)... mostly it's never.
120bits 4y ago
AWS billing has been the main concerns in few projects that I worked on. I took some on perm APIs and moved it to cloud(lambdas, api gateways, route53 and such) from a on prem LAMP like single server application. Not matter how much I demoed the advantages about security and high availability and scalability, it wasn't good enough. I was always asked "How much would this cost us?" and everything else comes to halt.
daenz 4y ago
The author claims that another drawback of AWS is that your AWS credentials can get "stolen by bad people." What? This is a risk to literally every online service. You must practice opsec and good design patterns if you have API credentials for anything online. Your secrets should be locked down with least privileges, encrypted at rest and in transit, and rotated periodically. AWS makes this extremely easy to do.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
These kinds of articles seem to come up on tech aggregators every so often. Someone comes up with a bunch of theoretical benefits of not using AWS along with some hand-wringing about complexity (which is relative to the person but is invoked as objective fact). They then offer alternatives. But they never interview anyone who actually subscribes to these theoretical benefits and operates at any scale. There's never a discussion on the needs of the products in mind, it's always blanket dogma that can be applied in any situation. Like any choice in technology, there's always tradeoffs. One person/team's complex is another person/team's simple. Moreover there are circumstances that definitively tip the scale in one direction or the other. If egress bandwidth is important to your product, then you're better off going with an unmetered bandwidth solution. If you want to operate as lean as possible, you're better off in a colo. But discussing tradeoffs is a lot more complicated and less satisfying than saying "AWS bad" with a bit of corporate bashing so clickbait is what we get.
- lopatin 4y ago
  Reminds me of these YouTube videos filled with bad advice for newbies. For example, "Why I never code with ELSE statements, and YOU shouldn't either". It sounds profound to a newbie, but it's all just disingenuous dogmatic click bait.
  - ehutch79 4y ago
    I know you're kidding, but there are legit videos saying you should never use If statements
    - lopatin 4y ago
      I wish I was kidding, but that sounds even worse! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzuCnivRoEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzuCnivRoEw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ougvb8mT7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ougvb8mT7k - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EumXak7TyQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EumXak7TyQ0
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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outworlder 4y ago
> "You" probably don't need AWS Who are "you" ? That answer is crucial. "You probably don't need to pay your power company" could be a similar headline. It's true, we could all deploy generators to power our homes(and handle fuel logistics etc), or go fully offgrid with solar panels and batteries. Why don't we do that? Let's see - there's the equipment cost, then there's the 'installation' and 'maintenance' costs, often performed by contractors. This often makes the return on investment not worth it. It would make even less sense if we had to constantly tinker with the power solution (or keep someone on call to do that, on our own payroll). Let's say we have an aluminum plant in the middle of a desert somewhere. It might make sense to operate a power plant tailored to our own requirements. Or pay a company to build and operate one, as it's their expertise. Somehow, these calculations look different whenever executives try to pitch their "on-prem" or "colo" solutions. I've yet to see a spreadsheet where their own staff costs are called out. Or the potential costs because someone has to rack and stack new capacity, rather than that being automatically handled. AWS is the 'power company'. They take care of stuff so I don't have to. If I'm pulling too much power, that's on me. Linode would be a company specialized in generator rentals. Some logistics taken care of, I still have to worry about a bunch of stuff. It might be what my shed in Alaska needs. Now, a discussion can be had on AWS pricing structure (cough network egress cough). I would expect to pay a premium. Sometimes they are reasonable, sometimes they aren't (Hi, NAT GW).
- usrn 4y ago
  How about: "You probably don't need to pay industrial power rates for your MVP setup."
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Plenty of companies don't factor staff costs into anything. In my first job out of university, absolutely crazy requirements for tiny things were accepted because it would just mean the project would take a few weeks longer.
glintik 4y ago
"One option is to purchase a hardware server and keep it on premises" - really? I expected something intelligent in the article, but this option looks too dumb.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  just put it under your desk!
  - glintik 4y ago
    One can seat on the server also!
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I know you're joking but a server under a desk is a fine alternative to a lot of compute-heavy background tasks where you can tolerate downtime without any user-facing effects.
    - glintik 4y ago
      No jokes buddy. Today, millions have home local storage servers like QNAP which can run many webapps or scripts.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  ...until you realize that owning hardware is the cheapest option.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Typically only at fairly large scales or if you aren't counting labor costs.
newaccount2021 4y ago
redact207 4y ago
These articles are pointless, they completely miss any nuance to you and your solution. Who are you? A hobbyist developer? A small team of 3 devs? A large company with multiple teams of devs dbas sysops? What's your use case? An occasional Cron job? A small WordPress site? A distributed HA app that manages a huge ingress with strict uptime SLAs? Where do you want to spend your effort? Happy to apt-get a few packages and call it a day? Need to create and maintain a load balanced postgres cluster with low lag and cross region replication and backups? There are a lot of considerations that go into choosing a provider. Making blanket statements like this just feel click baity.
alluro2 4y ago
I find the provided arguments a bit baffling - you would be better off without AWS because you might forget to turn off $80k of instances? How is that their responsibility or different than any other provider / service? Or, if you're using Lamda - well, you're not just accidentally developing a serverless solution, are you - you know pros and cons and have chosen to do it, knowing how it's priced and to be careful...If self-hosting is potentially a better option, I'm curious how that can be done in a simpler way, while providing all security and benefits of mentioned VPC, EKS etc... I'm not particularly fond of AWS, but I think they're pretty transparent about pricing of various services - it's linked everywhere and pretty visible, calculators are available etc...I agree about not being able to set limits, though - but how many other vendors do it? My biggest gripe is the UX of their Console and various services - I'd rate it 3/10 compared to what could be done in terms of design, displayed information and user paths / workflows.
- daenz 4y ago
  Imo it's the author's attitude for why we have so many regulations on things. Their argument is essentially "I didn't do my reading to learn the implications of doing this thing, and now it hurt me." It's why the concept of an "accredited investor" exists.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    It's also why we have a safety on firearms. I mean, it's pretty simple, if you don't want the gun to shoot, don't pull the trigger.
    - daenz 4y ago
      I think I see your point, which is that sometimes safeties/regulations are necessary to prevent harm from people that don't know what they're doing. However, I'd counter your firearm example with one of the world's most popular firearms, the Glock handgun, which only has safety mechanisms that help ensure that the firing pin strikes the primer from an intentional trigger pull. You can still not know what you're doing ("what does the trigger do?") and have an ND (negligent discharge).
TameAntelope 4y ago
AWS is more or less eliminating the cost of one to two full time devops jobs, at the cost of one quarter of one of those jobs, for my startup. All due respect, I'm not sure the author knows what they're talking about.
999900000999 4y ago
If you want to easily hire people/ get experience for yourself, just use AWS. AWS is practically an industry standard tool. Of course you might be able to find a slightly cheaper way to do things, but training people will be harder. The only time AWS doesn't make sense is when you hit the scale where it's not longer cost effective.
tonymet 4y ago
I don't think people account for the amount of additional complexity to integrate AWS services. There are three huge pitfalls of building on AWS: configuration & API complexity , artificial resource constraints like iOPS and vcpu budget, and vendor lock-in . Simple integrations, e.g. among cloudwatch , dynamoDb, s3 typically require quite a lot of boilerplate configuration for networking, IAM permissions, provisioning (e.g. in Cloudformation), and the APIs to read and write are needlessly complex . Compare the API for cloudwatch to a logfile or Dynamo to redis. If you already have unix skills, you will be infinitely more productive with a couple linode instances. AWS (and all cloud) also has "magic constraints" like iOPS & cpu budget that you suddenly slam into. Your app typically runs fine until a certain amount of traffic reaches one of these budgets and then it suddenly hangs. If you are familiar with traditional resource estimation & constraints – this is an unpleasant and unexpected surprise. When you run a small startup, these constraints often cause you to drastically increase your budget because the constraint is hit in the middle of business (e.g. upsizing a volume or DB instance to add additional IOPS at the cost of $20-50k / mo) App platforms like lambda force you to rewrite your code so that it's hard to maintain and nearly impossible to test. If you want to leverage your skills and have a predictable experience, KISS and run your services on a dedicated host.
mmaunder 4y ago
The first half of the post is like blaming the barman because you drank a bottle of Michters Celebration and are stuck with a $30K bill. It’s not hard. Just don’t buy shit that may bankrupt you. And suggesting Hetzner dedicated servers as an alternative? Why not EC2 spot instances if you’re so budget conscious? It’s just Linux (or whatever you put on them). We spent big on dedicated hardware in the early days of our biz. Sure we bought bandwidth at 95th percentile which was cheaper. But as our people became our biggest cost we quickly moved into aws and haven’t looked back. Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is the real win. If you need to push a fuckton of bandwidth with little CPU usage you should buy your own metal, colo it and buy bandwidth at 95th percentile billing. We dug up a sidewalk and leased from Zayo to do just that for a specific thing. Most other applications belong in a cloud provider like aws.
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  What people really don‘t get is that depending on where you are, 500k annual is only the payroll of 3-5 employees. You can quickly outgrow that if your on premise infrastructure grows.
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    Even worse, the total cost of an employee is often reported at 1.5x their salary, or higher. Engineer hours eat up per-compute-hour savings fast.
  - jtsiskin 4y ago
    Or in SF, that’s the cost of 1 employee. Only consider running it yourself if your compute is by far your largest cost, or if it’s a huge component of what you’re selling (for instance a cloud backup service, a video hosting service, a CDN, etc. where you’re competing with others and a lower marginal cost let’s you gain market share)
- nucleardog 4y ago
  > Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is the real win. Yep. This is the value proposition. How much of a FTE's time goes to maintaining a scalable, redundant, durable queuing system on par with SQS? I can run something like 500k messages for free, with all of the same service guarantees as someone running orders of magnitude more. If I need to run an order of magnitude more? It'll cost $3.60. If our service blows up overnight and we need another order of magnitude more? There's no pagers, no alarms, no schedule getting blown up as suddenly someone needs to figure out how to scale our queuing solution to 10x capacity... it costs us $20 now. Sure at some point when I'm passing like 6.5b messages/mo I'll make up a half a non-SV FTE salary that I could instead dedicate to maintaining a queuing system... but why? Most places I've worked were much more constrained with finding good people than paying them. If it's not our core value proposition, I'd rather outsource it and have people working in stuff that adds to the value _we_ provide. That will make us way more money than saving a few bucks on infra costs.
kringo 4y ago
Although you make some points, looks like you never owned or built an environment. At one point we had around 11 data centers, and it was a freaking nightmare to build, run and maintain them. Nothing wrong with doing it, there is a hidden cost to it. Leaving cost aside, once we migrated to AWS we could focus on our business more than the environment.
solumos 4y ago
> Is it actually good as default choice to host a software system of any scale? I think so - or its competitor, Google Cloud Platform. Anything beyond a simple software system that you might deploy on heroku up to the complexity of something that requires on-prem infra (e.g. Netflix's content servers, although they're also a big AWS customer) would be a good candidate for AWS.
jonaldomo 4y ago
I use Digital Ocean, GCP and AWS. I think each has a little bit of a different use case and as a dev we should be up for each of them. I can run a k8s cluster on digital ocean for like $20-30 a month and spin up multiple services for experiments. However, there is not a great S3, Cloudfront equivalent on DO so I need AWS. For ML/AI stuff, you need Google. There are probably a ton of these little variations.
- mst 4y ago
  Where do you find https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces falls down as something to handle the S3 role? (I've been pondering using it for file storage for apps that I want to design to be relatively easily shiftable to AWS later if they hit a scale such that they need it, so I'm genuinely curious what you think)
carlsborg 4y ago
Author probably never worked in a corporate / enterprise IT setup at scale. AWS is a b2b product and the best one in its category.
ibejoeb 4y ago
The tide has totally changed. I saved a massive amount of money moving from colo to aws ~10 years ago. I think there's a mentality about it. When you're somewhat resource-constrained just due to the nature of having to get hardware, it makes you do some upfront design. This magic capacity lets teams punt on the problem. Like, "We saved a day not setting up nginx, and now we pay for every image we deliver," is not the same as "we saved $100,000 this quarter because we don't need a full-time sysop team." It's worth taking a beat to consider things at these margins.
scardycat 4y ago
> better off without it Umm ... No. This blanket statement is certifiably false that it only applies to a company running maybe 1 or 10, or at most 100 physical machines. My work needs across the world presence, networking, fault tolerance and a boat load of storage and compute. I cant shift all those to on-prem or a cheaper, alternative provider.
kareemsabri 4y ago
I, a single developer, have an automatic CI/CD pipeline running from Github to ECR/ECS that deploys multiple high-availability services to serverless Fargate tasks with no downtime, as well as numerous executables running on cron jobs that pull the latest container and each run their own command on a separate instance of a serverless task. These are all automatically torn down when they complete, and I'm billed for the seconds or minutes they take to execute. Total bill is about $50/month. I set this all up with Terraform, and never touch the AWS UI. The code is 99.9% ignorant of the fact that it runs on AWS. I used to self host, and then used Media Temple, and then used DigitalOcean. Maybe I'm ignorant of the latest offerings from those providers but creating, let alone maintaining, something like the above without a cloud provider like AWS or GCP would be a significant overhead. The downsides the author points out are unpredictable costs (this is a risk, but manageable) and vendor lock in (this is low if you know how to code your services using abstract interfaces that hide the underlying vendors).
- deleted 4y ago
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oneplane 4y ago
As this seems to be a repeating class of posts, the reality generally boils down to the same thing every time: - use requirements to find out what you need, not buzzwords - comparing services with significantly different properties while ignoring those properties isn't helpful - playing datacenter in a virtual environment isn't the same as cloud architecture If you just need a virtual machine to do some stuff and loss of availability, reduced durability and lack of redundancy doesn't really matter, then you can get that pretty much anywhere. The same goes for DNS, object storage and SQL-based storage (ignoring database features). As soon as your needs for availability, durability and redundancy increase, your choices of service providers decrease because not every service provider provides the same servers at the same level. Integration of services is a whole different game as well and equally has fewer providers as the level of integration increases. Also: don't conflate integration with lock-in.
taylodl 4y ago
My experience is the exact opposite. Keep in mind I work for a Fortune 200 company and we recently spent $120 million expanding our data center capacity just five years ago - and it's now running out of power capacity (it has 1 MW power service). Also, our lead times for getting new servers is now months. Why? Because all the manufacturers are prioritizing deliveries for the cloud providers. That's a general problem we have. Now for a specific project I have, I took it from on-premise to AWS and am saving over 75% than what it was to host on-premise. The majority of the savings was due to software licensing costs. It's expensive to license software on-premise. The architecture of AWS and using their services makes it so those licenses aren't required. Moreover, we've been able to add features to our product offerings that we realistically would not have been able to add while keeping the hosting on-premise. All while saving 75% over what we were paying previously. My experience has been AWS is faster, cheaper, and better. The business loves it and we're getting more projects. They can't believe how quickly we can deploy new solutions nor how cheap it is for on-going operational costs. Bottom line - I wouldn't recommend hosting on-premise. AWS isn't the only cloud provider in town, but I would use them over doing anything on-premise.
- sodality2 4y ago
  > My experience is the exact opposite. Keep in mind I work for a Fortune 200 company I bet this is exactly why you find it helpful; rapid scaling is great for when you actually need to scale. I think the post is about the people who don't need to rapidly scale (most customers probably? certainly more common than a F200 company)
rubyfan 4y ago
AWS is the new mainframe. In a few years there will be a booming consulting business town up around making legacy updates, modernizing or getting off AWS. Goes for GCP and Azure.
HNHatesUsers 4y ago
jwsteigerwalt 4y ago
Unfortunately there is a huge amount of data that you have to learn to confidently understand and make decisions about billing.
phendrenad2 4y ago
I agree with the second half (devops complexity) but not the first half (surprise billing). And I only agree with the first part if you're running a small-to-medium scale operation (I.E. you don't have 2+ devops engineers). It's not that hard to avoid the infamous "AWS surprise". Just pay attention to the costs of things, and check the billing page regularly until you're comfortable with how your infrastructure is affecting the cost. Devops complexity is a trickier topic. If you're running a startup or a small tech team, AWS can quickly mire you in delays as you become the AWS expert (or delegate one of your engineers to become the AWS expert). It's a lot easier to just use DigitalOcean or something. That said, AWS/GCP/Azure scale in a way that other providers don't. Not in terms of technical scalability, but in terms of organizational scalability. Once you hire 2 or more devops engineers, it's likely that their expertise in AWS will pay dividends, and hamstringing them with something that isn't industry-standard is going to frustrate them and you.
hamandcheese 4y ago
I learned recently that you can rent a 42U cabinet from Hurricane Electric for $400 a month. Granted, that _only_ includes 1Gbps internet, and you have to provide your own servers, but still. I was surprised at how cheap this was. You could probably fit enough compute in there to power most businesses. https://he.net/colocation.html https://he.net/colocation.html
sam0x17 4y ago
Right now I'm very in bed with AWS lambda, but I'm working towards the point where all my tooling can also deploy to something like firecracker VMs so I can have the peace of mind of knowing I could roll my own cloud with the same tooling
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
>A HN user reports a story of someone who burned 80 grand overnight by provisioning bunch of EC2 instances for testing and leaving them on. So, ~$5000 per hour? Either a company cares about $5000 per hour, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then it doesn't care about $120,000 per day either. If it does, then WTF were they doing running a cluster at $5,000 per hour? And by definition, anyone who wants to launch $5000/hour or EC2 instances, isn't able to rock up to a COLO or IT department and say "I need 1,000 96 core Intel boxes for a couple of hours." Literally any other provider that can give you that service will require that you sign up to pay for $5,000 per hour, for how ever long you want to run them. There's nobody running a service that you go inside and ask for $20 on pump number 3. You're giving them a credit card, and then you're asking for an instance limit increase. The author thinks this is a damning indictment of AWS when a small amount of analysis shows the killer feature underneath. It's what people want: to spend cash, immediately, on compute. So when I was working at a startup, and I asked our COO to request an instance increase (to 250 instances, backed by his credit card) I made damned sure that I didn't "leave the cluster on". And that cluster gave us 2,000 cores! We couldn't have afforded to buy 250 servers! Finally, when this happened to a colleague at a different company, we reached out to AWS and they refunded the money. Because if a company allows a developer to launch a $5,000/hour cluster, then that company is already spending a lot on AWS, and will certainly spend a lot more in the future.
maerF0x0 4y ago
Ok, if you simply use EC2, S3, maybe a single RDS and/or Elasticache. Ok maybe I agree there. But the real magic comes when you learn to architect entire applications out of their pre-built patterns. random examples OTOH : fan out messages to a number of lambdas when a SNS topic receives a message . processing + backing up a kinesis event stream w/ lambdas + s3. There are many many cross product integrations that make development about as simple as connecting the two ends of a (data) hose. In these sorts of cases you can trade $$ for velocity pretty easily. Yes it will cost you a bit more to operate, but far less than the humans you save. Also on the argument about unexpected traffic leading to unexpected bills. AWS is most applicable for businesses that have a strong correlation between traffic and revenue. If you make a dollar per million, then it's fine when you wake up to elasticity unexpectedly handling a trillion. Not so much if you don't have an actual business.
- jopsen 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings too... SNS/SQS are awesome. But if you end up with micro services, your tests won't cover the integration of the entire system.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    Layers of testing. You're right that unit tests wont cover the entire system though. Typically the most important customer features will also have other suites that test end to end (API Call goes in, eventually S3 file is generated or something like that) .
segmondy 4y ago
You can make this argument about many things. You probably don't need that SUV/truck and are better off without it. You probably don't need that luxury car and are better off without it. Then go argue about the headache and the price and when you're done, your audience will just go back to their favorite toys. AWS it is. I will never advice anyone against AWS unless they are broke and it will bleed them dry. If you can afford it and have the skillset to run it, go for it. If you also have the skillset to go cheaper, go for it.
mikl 4y ago
Depends a lot on your situation. AWS is a way to trade money for engineering time. Sure, you can run your own OpenSearch/PostgreSQL/Kubernetes cluster “cheaper” than their managed offerings. But that’s the keyword: _managed_. If you use their (or other cloud provider’s) managed services, you can just turn it on and expect it to be there, available and running all the time (or at least to however many 9s the promise). You don’t have to worry about configuration, management and maintenance on the whole infrastructure, software upgrades, backups, etc. They take a bunch of worries off the table. Sure, they don’t do it for free. But if you (like many companies these days) lack manpower in the engineering department, using managed services can be a way to use the people you have more efficiently. So yeah, approach AWS with caution, be sure you don’t set things up in ways where your costs could suddenly explode. Do the math vs. DYI infrastructure, but don’t forget that your own engineering time isn’t free.
mulmboy 4y ago
Does anyone know an adblock rule to filter out HN articles telling me to buy an on-prem server to replace AWS? Seriously though, why are valueless bait articles like this so popular here? Is it collective satire that I'm missing? Is "you don't need AWS" a trendy counterculture thing? I could swear I've clicked through to equivalent articles at least five times from HN.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  May have multiple reasons: 1) Some people just like the infra work, so they presume everyone likes as well. AWS eliminates/simplifies a good portion of it. 2) Some feel a sense of superiority saying they can pull off an entire infra on Hertzner. They know many younger engineers can't, since they started with AWS in mind. 3) AWS has a terrible reputation as an employer. Perhaps some these anti-AWS blog writers might have worked there, know someone who did, or heard one of the AWS PIP horror stories...
  - mulmboy 4y ago
    Interesting take, > Some people just like the infra work I think AWS improves infra work. Using CDK is a joy - primarily because it's clean, simple, and reproducible once you have stuff up and running. But the process of getting stuff up and running is its own kind of drug, it's a serious puzzle (unless you really really know what you're doing) which I find really rewarding to solve. I'm a pig in mud with CDK. Compare that with traditional infra work and I immediately start to worry about how to make sure that everything is provisioned correctly, that other people on the team aren't messing things up, how I'm going to implement zero-trust type auth without something akin to IAM, how I'm going to implement monitoring without the monitoring system becoming its own beast....
    - rmbyrro 4y ago
      Absolutely. I'm referring to the traditional infra work. I think these people should seek a job at AWS, Azure, GCP.
  - randomtwiddler 4y ago
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I can’t say I fully agree with the article but I do think that someone needs to close the gap between the hyperscalers (AWS firmly in the lead in that group) and smaller infrastructure providers like OVH, Hetzner, etc. I think you could restate this as “smaller providers need to step up their game” as well. As far as closing the gap, I’m working on nimbus web services [0] and that’s exactly what it’s for — I want to build the middle layer (hopefully a bit less chaotic than AWS’s) so that people on smaller clouds have access to some scale/abstractions. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
DarthNebo 4y ago
GCP's Cloud Run is a better & cheaper alternative to Lambda though
amai 4y ago
Also AWS violates GDPR, because as an american company it must obey the CLOUD act. But most EU companies simply ignore this issue hoping that nobody will notice. But it is just a matter of time until this will explode in several scandals.

324 points by rl1987 4y ago

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It's like running Oracle RDBMS. You probably don't need it. But if you do need it, you cannot hope to build it yourself. You need to know what you need.

foobiekr 4y ago
Almost everyone who really does need it (and is not just ridiculously inefficient) eventually moves off of AWS, including most large startups. Revenue makes it possible to hire and build whatever you want.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  extremely incorrect. The benefits of cloud grow as the company grows. I've been in a few mega companies that from colo infra to cloud infra, it was a huge cost savings and helped enormously with product development speed.
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    I've never seen anyone save money by moving to AWS unless things were already a complete clusterfuck catastrophe.
    - MattGaiser 4y ago
      In my first job, it meant we got a dev back moving to Digital Ocean as they were no longer dealing with servers and infrastructure.
      - shiftpgdn 4y ago
        Digital Ocean is a radically less complex offering than AWS.
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      My medium-sized company saved a considerable amount of money by moving to Azure from a managed dedicated server company. I wouldn't call the previous situation "a complete clusterfuck catastrophe" by any means, although I would say we were paying too much. Our Azure bill is just starting to approach what we were paying five years ago to the previous company, with far more things going on now plus all of the flexibility that The Cloud™ has to offer.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Netflix uses AWS heavily and they are probably one of the heaviest users in the world of compute. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/
- AggroVanGogh 4y ago
  This might be the most ludicrous thing I've ever read on HN. Do you have any actual examples to back up the statement?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Not GP, but Dropbox moved off AWS as they grew: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse-migration-cloud-own-data-centers-five-years https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/manage/dropbox-s-reverse...
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Dropbox makes sense. They're an egress-heavy business. Other than media companies (Netflix, Disney Plus, et al.) there aren't that many egress-heavy businesses, so AWS continues to make sense.
    - AggroVanGogh 4y ago
      Dropbox is not a relevant example to the original comment IMO - they clearly need cheap storage above all else; it should be no surprise that someone can self-host something so single-minded as a storage application without all the cloud provider baubles.
    - tempnow987 4y ago
      Is this true? I thought dropbox moved their 30PB+ data lake ONTO aws to get off of Hadoop or something because trying to do this on-prem, even with tons of tech talent and money, was not working. They complained about onprem requiring 3 YEAR forecasts for capacity planning given their scale. Here is what they said in 2020 for benefits of AWS: --------------------- Hosts 40 PB of analytics data and supports 1 PB of data growth a month Optimizes costs by moving cold data to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive Uses Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for 15–50% of compute capacity Doubles compute footprint using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Enables the testing of new technologies without damaging data or affecting users Improved performance by six times for some job types Deletes hundreds of files in a few seconds compared to 30–40 minutes Runs more than 100,000 analytics jobs and tens of thousands of one-time jobs daily --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x-XGJQwk2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x-XGJQwk2M Maybe this has changed since 2020
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Worst take ever
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  That's definitely not what we did at $TRENDCORP. We still use AWS all the time. The cost of netops dwarfs whatever discounts we'd get on colo costs. We're not an egress heavy business so we aren't eating bandwidth costs either. Do you have examples demonstrating your point?
- lostcolony 4y ago
  ...some examples please? I literally can't even think of one, but can absolutely think of numerous companies that have moved to AWS (and other public clouds) and remained there.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
charcircuit 4y ago
Does anyone actually need it when software like MySQL and PostgreSQL exist? Mature RDBMS already exists that you don't have to build yourself. Does Oracle have something special?
- blowski 4y ago
  * Extremely granular permissions * integration with the rest of the Oracle suite. * compatibility with the Oracle database you’ve tightly coupled yourselves to over the last 30 years * Various incentives for purchasing influencers
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    Or, said another way: nobody is choosing Oracle when starting from scratch.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    Someone you can call 24/7 and get engineers working on your problem 24/7 until it's fixed.
- mvanbaak 4y ago
  They are probably talking about building the cluster yourself, not the RDBMS itself. aws (and most other cloud providers) have this cluster management handled for you.
icedchai 4y ago
Most companies I know that were using Oracle didn't actually need it, they just didn't trust open source yet. One actually paid me to move their stuff from Postgres to Oracle "because we need enterprise support." This was in the early to mid 2000's.

me_me_mu_mu 4y ago

I hope I can scale my company to the point we need to use aws or equivalent offerings. Currently just using VMs, managed database, and services like firebase.

mypalmike 4y ago
Uh, it sounds like you are using an equivalent offering...?

devmor 4y ago

AWS replaces an entire ops team for me. It's invaluable. I would prefer not to need it, but for large complex applications with a lot of parts, it's a lifesaver.

manquer 4y ago
I don’t think this post is addressed for your usecase. He is not saying enterprises with ability or need to have large ops teams don’t need AWS. He is saying the average indie developer does not need it. The post closes with a 100$ example, for very early stage startups or small (most are) apps likely don’t need AWS is the premise .
ecshafer 4y ago
AWS doesn't really remove an ops team, it should change what ops are doing. Maybe on a very small scale it replaces the ops team that would otherwise run hardware and do updates. But once you scale up a good SRE/Devops/Production engineering team that can run the infra for the company on top of your cloud of choice is a game changer, since networking, database, system issues still show up.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  So instead of an ops bill now there's a cloud bill plus an ops bill! :P
- devmor 4y ago
  It absolutely replaces an ops team for me. Well, to be fair I end up doing a small amount of ops by monitoring things but for the most part, everything I used to have to manage for scaling and deployment is handled automatically by some config files in a .aws folder in my repos now.
outworlder 4y ago
> AWS replaces an entire ops team for me. It's invaluable. For me, it's more like they have an automated ops team that my systems can interact with.
4y ago

mountainriver 4y ago

I agree that there is weird cult-like thinking around AWS, when the reality is their base services like EC2 or s3 are pretty great but most of them are just mediocre. Yet, people will insist on using services just because AWS built it, mostly just brand mentality. Running things on prem or on something like Hetzner cloud can be much simpler in some cases, and with Kubernetes now you can provide a great platform anywhere. It just isn't the solution for every use case.

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ramraj07 4y ago
Agreed that you should be careful about all the auxiliary aws services but can you actually show real proof that on perm is cheaper as a whole while doing everything fast? For sure you pay a premium for ec2, but at the least you get good reliability. Your data won’t disappear off S3 unless you delete it. What level of rigor do you need to put in your on premise game to promise the same? Even for my side projects I nowadays just float an Elastic beanstalk flask app and a small rds instance. It costs 15 a month but I’m fine with that cost for the time it saves me. If you want to be truly cost conscious stick to lightsail. It’s a steal all things considered.
- ericd 4y ago
  I think even on-prem should generally use S3 for the scalable storage parts like user image hosting, scaling storage sucks. But for app, database, or compute that’s anything but a one-off? Dedicated servers destroy in terms of cost/performance. And bandwidth on AWS is an incredible ripoff, so if you’re doing any heavyweight data hosting, you should absolutely bust out the calculator. OVH boxes with dedicated 1 gbit lines are just absurdly more cost efficient there.
  - mobilio 4y ago
    Just checking bill from customer. EC2 - $150 production plus few support instances = $500 Egress traffic - $4500

karmasimida 4y ago

You (as an indie dev developer) probably don't need AWS, would be a more accurate and less clickbaity title

paxys 4y ago

Is it that time of the week again?

dataminded 4y ago

Pricing isn't an actual concern when you are just getting started. Why would you be worried about vendor-lock if you haven't built anything? If you run your entire solution on a server that you manage, you are also on the hook for backups, recovery, and every other problem that AWS already solved.

tppiotrowski 4y ago
Shouldn't pricing be the main concern? If you're just getting started I assume you have $0 revenue to spend. Edit: unless you mean that you'll be within AWS free-tier for a while.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  You’re burning way, way more in labor (and/or opportunity cost of your own time) than you are likely to spend on your monthly cloud (or co-lo) bill. Anything that helps get you to MVP faster is a huge cost-saving.
  - tppiotrowski 4y ago
    You're right. My personal successes came from pecking away a few hours per week, keeping costs low (or free) and growing slowly over multiple years without the need to monetize early.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
neurotrace 4y ago
> Why would you be worried about vendor-lock if you haven't built anything? When else would you worry about lock-in? The early stages of a project involve setting up the foundation. If you build your foundation on vendor-specific tech, you've just locked yourself in or signed yourself up for a very painful transition in the future
- xboxnolifes 4y ago

electroly 4y ago

The given alternatives include Linode/DO; I would suggest Amazon Lightsail instead. Then you have a clear on-ramp to AWS if you should grow to need it, and the pricing is on par with Linode/DO. The only real differentiator is egress cost once you exceed your included monthly allotment. That, and AWS has a massive scale that is useful even if you have a single server. When I was on Linode, they got DDoSed and the whole service was inaccessible, even though the DDoS wasn't targeted at my server. They didn't have enough capacity at their POPs to grunt through the DDoS. You can't do that to AWS.

asim 4y ago

I think I've beaten this dead horse for years, written multiple articles and even run a service called M3O (m3o.com) attempting to replace it for new use cases. Ultimately there's a generation of developers that have found AWS invaluable. There will be many MANY more companies who will adopt AWS because it's synonymous with cloud and the most mature solution. Yet for all it's worth I still don't think it's the end game. Throughout history we've seen industries and technologies evolve. I feel like AWS is the PalmPilot of this era and we're going to see a very disruptive evolution of Cloud soon.

imwillofficial 4y ago
Any ideas on what would drive that or what that looks like?
- hatware 4y ago
  I'm not the person you responded to, but I think you're going to see more folks self hosting things and owning everything themselves, and enjoying the cost savings. AWS has made great strides in the last decade, but so has the open source community.
- asim 4y ago
  I think we're essentially lacking a cloud operating system. Kubernetes isn't an end solution. There's no development model, there's no consumption model. If you look at every platform in existence, there some kind of OS that defines that experience and makes it readily available to developers and end users. I think cloud services are in their infancy and we'll see the emergence of a fully vertical solution including an OS that standardises the entire model as others did. What it looks like? Well I can only speculate and try out ideas myself but effectively it's going to have direct appeal to end consumers, not just devs and execs.
  - jmt_ 4y ago
    What about Amazon Linux?

mkl95 4y ago

To me AWS are the Apple of cloud computing. Expensive, reliable, opinionated, etc. I have been in very few situations where some AWS service was the ideal tool to solve a problem, but those times it just worked.

daenz 4y ago

>Furthermore, AWS billing is uncapped, which has significant potential for trouble. Two words: billing alarms. If you have stuff on AWS, and you don't have billing alarms for actual and predicted costs, you have nobody to blame but yourself for extra charges. EDIT>> I see they address billing alarms but claim that they only fire after you've lost the money. This is simply not true with the predictive alarms. I get the sense that this author is not using AWS correctly in general.

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danial 4y ago
Billing alarms only work if you have static usage. I had to constantly adjust their alarms and eventually gave up.
- daenz 4y ago
  Make a billing alarm for 50% of your budget. If it fires before halfway through the month, you're burning too fast.
  - hayd 4y ago
    But if traffic is high in the beginning of the month does this mean you should be allocated more budget? How much? Such an alarm doesn't really give you any insight into where the additional costs might be, or where/whether it's worth spending engineering time optimizing! And that's if you even have a budget :)
    - daenz 4y ago
      If you don't have a budget, then that's what you should establish first. If you can't get a handle on your budget, then no set of tools and techniques is going to save you.
      - 4y ago

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

I spent the last few years developing software on AWS. I honestly cannot imagine not using it. Once you get good at infrastructure as code (CDK), microservices, and how everything wires together, any other technical stack is just painful. I still believe that engineers are completely underestimating productivity gains in people that are good at AWS. There is just so much less BS in terms of systems working, everything clicks together, you arent stitching a million open source libraries to build a stack. Billions of dollars of effort are behind making it as seamless as possible.

elorant 4y ago
Would you recommend any resources/book for someone who hasn't got a clue what all the services at AWS are about?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I would start by understanding the infrastructure as code paradigm, built by CDK. With CDK, I would build some kind of webapp, incrementally adding more resources (lambdas, databases, etc). The true value is that you should never modify resources you provision in the console and only do it through code. Once you start developing software like this, it will be very hard to go back to the old way.
  - lambdaba 4y ago
    Where does this sit in relation with Terraform? Is Terraform not able to do everything this does? I was aware of something from AWS called CloudFormation templates or something but I heard that was too low-level and idiosyncratic, also JSON-based and not expressive enough. Sorry if this is a bit confused, just want some clarification, and thought that Terraform was the gold standard.
    - pojzon 4y ago
      Terraform is using a delarative DSL. CloudFormation is similar in that regard. Using a declarative language is both a pro and con. Pros of that solution is that you are restricted in what you can do, which often results in simplier and cleaner code. Cons are that again you are restricted in what you can do. Now about CDK is just your preferred language library to write infrastructure in imperative way. For example you write java code that deploys infrastructure. When using a real programming language you have ofcourse a lot more freedom in what you do, but ofcourse that comes at the cost of complexity. If your developers are “creative” it can be very hard to understand wth is happening in code. —- So yes many ppl consider Terraform as a golden standard (me included) but after many years of working with it, like anything in IT it has own flaws and you may want to consider other solutions for specific projects.

uuyi 4y ago

I don’t know about that. AWS makes me a hell of a lot of money selling solutions to people who don’t need it and could solve the same problem cheaper elsewhere.

zthrowaway 4y ago

If you're small enough of an operation to get by with one physical server, then yeah you probably don't need AWS. If anything, use DigitalOcean. I agree on that aspect. Anything larger than that though, the value of AWS starts to grow.

hayd 4y ago

IMO The best thing about AWS: The deprecation cycle. It's either never or some time in the distant future (and then pushed back multiple times)... mostly it's never.

120bits 4y ago

AWS billing has been the main concerns in few projects that I worked on. I took some on perm APIs and moved it to cloud(lambdas, api gateways, route53 and such) from a on prem LAMP like single server application. Not matter how much I demoed the advantages about security and high availability and scalability, it wasn't good enough. I was always asked "How much would this cost us?" and everything else comes to halt.

daenz 4y ago

The author claims that another drawback of AWS is that your AWS credentials can get "stolen by bad people." What? This is a risk to literally every online service. You must practice opsec and good design patterns if you have API credentials for anything online. Your secrets should be locked down with least privileges, encrypted at rest and in transit, and rotated periodically. AWS makes this extremely easy to do.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

These kinds of articles seem to come up on tech aggregators every so often. Someone comes up with a bunch of theoretical benefits of not using AWS along with some hand-wringing about complexity (which is relative to the person but is invoked as objective fact). They then offer alternatives. But they never interview anyone who actually subscribes to these theoretical benefits and operates at any scale. There's never a discussion on the needs of the products in mind, it's always blanket dogma that can be applied in any situation. Like any choice in technology, there's always tradeoffs. One person/team's complex is another person/team's simple. Moreover there are circumstances that definitively tip the scale in one direction or the other. If egress bandwidth is important to your product, then you're better off going with an unmetered bandwidth solution. If you want to operate as lean as possible, you're better off in a colo. But discussing tradeoffs is a lot more complicated and less satisfying than saying "AWS bad" with a bit of corporate bashing so clickbait is what we get.

lopatin 4y ago
Reminds me of these YouTube videos filled with bad advice for newbies. For example, "Why I never code with ELSE statements, and YOU shouldn't either". It sounds profound to a newbie, but it's all just disingenuous dogmatic click bait.
- ehutch79 4y ago
  I know you're kidding, but there are legit videos saying you should never use If statements
  - lopatin 4y ago
    I wish I was kidding, but that sounds even worse! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzuCnivRoEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzuCnivRoEw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ougvb8mT7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ougvb8mT7k - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EumXak7TyQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EumXak7TyQ0
    - 4y ago

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outworlder 4y ago

> "You" probably don't need AWS Who are "you" ? That answer is crucial. "You probably don't need to pay your power company" could be a similar headline. It's true, we could all deploy generators to power our homes(and handle fuel logistics etc), or go fully offgrid with solar panels and batteries. Why don't we do that? Let's see - there's the equipment cost, then there's the 'installation' and 'maintenance' costs, often performed by contractors. This often makes the return on investment not worth it. It would make even less sense if we had to constantly tinker with the power solution (or keep someone on call to do that, on our own payroll). Let's say we have an aluminum plant in the middle of a desert somewhere. It might make sense to operate a power plant tailored to our own requirements. Or pay a company to build and operate one, as it's their expertise. Somehow, these calculations look different whenever executives try to pitch their "on-prem" or "colo" solutions. I've yet to see a spreadsheet where their own staff costs are called out. Or the potential costs because someone has to rack and stack new capacity, rather than that being automatically handled. AWS is the 'power company'. They take care of stuff so I don't have to. If I'm pulling too much power, that's on me. Linode would be a company specialized in generator rentals. Some logistics taken care of, I still have to worry about a bunch of stuff. It might be what my shed in Alaska needs. Now, a discussion can be had on AWS pricing structure (cough network egress cough). I would expect to pay a premium. Sometimes they are reasonable, sometimes they aren't (Hi, NAT GW).

usrn 4y ago
How about: "You probably don't need to pay industrial power rates for your MVP setup."
MattGaiser 4y ago
Plenty of companies don't factor staff costs into anything. In my first job out of university, absolutely crazy requirements for tiny things were accepted because it would just mean the project would take a few weeks longer.

glintik 4y ago

"One option is to purchase a hardware server and keep it on premises" - really? I expected something intelligent in the article, but this option looks too dumb.

jrochkind1 4y ago
just put it under your desk!
- glintik 4y ago
  One can seat on the server also!
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I know you're joking but a server under a desk is a fine alternative to a lot of compute-heavy background tasks where you can tolerate downtime without any user-facing effects.
  - glintik 4y ago
    No jokes buddy. Today, millions have home local storage servers like QNAP which can run many webapps or scripts.
goodpoint 4y ago
...until you realize that owning hardware is the cheapest option.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  Typically only at fairly large scales or if you aren't counting labor costs.

newaccount2021 4y ago

redact207 4y ago

These articles are pointless, they completely miss any nuance to you and your solution. Who are you? A hobbyist developer? A small team of 3 devs? A large company with multiple teams of devs dbas sysops? What's your use case? An occasional Cron job? A small WordPress site? A distributed HA app that manages a huge ingress with strict uptime SLAs? Where do you want to spend your effort? Happy to apt-get a few packages and call it a day? Need to create and maintain a load balanced postgres cluster with low lag and cross region replication and backups? There are a lot of considerations that go into choosing a provider. Making blanket statements like this just feel click baity.

alluro2 4y ago

I find the provided arguments a bit baffling - you would be better off without AWS because you might forget to turn off $80k of instances? How is that their responsibility or different than any other provider / service? Or, if you're using Lamda - well, you're not just accidentally developing a serverless solution, are you - you know pros and cons and have chosen to do it, knowing how it's priced and to be careful...If self-hosting is potentially a better option, I'm curious how that can be done in a simpler way, while providing all security and benefits of mentioned VPC, EKS etc... I'm not particularly fond of AWS, but I think they're pretty transparent about pricing of various services - it's linked everywhere and pretty visible, calculators are available etc...I agree about not being able to set limits, though - but how many other vendors do it? My biggest gripe is the UX of their Console and various services - I'd rate it 3/10 compared to what could be done in terms of design, displayed information and user paths / workflows.

daenz 4y ago
Imo it's the author's attitude for why we have so many regulations on things. Their argument is essentially "I didn't do my reading to learn the implications of doing this thing, and now it hurt me." It's why the concept of an "accredited investor" exists.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  It's also why we have a safety on firearms. I mean, it's pretty simple, if you don't want the gun to shoot, don't pull the trigger.
  - daenz 4y ago
    I think I see your point, which is that sometimes safeties/regulations are necessary to prevent harm from people that don't know what they're doing. However, I'd counter your firearm example with one of the world's most popular firearms, the Glock handgun, which only has safety mechanisms that help ensure that the firing pin strikes the primer from an intentional trigger pull. You can still not know what you're doing ("what does the trigger do?") and have an ND (negligent discharge).

TameAntelope 4y ago

AWS is more or less eliminating the cost of one to two full time devops jobs, at the cost of one quarter of one of those jobs, for my startup. All due respect, I'm not sure the author knows what they're talking about.

999900000999 4y ago

If you want to easily hire people/ get experience for yourself, just use AWS. AWS is practically an industry standard tool. Of course you might be able to find a slightly cheaper way to do things, but training people will be harder. The only time AWS doesn't make sense is when you hit the scale where it's not longer cost effective.

tonymet 4y ago

I don't think people account for the amount of additional complexity to integrate AWS services. There are three huge pitfalls of building on AWS: configuration & API complexity , artificial resource constraints like iOPS and vcpu budget, and vendor lock-in . Simple integrations, e.g. among cloudwatch , dynamoDb, s3 typically require quite a lot of boilerplate configuration for networking, IAM permissions, provisioning (e.g. in Cloudformation), and the APIs to read and write are needlessly complex . Compare the API for cloudwatch to a logfile or Dynamo to redis. If you already have unix skills, you will be infinitely more productive with a couple linode instances. AWS (and all cloud) also has "magic constraints" like iOPS & cpu budget that you suddenly slam into. Your app typically runs fine until a certain amount of traffic reaches one of these budgets and then it suddenly hangs. If you are familiar with traditional resource estimation & constraints – this is an unpleasant and unexpected surprise. When you run a small startup, these constraints often cause you to drastically increase your budget because the constraint is hit in the middle of business (e.g. upsizing a volume or DB instance to add additional IOPS at the cost of $20-50k / mo) App platforms like lambda force you to rewrite your code so that it's hard to maintain and nearly impossible to test. If you want to leverage your skills and have a predictable experience, KISS and run your services on a dedicated host.

mmaunder 4y ago

The first half of the post is like blaming the barman because you drank a bottle of Michters Celebration and are stuck with a $30K bill. It’s not hard. Just don’t buy shit that may bankrupt you. And suggesting Hetzner dedicated servers as an alternative? Why not EC2 spot instances if you’re so budget conscious? It’s just Linux (or whatever you put on them). We spent big on dedicated hardware in the early days of our biz. Sure we bought bandwidth at 95th percentile which was cheaper. But as our people became our biggest cost we quickly moved into aws and haven’t looked back. Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is the real win. If you need to push a fuckton of bandwidth with little CPU usage you should buy your own metal, colo it and buy bandwidth at 95th percentile billing. We dug up a sidewalk and leased from Zayo to do just that for a specific thing. Most other applications belong in a cloud provider like aws.

selfmodruntime 4y ago
What people really don‘t get is that depending on where you are, 500k annual is only the payroll of 3-5 employees. You can quickly outgrow that if your on premise infrastructure grows.
- spiffytech 4y ago
  Even worse, the total cost of an employee is often reported at 1.5x their salary, or higher. Engineer hours eat up per-compute-hour savings fast.
- jtsiskin 4y ago
  Or in SF, that’s the cost of 1 employee. Only consider running it yourself if your compute is by far your largest cost, or if it’s a huge component of what you’re selling (for instance a cloud backup service, a video hosting service, a CDN, etc. where you’re competing with others and a lower marginal cost let’s you gain market share)
nucleardog 4y ago
> Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is the real win. Yep. This is the value proposition. How much of a FTE's time goes to maintaining a scalable, redundant, durable queuing system on par with SQS? I can run something like 500k messages for free, with all of the same service guarantees as someone running orders of magnitude more. If I need to run an order of magnitude more? It'll cost $3.60. If our service blows up overnight and we need another order of magnitude more? There's no pagers, no alarms, no schedule getting blown up as suddenly someone needs to figure out how to scale our queuing solution to 10x capacity... it costs us $20 now. Sure at some point when I'm passing like 6.5b messages/mo I'll make up a half a non-SV FTE salary that I could instead dedicate to maintaining a queuing system... but why? Most places I've worked were much more constrained with finding good people than paying them. If it's not our core value proposition, I'd rather outsource it and have people working in stuff that adds to the value _we_ provide. That will make us way more money than saving a few bucks on infra costs.

kringo 4y ago

Although you make some points, looks like you never owned or built an environment. At one point we had around 11 data centers, and it was a freaking nightmare to build, run and maintain them. Nothing wrong with doing it, there is a hidden cost to it. Leaving cost aside, once we migrated to AWS we could focus on our business more than the environment.

solumos 4y ago

> Is it actually good as default choice to host a software system of any scale? I think so - or its competitor, Google Cloud Platform. Anything beyond a simple software system that you might deploy on heroku up to the complexity of something that requires on-prem infra (e.g. Netflix's content servers, although they're also a big AWS customer) would be a good candidate for AWS.

jonaldomo 4y ago

I use Digital Ocean, GCP and AWS. I think each has a little bit of a different use case and as a dev we should be up for each of them. I can run a k8s cluster on digital ocean for like $20-30 a month and spin up multiple services for experiments. However, there is not a great S3, Cloudfront equivalent on DO so I need AWS. For ML/AI stuff, you need Google. There are probably a ton of these little variations.

mst 4y ago
Where do you find https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces falls down as something to handle the S3 role? (I've been pondering using it for file storage for apps that I want to design to be relatively easily shiftable to AWS later if they hit a scale such that they need it, so I'm genuinely curious what you think)

carlsborg 4y ago

Author probably never worked in a corporate / enterprise IT setup at scale. AWS is a b2b product and the best one in its category.

ibejoeb 4y ago

The tide has totally changed. I saved a massive amount of money moving from colo to aws ~10 years ago. I think there's a mentality about it. When you're somewhat resource-constrained just due to the nature of having to get hardware, it makes you do some upfront design. This magic capacity lets teams punt on the problem. Like, "We saved a day not setting up nginx, and now we pay for every image we deliver," is not the same as "we saved $100,000 this quarter because we don't need a full-time sysop team." It's worth taking a beat to consider things at these margins.

scardycat 4y ago

> better off without it Umm ... No. This blanket statement is certifiably false that it only applies to a company running maybe 1 or 10, or at most 100 physical machines. My work needs across the world presence, networking, fault tolerance and a boat load of storage and compute. I cant shift all those to on-prem or a cheaper, alternative provider.

kareemsabri 4y ago

I, a single developer, have an automatic CI/CD pipeline running from Github to ECR/ECS that deploys multiple high-availability services to serverless Fargate tasks with no downtime, as well as numerous executables running on cron jobs that pull the latest container and each run their own command on a separate instance of a serverless task. These are all automatically torn down when they complete, and I'm billed for the seconds or minutes they take to execute. Total bill is about $50/month. I set this all up with Terraform, and never touch the AWS UI. The code is 99.9% ignorant of the fact that it runs on AWS. I used to self host, and then used Media Temple, and then used DigitalOcean. Maybe I'm ignorant of the latest offerings from those providers but creating, let alone maintaining, something like the above without a cloud provider like AWS or GCP would be a significant overhead. The downsides the author points out are unpredictable costs (this is a risk, but manageable) and vendor lock in (this is low if you know how to code your services using abstract interfaces that hide the underlying vendors).

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oneplane 4y ago

As this seems to be a repeating class of posts, the reality generally boils down to the same thing every time: - use requirements to find out what you need, not buzzwords - comparing services with significantly different properties while ignoring those properties isn't helpful - playing datacenter in a virtual environment isn't the same as cloud architecture If you just need a virtual machine to do some stuff and loss of availability, reduced durability and lack of redundancy doesn't really matter, then you can get that pretty much anywhere. The same goes for DNS, object storage and SQL-based storage (ignoring database features). As soon as your needs for availability, durability and redundancy increase, your choices of service providers decrease because not every service provider provides the same servers at the same level. Integration of services is a whole different game as well and equally has fewer providers as the level of integration increases. Also: don't conflate integration with lock-in.

taylodl 4y ago

My experience is the exact opposite. Keep in mind I work for a Fortune 200 company and we recently spent $120 million expanding our data center capacity just five years ago - and it's now running out of power capacity (it has 1 MW power service). Also, our lead times for getting new servers is now months. Why? Because all the manufacturers are prioritizing deliveries for the cloud providers. That's a general problem we have. Now for a specific project I have, I took it from on-premise to AWS and am saving over 75% than what it was to host on-premise. The majority of the savings was due to software licensing costs. It's expensive to license software on-premise. The architecture of AWS and using their services makes it so those licenses aren't required. Moreover, we've been able to add features to our product offerings that we realistically would not have been able to add while keeping the hosting on-premise. All while saving 75% over what we were paying previously. My experience has been AWS is faster, cheaper, and better. The business loves it and we're getting more projects. They can't believe how quickly we can deploy new solutions nor how cheap it is for on-going operational costs. Bottom line - I wouldn't recommend hosting on-premise. AWS isn't the only cloud provider in town, but I would use them over doing anything on-premise.

sodality2 4y ago
> My experience is the exact opposite. Keep in mind I work for a Fortune 200 company I bet this is exactly why you find it helpful; rapid scaling is great for when you actually need to scale. I think the post is about the people who don't need to rapidly scale (most customers probably? certainly more common than a F200 company)

rubyfan 4y ago

AWS is the new mainframe. In a few years there will be a booming consulting business town up around making legacy updates, modernizing or getting off AWS. Goes for GCP and Azure.

HNHatesUsers 4y ago

jwsteigerwalt 4y ago

Unfortunately there is a huge amount of data that you have to learn to confidently understand and make decisions about billing.

phendrenad2 4y ago

I agree with the second half (devops complexity) but not the first half (surprise billing). And I only agree with the first part if you're running a small-to-medium scale operation (I.E. you don't have 2+ devops engineers). It's not that hard to avoid the infamous "AWS surprise". Just pay attention to the costs of things, and check the billing page regularly until you're comfortable with how your infrastructure is affecting the cost. Devops complexity is a trickier topic. If you're running a startup or a small tech team, AWS can quickly mire you in delays as you become the AWS expert (or delegate one of your engineers to become the AWS expert). It's a lot easier to just use DigitalOcean or something. That said, AWS/GCP/Azure scale in a way that other providers don't. Not in terms of technical scalability, but in terms of organizational scalability. Once you hire 2 or more devops engineers, it's likely that their expertise in AWS will pay dividends, and hamstringing them with something that isn't industry-standard is going to frustrate them and you.

hamandcheese 4y ago

I learned recently that you can rent a 42U cabinet from Hurricane Electric for $400 a month. Granted, that _only_ includes 1Gbps internet, and you have to provide your own servers, but still. I was surprised at how cheap this was. You could probably fit enough compute in there to power most businesses. https://he.net/colocation.html https://he.net/colocation.html

sam0x17 4y ago

Right now I'm very in bed with AWS lambda, but I'm working towards the point where all my tooling can also deploy to something like firecracker VMs so I can have the peace of mind of knowing I could roll my own cloud with the same tooling

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

>A HN user reports a story of someone who burned 80 grand overnight by provisioning bunch of EC2 instances for testing and leaving them on. So, ~$5000 per hour? Either a company cares about $5000 per hour, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then it doesn't care about $120,000 per day either. If it does, then WTF were they doing running a cluster at $5,000 per hour? And by definition, anyone who wants to launch $5000/hour or EC2 instances, isn't able to rock up to a COLO or IT department and say "I need 1,000 96 core Intel boxes for a couple of hours." Literally any other provider that can give you that service will require that you sign up to pay for $5,000 per hour, for how ever long you want to run them. There's nobody running a service that you go inside and ask for $20 on pump number 3. You're giving them a credit card, and then you're asking for an instance limit increase. The author thinks this is a damning indictment of AWS when a small amount of analysis shows the killer feature underneath. It's what people want: to spend cash, immediately, on compute. So when I was working at a startup, and I asked our COO to request an instance increase (to 250 instances, backed by his credit card) I made damned sure that I didn't "leave the cluster on". And that cluster gave us 2,000 cores! We couldn't have afforded to buy 250 servers! Finally, when this happened to a colleague at a different company, we reached out to AWS and they refunded the money. Because if a company allows a developer to launch a $5,000/hour cluster, then that company is already spending a lot on AWS, and will certainly spend a lot more in the future.

maerF0x0 4y ago

Ok, if you simply use EC2, S3, maybe a single RDS and/or Elasticache. Ok maybe I agree there. But the real magic comes when you learn to architect entire applications out of their pre-built patterns. random examples OTOH : fan out messages to a number of lambdas when a SNS topic receives a message . processing + backing up a kinesis event stream w/ lambdas + s3. There are many many cross product integrations that make development about as simple as connecting the two ends of a (data) hose. In these sorts of cases you can trade $$ for velocity pretty easily. Yes it will cost you a bit more to operate, but far less than the humans you save. Also on the argument about unexpected traffic leading to unexpected bills. AWS is most applicable for businesses that have a strong correlation between traffic and revenue. If you make a dollar per million, then it's fine when you wake up to elasticity unexpectedly handling a trillion. Not so much if you don't have an actual business.

jopsen 4y ago
I have mixed feelings too... SNS/SQS are awesome. But if you end up with micro services, your tests won't cover the integration of the entire system.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  Layers of testing. You're right that unit tests wont cover the entire system though. Typically the most important customer features will also have other suites that test end to end (API Call goes in, eventually S3 file is generated or something like that) .

segmondy 4y ago

You can make this argument about many things. You probably don't need that SUV/truck and are better off without it. You probably don't need that luxury car and are better off without it. Then go argue about the headache and the price and when you're done, your audience will just go back to their favorite toys. AWS it is. I will never advice anyone against AWS unless they are broke and it will bleed them dry. If you can afford it and have the skillset to run it, go for it. If you also have the skillset to go cheaper, go for it.

mikl 4y ago

Depends a lot on your situation. AWS is a way to trade money for engineering time. Sure, you can run your own OpenSearch/PostgreSQL/Kubernetes cluster “cheaper” than their managed offerings. But that’s the keyword: _managed_. If you use their (or other cloud provider’s) managed services, you can just turn it on and expect it to be there, available and running all the time (or at least to however many 9s the promise). You don’t have to worry about configuration, management and maintenance on the whole infrastructure, software upgrades, backups, etc. They take a bunch of worries off the table. Sure, they don’t do it for free. But if you (like many companies these days) lack manpower in the engineering department, using managed services can be a way to use the people you have more efficiently. So yeah, approach AWS with caution, be sure you don’t set things up in ways where your costs could suddenly explode. Do the math vs. DYI infrastructure, but don’t forget that your own engineering time isn’t free.

mulmboy 4y ago

Does anyone know an adblock rule to filter out HN articles telling me to buy an on-prem server to replace AWS? Seriously though, why are valueless bait articles like this so popular here? Is it collective satire that I'm missing? Is "you don't need AWS" a trendy counterculture thing? I could swear I've clicked through to equivalent articles at least five times from HN.

rmbyrro 4y ago
May have multiple reasons: 1) Some people just like the infra work, so they presume everyone likes as well. AWS eliminates/simplifies a good portion of it. 2) Some feel a sense of superiority saying they can pull off an entire infra on Hertzner. They know many younger engineers can't, since they started with AWS in mind. 3) AWS has a terrible reputation as an employer. Perhaps some these anti-AWS blog writers might have worked there, know someone who did, or heard one of the AWS PIP horror stories...
- mulmboy 4y ago
  Interesting take, > Some people just like the infra work I think AWS improves infra work. Using CDK is a joy - primarily because it's clean, simple, and reproducible once you have stuff up and running. But the process of getting stuff up and running is its own kind of drug, it's a serious puzzle (unless you really really know what you're doing) which I find really rewarding to solve. I'm a pig in mud with CDK. Compare that with traditional infra work and I immediately start to worry about how to make sure that everything is provisioned correctly, that other people on the team aren't messing things up, how I'm going to implement zero-trust type auth without something akin to IAM, how I'm going to implement monitoring without the monitoring system becoming its own beast....
  - rmbyrro 4y ago
    Absolutely. I'm referring to the traditional infra work. I think these people should seek a job at AWS, Azure, GCP.
- randomtwiddler 4y ago

hardwaresofton 4y ago

I can’t say I fully agree with the article but I do think that someone needs to close the gap between the hyperscalers (AWS firmly in the lead in that group) and smaller infrastructure providers like OVH, Hetzner, etc. I think you could restate this as “smaller providers need to step up their game” as well. As far as closing the gap, I’m working on nimbus web services [0] and that’s exactly what it’s for — I want to build the middle layer (hopefully a bit less chaotic than AWS’s) so that people on smaller clouds have access to some scale/abstractions. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com

DarthNebo 4y ago

GCP's Cloud Run is a better & cheaper alternative to Lambda though

amai 4y ago

Also AWS violates GDPR, because as an american company it must obey the CLOUD act. But most EU companies simply ignore this issue hoping that nobody will notice. But it is just a matter of time until this will explode in several scandals.