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So we have gone from a categorical "not cheaper" to "almost always not cheaper," except for two circumstances, no, three. Progress! At my last company, providi

So we have gone from a categorical "not cheaper" to "almost always not cheaper," except for two circumstances, no, three. Progress! At my last company, providing SaaS for the education market, moving from a datacenter to AWS saved almost 70% year-over-year. In the datacenter, we ran machines to cover our peak load, which only happened a few times a year. In AWS, we scaled way down and auto-scaled up during those peak weeks. Is the entire education market "exceptionally bursty?" I suppose it could be considered so. Bar exams and midterms and finals certainly don't happen every week. I'll wait for people to tell me how AWS was the wrong solution, and how we did everything wrong before that, but the bottom line is we saved a lot of money, accelerated our development schedule by building all new functionality using the so-called "serverless" stack, and succeeded so well during the pandemic that another company acquired us... which is why it's my former company.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
It sounds like you made a good decision, and yes, it sounds like your entire market (particularly the parts around exam hosting) is exceptionally bursty. I worked with some folks at a university on some of their IT systems, and they hit huge traffic spikes (literally 1000x their base load) around course registration and final exams. Their solution was to put 100 gbps NICs on their Oracle server... I don't know how big your peak was compared to your average load, but if it was anything like that, serverless was a great call. Buying enough hardware for the bar exam and idling it 99.5% of the time sounds incredibly wasteful. However, this is an exceptionally bursty workload. Most services do not have this level of traffic variability in such a way that a CDN can't handle it for you. 10x peak to trough variability (after your CDN) is fairly common, but still considered bursty, and in that case, AWS serverless still doesn't look great compared to DO droplets. Many services have daily or weekly cycles (without events like the bar exam), and run analytics workloads in their off hours.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  My suggestion to you, then, is this: instead of making blanket statements and allowing for a teeny-tiny exception for edge case, try to remember that the market is FULL of those edge cases. Almost the entire education market, billions of dollars of revenue, fits into what you described as "exceptionally bursty" and didn't even include in your first blanket dismissal. I suspect education isn't the only market that surprises you with its burstiness. We frequently see links at HN that fall over and die after they're linked. On the one hand, that's usually because they've misconfigured a personal blog and lack caching. On the other hand, some services just weren't ready for HN traffic and failed to scale up. Which.... they wouldn't, were they running on a cloud provider like AWS. It's possible for any service to be surprisingly bursty, but I suspect more than you think are bursty on a regular basis. P.S. DO Droplets are Digital Ocean's response to AWS Lambda, and are still "cloud."

pclmulqdq 4y ago

It sounds like you made a good decision, and yes, it sounds like your entire market (particularly the parts around exam hosting) is exceptionally bursty. I worked with some folks at a university on some of their IT systems, and they hit huge traffic spikes (literally 1000x their base load) around course registration and final exams. Their solution was to put 100 gbps NICs on their Oracle server... I don't know how big your peak was compared to your average load, but if it was anything like that, serverless was a great call. Buying enough hardware for the bar exam and idling it 99.5% of the time sounds incredibly wasteful. However, this is an exceptionally bursty workload. Most services do not have this level of traffic variability in such a way that a CDN can't handle it for you. 10x peak to trough variability (after your CDN) is fairly common, but still considered bursty, and in that case, AWS serverless still doesn't look great compared to DO droplets. Many services have daily or weekly cycles (without events like the bar exam), and run analytics workloads in their off hours.

pwinnski 4y ago
My suggestion to you, then, is this: instead of making blanket statements and allowing for a teeny-tiny exception for edge case, try to remember that the market is FULL of those edge cases. Almost the entire education market, billions of dollars of revenue, fits into what you described as "exceptionally bursty" and didn't even include in your first blanket dismissal. I suspect education isn't the only market that surprises you with its burstiness. We frequently see links at HN that fall over and die after they're linked. On the one hand, that's usually because they've misconfigured a personal blog and lack caching. On the other hand, some services just weren't ready for HN traffic and failed to scale up. Which.... they wouldn't, were they running on a cloud provider like AWS. It's possible for any service to be surprisingly bursty, but I suspect more than you think are bursty on a regular basis. P.S. DO Droplets are Digital Ocean's response to AWS Lambda, and are still "cloud."