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People underestimate AWS but as long as their S3, EC2, SQS, and Lambda keeps kicking butt, it'd be really hard to displace them. All roads ultimate lead to sto

People underestimate AWS but as long as their S3, EC2, SQS, and Lambda keeps kicking butt, it'd be really hard to displace them. All roads ultimate lead to storage and compute, which I think AWS does a really good job in.

danpalmer 4y ago
Are these all kicking butt? S3 is great, and I don't know much about SQS... But EC2? Configurations are static, cost optimisation is hard, the spot market is a pain, reserved instances aren't fun to trade-off. Compared to GCP where you get sustained usage discounts which are much simpler to reason about, and you can spec machines in much more dynamic ways. And Lambda? It's just not a great environment to build applications for. Frameworks are necessary to tame complexity, API gateway adds a ton more complexity, dealing with any state is difficult. Lambda doesn't seem any better than any of the other FaaS offerings. Fargate seems like a better option for most people who want to use serverless, but again that's not unique.
- nextworddev 4y ago
  As for Lambda, if ur app gets less than a million requests it’s basically free, which I love. API gateway lets me sleep at night because of all it’s security features. EC2 is kind of crappy UX wise but spot instances at cheap af
- acdha 4y ago
  AWS compute savings plans are easy to reason about, though, and cover things like Lambda and Fargate, too. GCP’s sustained usage discounts are nice but they don’t save more than AWS’ savings offer and in the last 6 months that’s been a lot lower than GCP’s cost increases on other services.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I don't think they are easy to reason about. They're non-trivial to explain, and to figure out how to make best use of them requires quite a lot of modelling, usage projection, etc, to figure out how many of each type to buy. The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. From a cash flow perspective "it just gets cheaper after 3 months" is very straightforward, requires no usage projection, and not a lot of modelling to figure out eventual prices. The fact that it's not opt-in also means that more businesses will get the benefits, so many don't use the reserved instances because they don't have the capacity to figure out how best to use them, or worry about giving up the flexibility.
    - acdha 3y ago
      > The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. This is probably where our experiences differ: I’ve dealt with this at large organizations where cash flow isn’t tight and the accountants have never had trouble working with the prepayment concept since they do that for tons of things.
      - danpalmer 3y ago
        That's fair, but cash flow is a major focus for many businesses, and with AWS it's still _hard_ to figure out the impacts of all these things, especially if you're a growing startup.

danpalmer 4y ago

Are these all kicking butt? S3 is great, and I don't know much about SQS... But EC2? Configurations are static, cost optimisation is hard, the spot market is a pain, reserved instances aren't fun to trade-off. Compared to GCP where you get sustained usage discounts which are much simpler to reason about, and you can spec machines in much more dynamic ways. And Lambda? It's just not a great environment to build applications for. Frameworks are necessary to tame complexity, API gateway adds a ton more complexity, dealing with any state is difficult. Lambda doesn't seem any better than any of the other FaaS offerings. Fargate seems like a better option for most people who want to use serverless, but again that's not unique.

nextworddev 4y ago
As for Lambda, if ur app gets less than a million requests it’s basically free, which I love. API gateway lets me sleep at night because of all it’s security features. EC2 is kind of crappy UX wise but spot instances at cheap af
acdha 4y ago
AWS compute savings plans are easy to reason about, though, and cover things like Lambda and Fargate, too. GCP’s sustained usage discounts are nice but they don’t save more than AWS’ savings offer and in the last 6 months that’s been a lot lower than GCP’s cost increases on other services.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I don't think they are easy to reason about. They're non-trivial to explain, and to figure out how to make best use of them requires quite a lot of modelling, usage projection, etc, to figure out how many of each type to buy. The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. From a cash flow perspective "it just gets cheaper after 3 months" is very straightforward, requires no usage projection, and not a lot of modelling to figure out eventual prices. The fact that it's not opt-in also means that more businesses will get the benefits, so many don't use the reserved instances because they don't have the capacity to figure out how best to use them, or worry about giving up the flexibility.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > The lowest priced options also require pre-purchasing, which ties up cash. They're rarely worth it for a business with typical cash flow. This is probably where our experiences differ: I’ve dealt with this at large organizations where cash flow isn’t tight and the accountants have never had trouble working with the prepayment concept since they do that for tons of things.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      That's fair, but cash flow is a major focus for many businesses, and with AWS it's still _hard_ to figure out the impacts of all these things, especially if you're a growing startup.