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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

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
jjeaff 5y ago
Why not dedicated servers? You are not "buying" dedicated hardware. You are renting it, just like a spot VM on AWS. (except the spot VM is temporary) Anytime I see the comparison of cloud vs dedicated bare metal, it seems that the cloud advocates have been doing all their comparisons and calculations based on the alternative being to buy dedicated hardware and maintain it yourself in a colocated data center.
- clintonb 5y ago
  Dedicated servers still require staff to maintain. If you’re just comparing EC2, dedicated servers may be cheaper. Once you get to application offerings, such as databases, caching, etc., you now need to weigh the cost of administering those applications directly. That’s just for one location. If you need redundancy, you’ll also need to factor in those costs. Alternatively, I can spin up a multi-AZ database in a few minutes on a cloud provider.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    I have found AWS services not to be maintenance free. And I think at least for some services, the required maintenance is greatly overstated. Especially in the age of pre-built containers where updating can literally consist of changing the version tag.

selfmodruntime 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

jjeaff 5y ago

Why not dedicated servers? You are not "buying" dedicated hardware. You are renting it, just like a spot VM on AWS. (except the spot VM is temporary) Anytime I see the comparison of cloud vs dedicated bare metal, it seems that the cloud advocates have been doing all their comparisons and calculations based on the alternative being to buy dedicated hardware and maintain it yourself in a colocated data center.

clintonb 5y ago
Dedicated servers still require staff to maintain. If you’re just comparing EC2, dedicated servers may be cheaper. Once you get to application offerings, such as databases, caching, etc., you now need to weigh the cost of administering those applications directly. That’s just for one location. If you need redundancy, you’ll also need to factor in those costs. Alternatively, I can spin up a multi-AZ database in a few minutes on a cloud provider.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I have found AWS services not to be maintenance free. And I think at least for some services, the required maintenance is greatly overstated. Especially in the age of pre-built containers where updating can literally consist of changing the version tag.