4 ms·

> colo cost + total server cost/(3 year) => $18,471/year Meanwhile the company I just left was spending more than this for dozens of kubernetes clusters on AWS

> colo cost + total server cost/(3 year) => $18,471/year Meanwhile the company I just left was spending more than this for dozens of kubernetes clusters on AWS before signing a single customer. Sometimes I wonder what I'm still doing in this industry.

tluyben2 4y ago
Very often. I work with companies spending 10x as much on bad (bizarrely complex; indeed kubernetes, lambda, gateway, rds etc) setup and bad code on aws. Almost no traffic (b2b). Makes no sense at all.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Techies in tech industry are basically eating the rich .. A lot of buzzword to suck investment money in.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Or rather cloud providers are eating the rich. Techies are carrying the plates.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    It's a big meal. Those old-industry tycoons (oil/real estate/finance/alcohol/export/etc.) from gold rush era have too much money. There are a few places for money to land. Cloud seems to be the first wave, social media, messaging, big data, ai, smart everything. $200k-400k + $80k-$150k ranges are like hyenas army!
traceroute66 4y ago
> spending more than this for dozens of kubernetes clusters on AWS before signing a single customer Yup. Cloud is 21st century Nickel & Diming. Sure it sounds cheap, everything is priced in small sounding cents per unit. But then it very quickly becomes a compounding vicious circle ... a dozen different cloud tools, each charged at cents per unit, those units often being measured in increments of hours....next thing you know is your cloud bill has as many zeros on the end of it as the number of cloud services you are using. ;-) And that's before we start talking about the data egress costs. With colo you can start off with two 1/4 rack spaces at two different sites for resilience. You can get quite a lot of bang for your buck in a 1/4 rack with today's kit.
- richwater 4y ago
  > You can get quite a lot of bang for your buck in a 1/4 rack with today's kit. Until very recently, while money was still very cheap, the time overhead it would take to manage this just was not worth the cost savings. Even with the market falling out from under VC, I think it still is a good tradeoff for many shops.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > Until very recently, while money was still very cheap, the time overhead it would take to manage this just was not worth the cost savings. You can also rent a whole server. There's not much difference in time in managing a VM in a cloud or a whole server you rent from someone. Depending on the vendor, maybe some more setup time, since low end hosts don't usually have great setup workflows, so maybe you need to fiddle with the ipmi console once or twice to get it started, but if you go with a higher tier provider, you can fully automate everything if that floats your boat. It's just bare metal rather than a VM, and typically much lower cost for sustained usage (if you're really scaling up signfigantly and down throughout the day, cloud costs can work out less, although some vendors offer bare metal by the hour, too)
ummonk 4y ago
Was it more than the salary of even a single software engineer?
- yazzku 4y ago
  Ah, the classic excuse for writing shitty software systems.
- britneybitch 4y ago
  We wasted 5-6 figures of salary dollars lovingly building those clusters and the automation surrounding them. We had blue-green zero downtime deploys, but no customers who would notice any downtime to begin with. I think the CTO just wanted k8s on his resume. In one afternoon (at most), I could have written a script to deploy our demo with docker compose over ssh. Sure, docker compose won't scale forever, but their runway didn't last forever either.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Fair enough. To be honest, of the abstraction tools out there, Kubernetes is the one I'd hold off on as long as possible. Load balancing proxies, docker compose, auto-scaling, cloud databases, etc. are things I'd do relatively early, but not Kubernetes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 4y ago
If they were a startup like you suggest then it's possible they were running on AWS credits. You can get up to $100k and it's a big reason many startups go in that direction. Also $20k is nothing when you factor in developer time etc.

tluyben2 4y ago

Very often. I work with companies spending 10x as much on bad (bizarrely complex; indeed kubernetes, lambda, gateway, rds etc) setup and bad code on aws. Almost no traffic (b2b). Makes no sense at all.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Techies in tech industry are basically eating the rich .. A lot of buzzword to suck investment money in.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Or rather cloud providers are eating the rich. Techies are carrying the plates.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  It's a big meal. Those old-industry tycoons (oil/real estate/finance/alcohol/export/etc.) from gold rush era have too much money. There are a few places for money to land. Cloud seems to be the first wave, social media, messaging, big data, ai, smart everything. $200k-400k + $80k-$150k ranges are like hyenas army!

traceroute66 4y ago

> spending more than this for dozens of kubernetes clusters on AWS before signing a single customer Yup. Cloud is 21st century Nickel & Diming. Sure it sounds cheap, everything is priced in small sounding cents per unit. But then it very quickly becomes a compounding vicious circle ... a dozen different cloud tools, each charged at cents per unit, those units often being measured in increments of hours....next thing you know is your cloud bill has as many zeros on the end of it as the number of cloud services you are using. ;-) And that's before we start talking about the data egress costs. With colo you can start off with two 1/4 rack spaces at two different sites for resilience. You can get quite a lot of bang for your buck in a 1/4 rack with today's kit.

richwater 4y ago
> You can get quite a lot of bang for your buck in a 1/4 rack with today's kit. Until very recently, while money was still very cheap, the time overhead it would take to manage this just was not worth the cost savings. Even with the market falling out from under VC, I think it still is a good tradeoff for many shops.
- toast0 4y ago
  > Until very recently, while money was still very cheap, the time overhead it would take to manage this just was not worth the cost savings. You can also rent a whole server. There's not much difference in time in managing a VM in a cloud or a whole server you rent from someone. Depending on the vendor, maybe some more setup time, since low end hosts don't usually have great setup workflows, so maybe you need to fiddle with the ipmi console once or twice to get it started, but if you go with a higher tier provider, you can fully automate everything if that floats your boat. It's just bare metal rather than a VM, and typically much lower cost for sustained usage (if you're really scaling up signfigantly and down throughout the day, cloud costs can work out less, although some vendors offer bare metal by the hour, too)

ummonk 4y ago

Was it more than the salary of even a single software engineer?

yazzku 4y ago
Ah, the classic excuse for writing shitty software systems.
britneybitch 4y ago
We wasted 5-6 figures of salary dollars lovingly building those clusters and the automation surrounding them. We had blue-green zero downtime deploys, but no customers who would notice any downtime to begin with. I think the CTO just wanted k8s on his resume. In one afternoon (at most), I could have written a script to deploy our demo with docker compose over ssh. Sure, docker compose won't scale forever, but their runway didn't last forever either.
- ummonk 4y ago
  Fair enough. To be honest, of the abstraction tools out there, Kubernetes is the one I'd hold off on as long as possible. Load balancing proxies, docker compose, auto-scaling, cloud databases, etc. are things I'd do relatively early, but not Kubernetes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 4y ago

If they were a startup like you suggest then it's possible they were running on AWS credits. You can get up to $100k and it's a big reason many startups go in that direction. Also $20k is nothing when you factor in developer time etc.