6 ms·

I know you're joking around, but no, as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) is that it can scale flexibly with their customers' bus

by kypro 3y ago

I know you're joking around, but no, as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) is that it can scale flexibly with their customers' businesses. If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. With cloud if demand drops you can scale up and down as needed. Helping customers cut costs during difficult times makes sense since those customers are more likely to survive and stay with you through good times. So in context I think this article makes sense since long-term sustainable growth of AWS should be linked with the growth of their customers' businesses.

awaythrow98765 3y ago
> If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. Cloud vendors also mostly sell minimum use packages for discounts in the range of 20 to 80% (called e.g. "committed use discount" or "compute savings plan"). Lots of businesses use those, because two-digit discounts are real money, but they might find themselves in the same spot as with physical hardware they don't need...
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yup, and you are paying the premium of cloud forever, which over some vanilla compute & storage can be a lot. And cloud proponents pretend data center / rack space / server leasing doesn't exist either, for those trying to avoid large up front costs.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. It also means some poor fuck at AWS gets woken up in the middle of the night instead of me when things go to shit. It absolutely comes at a cost, and might not be the right fit for an organisation that's absolutely on top of it's hardware requirements and can afford to divert resources from new development work. For the rest of us it saves a lot of dev hours that would have otherwise been spent in pointless meetings or debating the best implementation of whatever half-baked stack has oozed it's way out of the organisation in an attempt to replicate what's handed to you with a cloud solution.
    - awaythrow98765 3y ago
      > I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. And endless orgies of "call for pricing" with hardware vendors and hosting. Shitty websites where you can buy preconfigured servers somewhat cheaply, or vendor websites where you can configure everything but overpay. Useless sales-droids trying to "value-add" stuff on top. Cloud buys are a lot friendlier, because you only have the one cloud vendor to worry about. Entry level you just pay list price by clicking a button. If you buy a lot, you are big enough to have your own business people to hammer out a rebate on list price, still very easy, still very simple. But overall still more expensive unfortunately.
    - jjav 3y ago
      > I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM? But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on. Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.
      - Jochim 3y ago
        > I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM? Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained. The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount. > I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on. I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex. Also it's going to be simpler to provision your base (commited use) on the cloud and then handle bursts on the cloud, than it is to have your base on prem and burst to the cloud.
  - awaythrow98765 3y ago
    That is not really a difference, you may as well lease your server farm in the basement, practically the same cost as buying it, just as a monthly payment with the supposed "advantages" the business people might care about.
  - adql 3y ago
    > It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex. You can buy physical servers in leasing ,turning it into opex You can also rent them for little bit extra via managed dedicated servers from vendors like OVH.
    - runlaszlorun 3y ago
      I think this point isn’t made often enough. Not going with a big cloud provider def doesn’t mean that you need to buy physical servers and build an on-prem data center.
      - adql 3y ago
        And other point I also seen used to lie about cloud cost is saying you save so much on engineers. ...while forgetting to have sane on-call rotation for cloud you also need at least 3 people on that rotation that are also clued in on cloud operation enough. Sure they can be "developers" but if your app architecture requires so little maintenance and flea removal that they are not doing ops jobs much, chances are so would it in either rented or dedicated server env.
belorn 3y ago
Using insurance to cover unexpected costs is always a gamble, one way or an other. A business that invest into physical servers could sell of those servers if they later find out that there is a recession, which might cost more or less compared to a cloud solution. If a business invest into a cloud infrastructure and create a binding contract for 5 years, only to find out that they actually want to abandon that project a year later, that is also a sunk cost. Long term contracts tend to be cheaper, so its a trade off between saving money vs risk. It all depend on the risk analysis, how risk averse one want to be, and the economics/liquidity needs.
throwaway283bd 3y ago
There's a middle ground between cloud and on-prem You don't need to go all in on buying racks and other hardware, when you can rent servers at Hetzner at a cheaper cost than aws.
colonelpopcorn 3y ago
Scale to zero has always been my favorite feature of serverless compute. If there was a fast way to do it with VMs, I'd certainly consider it.
Scarblac 3y ago
> If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. Yes, but that sunk cost is probably still lower than what you paid AWS for the option to scale up and down.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Most companies will pay way more for the engineers maintaining their on-premises infrastructure than they would for AWS. On-premises still makes sense when you reach a certain scale. When you reach a certain scale.
  - NohatCoder 3y ago
    They kind of need to be there anyway, physically maintaining servers turns out to be a miniscule part of the whole maintenance. If you really care about uptime you still need people on-call who can intervene as necessary.
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      It's not a minuscule part of a small company. I made the point that on-premises makes sense after a certain scale. Once you have on-premises you need people that know switches, routers, rackmount server, hardware, virtualization, etc, plus keeping all of that properly maintained (security patches, IaC, periodic updates, analyzing performance, making sure it's properly architected, etc). I often see people saying it's the same cost or less but it's really not. Unless you have no idea what you should be doing.
      - Scarblac 3y ago
        I don't know, I worked at a few companies that did this early in my career (early 2000s), and it was just the devs or the sysadmin of the office IT that did this sort of thing. There are lots of people who know enough about switches and routers to get them up and running. Virtualization, IaC, analyzing performance, right architecture etc is all for later, when you've grown enough to need that.
zamnos 3y ago
It depends on your timing. If you're extremely unlucky, you'll buy the new set of servers and the recession will hit right after you sign the PO. Probability says you're not likely gonna be that unlucky, so the recession will hit probably elsewhere in the physical servers' life cycle. A recession hits, and now there's a focus on cutting costs. With AWS, you don't have much choice - if you stop paying the bill, the servers evaporate into the cloud. Physical servers don't. You can change their replacement schedule and just wait arm few years more to replace them. Hopefully the recession has passed by then and you can buy a whole new pile of servers. Really though, it seems like a hybrid on-prem/cloud approach is one to consider. Software like Anthos eases this, though there are also pitfalls with this approach too.
codedokode 3y ago
You can sell the servers and partially return the money.
briffle 3y ago
We have some DB servers that occasionally need to do very large batches of transactions. They run all month with a couple of CPU's, and a small amount of ram to make sure they are 'caught up' with production, and before the batches are run, get shutdown, and changed to 32 or 64 CPU monsters. An hour or two later, they go back to the 2 cpu servers again. In a non-cloud shop, we would have to size our hardware for that maximum batch size.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjav 3y ago
> as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) Although in this specific case, being a team at AWS, they are using their own company data centers, so it's essentially on-prem to them.

by kypro 3y ago

awaythrow98765 3y ago

> If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. Cloud vendors also mostly sell minimum use packages for discounts in the range of 20 to 80% (called e.g. "committed use discount" or "compute savings plan"). Lots of businesses use those, because two-digit discounts are real money, but they might find themselves in the same spot as with physical hardware they don't need...

steveBK123 3y ago
Yup, and you are paying the premium of cloud forever, which over some vanilla compute & storage can be a lot. And cloud proponents pretend data center / rack space / server leasing doesn't exist either, for those trying to avoid large up front costs.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. It also means some poor fuck at AWS gets woken up in the middle of the night instead of me when things go to shit. It absolutely comes at a cost, and might not be the right fit for an organisation that's absolutely on top of it's hardware requirements and can afford to divert resources from new development work. For the rest of us it saves a lot of dev hours that would have otherwise been spent in pointless meetings or debating the best implementation of whatever half-baked stack has oozed it's way out of the organisation in an attempt to replicate what's handed to you with a cloud solution.
  - awaythrow98765 3y ago
    > I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. And endless orgies of "call for pricing" with hardware vendors and hosting. Shitty websites where you can buy preconfigured servers somewhat cheaply, or vendor websites where you can configure everything but overpay. Useless sales-droids trying to "value-add" stuff on top. Cloud buys are a lot friendlier, because you only have the one cloud vendor to worry about. Entry level you just pay list price by clicking a button. If you buy a lot, you are big enough to have your own business people to hammer out a rebate on list price, still very easy, still very simple. But overall still more expensive unfortunately.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine. I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM? But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on. Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      > I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM? Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained. The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount. > I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on. I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.
jabradoodle 3y ago
It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex. Also it's going to be simpler to provision your base (commited use) on the cloud and then handle bursts on the cloud, than it is to have your base on prem and burst to the cloud.
- awaythrow98765 3y ago
  That is not really a difference, you may as well lease your server farm in the basement, practically the same cost as buying it, just as a monthly payment with the supposed "advantages" the business people might care about.
- adql 3y ago
  > It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex. You can buy physical servers in leasing ,turning it into opex You can also rent them for little bit extra via managed dedicated servers from vendors like OVH.
  - runlaszlorun 3y ago
    I think this point isn’t made often enough. Not going with a big cloud provider def doesn’t mean that you need to buy physical servers and build an on-prem data center.
    - adql 3y ago
      And other point I also seen used to lie about cloud cost is saying you save so much on engineers. ...while forgetting to have sane on-call rotation for cloud you also need at least 3 people on that rotation that are also clued in on cloud operation enough. Sure they can be "developers" but if your app architecture requires so little maintenance and flea removal that they are not doing ops jobs much, chances are so would it in either rented or dedicated server env.

belorn 3y ago

Using insurance to cover unexpected costs is always a gamble, one way or an other. A business that invest into physical servers could sell of those servers if they later find out that there is a recession, which might cost more or less compared to a cloud solution. If a business invest into a cloud infrastructure and create a binding contract for 5 years, only to find out that they actually want to abandon that project a year later, that is also a sunk cost. Long term contracts tend to be cheaper, so its a trade off between saving money vs risk. It all depend on the risk analysis, how risk averse one want to be, and the economics/liquidity needs.

throwaway283bd 3y ago

There's a middle ground between cloud and on-prem You don't need to go all in on buying racks and other hardware, when you can rent servers at Hetzner at a cheaper cost than aws.

colonelpopcorn 3y ago

Scale to zero has always been my favorite feature of serverless compute. If there was a fast way to do it with VMs, I'd certainly consider it.

Scarblac 3y ago

gtirloni 3y ago
Most companies will pay way more for the engineers maintaining their on-premises infrastructure than they would for AWS. On-premises still makes sense when you reach a certain scale. When you reach a certain scale.
- NohatCoder 3y ago
  They kind of need to be there anyway, physically maintaining servers turns out to be a miniscule part of the whole maintenance. If you really care about uptime you still need people on-call who can intervene as necessary.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    It's not a minuscule part of a small company. I made the point that on-premises makes sense after a certain scale. Once you have on-premises you need people that know switches, routers, rackmount server, hardware, virtualization, etc, plus keeping all of that properly maintained (security patches, IaC, periodic updates, analyzing performance, making sure it's properly architected, etc). I often see people saying it's the same cost or less but it's really not. Unless you have no idea what you should be doing.
    - Scarblac 3y ago
      I don't know, I worked at a few companies that did this early in my career (early 2000s), and it was just the devs or the sysadmin of the office IT that did this sort of thing. There are lots of people who know enough about switches and routers to get them up and running. Virtualization, IaC, analyzing performance, right architecture etc is all for later, when you've grown enough to need that.

zamnos 3y ago

It depends on your timing. If you're extremely unlucky, you'll buy the new set of servers and the recession will hit right after you sign the PO. Probability says you're not likely gonna be that unlucky, so the recession will hit probably elsewhere in the physical servers' life cycle. A recession hits, and now there's a focus on cutting costs. With AWS, you don't have much choice - if you stop paying the bill, the servers evaporate into the cloud. Physical servers don't. You can change their replacement schedule and just wait arm few years more to replace them. Hopefully the recession has passed by then and you can buy a whole new pile of servers. Really though, it seems like a hybrid on-prem/cloud approach is one to consider. Software like Anthos eases this, though there are also pitfalls with this approach too.

codedokode 3y ago

You can sell the servers and partially return the money.

briffle 3y ago

We have some DB servers that occasionally need to do very large batches of transactions. They run all month with a couple of CPU's, and a small amount of ram to make sure they are 'caught up' with production, and before the batches are run, get shutdown, and changed to 32 or 64 CPU monsters. An hour or two later, they go back to the 2 cpu servers again. In a non-cloud shop, we would have to size our hardware for that maximum batch size.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jjav 3y ago

> as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) Although in this specific case, being a team at AWS, they are using their own company data centers, so it's essentially on-prem to them.