4 ms·

I'm sorry, there's simply no world in which switching to the cloud, and serverless to boot, results in a 70% cost reduction unless you so grossly over-provision

by tw04 3y ago

I'm sorry, there's simply no world in which switching to the cloud, and serverless to boot, results in a 70% cost reduction unless you so grossly over-provisioned your on-prem infrastructure that whoever architected it should no longer be employed. Cloud infrastructure is more expensive across the board, full stop. Unless you're using hollywood math to claim millions in "efficiency gains" I don't buy it.

fragmede 3y ago
Millions, and 70% seems high to me, but let's look at some numbers. what is the cheapest real actual server you can buy, new, with a support contract from a reputable vendor like HP/Dell/etc? (Assume we're running both the db and web-server on one server.) And what's the cost of sitting it in a reputable colo? And then multiply that by, let's say two, to get redundancy in a us-west and us-east region. Ideally, we'd want more regions to serve the entire world, but let's just go with two for now. Let's say $10k for a server w/ support contract, x2, plus $400/mo for colo from Hurricane Electric (https://he.net/colocation.html https://he.net/colocation.html) in us-west. It's a promo deal, and only in us-west, but let's just go with that price. $400*60 for 5 years (standard lifetime of computer equipment) = $24k. So $34k per server * 2 servers / 60 months ~= $1,130/month amortized. Thankfully, we're not in cloud, so that's the cost whether it's 1 request/second, or 1,000 requests/second. A Raspberry Pi or old laptop in your basement with one consumer-grade ISP, and not factoring in the cost of electricity does not count here. Those are obviously going to be massively cheaper, but they're not remotely suitable for enterprise. Meanwhile, Lambda gives you 1M requests and 3.2 million compute-seconds a month for free. This works out to be 0.4 rps (requests/second) or 22 requests / minute if spread out evenly. Which isn't, like, a lot, but you haven't paid a single cent to AWS for this yet. Let's say you want to get to 40 rps (to keep the math easy) or 100M requests over the month. According to the AWS calculator (https://calculator.aws/#/addService/Lambda https://calculator.aws/#/addService/Lambda), this'll run you $120/month, or $120*24 ~= $3k for 2 years. But that doesn't count hosting for your static files with CloudFront, or does it count the RDS instance backing it, and we'd use AWS Cognito for user-auth since we've accepted AWS vendor lock-in. (Which isn't great, but that's the state of the industry.) CloudFront: Free Tier 1TB, 10M requests/month. 10 TB/month will run you $1k/month https://calculator.aws/#/addService/CloudFront https://calculator.aws/#/addService/CloudFront RDS: This will vary greatly. A teeny tiny db.m6g.large instance w/ 2 CPUs and 8 GiB of RAM is going to run you $250/month, but a big one fat juicy db.r5d.24xlarge will run you closer to $20k/month. https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSMySQL https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSMySQL Cognito: With 1,000 active users, this'll be $50/month; 10,000 users is $500/mo, and 100,000 users is $5k/month. Between Lambda, CloudFront, RDS, and Cognito you could easily blow past that $1,130/month estimate for a proper colo'd pair of servers, if your service gets at all popular. But if you stick within the free tier for Lambda and Cloudfront, then you're only looking at RDS and Cognito costs, which can vary greatly. Anywhere from $500/month to $26k/month, or more. Except to get the same service in a colo as a $26k/month AWS bill, you'd need to spend way more and have much more than the single server in a rack that I started with. Thankfully, with something like Equinix Smart Hands, no one has to drive to the colo to futz with a server when it develops a bad hard drive. Graph it out for your particular use case which one is better, but cloud infrastructure has the benefit of opex vs capex, as well as the opportunity cost of time. AWS Amplify will let you stand up a whole platform hacking on a Saturday before Dell can even quote you a price on a server or Equinix can answer the phone. I also did reject a raspberry pi or old laptop server early on, but that's not to be underestimated. If I've already got some server running at home for my house, running a service on that, fronted by Cloudflare can take you quite far. It really just depends on your use case.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Additionally, you need software to run on-prem. Rare is the application that is simply an executable running on a server and not having any dependencies on things such as databases. That software requires licensing, and there's always on ongoing annual tail that will be charged. On AWS all that licensing and support is rolled into their pricing. That turns out to be a substantial savings, along with all the other things you've mentioned.
- tw04 3y ago
  Your entire premise is based on a pair of servers - we're talking about fortune 500s. I'll ignore for a second the fact that $20k/month in server spend for a pair of servers to be database+web is grossly overpriced, even at LIST, which no fortune 500 ever comes close to paying. All of the "and you don't get all these other services" is just a red herring because, again, we're talking about a fortune 500 that isn't building their services on a pair of servers. They buy racks at a time, at minimum, and unless they're grossly oversizing what they're buying, will have better performance per-dollar all-in, including the people cost and the surrounding infrastructure cost, to say nothing of the egress bandwidth because you know, their customers aren't just other AWS servers...
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I'm not sure where you're getting $20k/month for on-prem from. The number in my post for on-prem for a pair of servers, which is grossly underestimated, was $1,130/mo, amortized. Still, $1M in servers, over 5 years is $200k/yr, or $16k/month, not including hosting costs for that size of a system. Equinix is the gold standard, but they're what one would call expensive. Mind throwing out some numbers you think are realistic for "racks at a time"?

by tw04 3y ago

fragmede 3y ago

Millions, and 70% seems high to me, but let's look at some numbers. what is the cheapest real actual server you can buy, new, with a support contract from a reputable vendor like HP/Dell/etc? (Assume we're running both the db and web-server on one server.) And what's the cost of sitting it in a reputable colo? And then multiply that by, let's say two, to get redundancy in a us-west and us-east region. Ideally, we'd want more regions to serve the entire world, but let's just go with two for now. Let's say $10k for a server w/ support contract, x2, plus $400/mo for colo from Hurricane Electric (https://he.net/colocation.html https://he.net/colocation.html) in us-west. It's a promo deal, and only in us-west, but let's just go with that price. $400*60 for 5 years (standard lifetime of computer equipment) = $24k. So $34k per server * 2 servers / 60 months ~= $1,130/month amortized. Thankfully, we're not in cloud, so that's the cost whether it's 1 request/second, or 1,000 requests/second. A Raspberry Pi or old laptop in your basement with one consumer-grade ISP, and not factoring in the cost of electricity does not count here. Those are obviously going to be massively cheaper, but they're not remotely suitable for enterprise. Meanwhile, Lambda gives you 1M requests and 3.2 million compute-seconds a month for free. This works out to be 0.4 rps (requests/second) or 22 requests / minute if spread out evenly. Which isn't, like, a lot, but you haven't paid a single cent to AWS for this yet. Let's say you want to get to 40 rps (to keep the math easy) or 100M requests over the month. According to the AWS calculator (https://calculator.aws/#/addService/Lambda https://calculator.aws/#/addService/Lambda), this'll run you $120/month, or $120*24 ~= $3k for 2 years. But that doesn't count hosting for your static files with CloudFront, or does it count the RDS instance backing it, and we'd use AWS Cognito for user-auth since we've accepted AWS vendor lock-in. (Which isn't great, but that's the state of the industry.) CloudFront: Free Tier 1TB, 10M requests/month. 10 TB/month will run you $1k/month https://calculator.aws/#/addService/CloudFront https://calculator.aws/#/addService/CloudFront RDS: This will vary greatly. A teeny tiny db.m6g.large instance w/ 2 CPUs and 8 GiB of RAM is going to run you $250/month, but a big one fat juicy db.r5d.24xlarge will run you closer to $20k/month. https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSMySQL https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSMySQL Cognito: With 1,000 active users, this'll be $50/month; 10,000 users is $500/mo, and 100,000 users is $5k/month. Between Lambda, CloudFront, RDS, and Cognito you could easily blow past that $1,130/month estimate for a proper colo'd pair of servers, if your service gets at all popular. But if you stick within the free tier for Lambda and Cloudfront, then you're only looking at RDS and Cognito costs, which can vary greatly. Anywhere from $500/month to $26k/month, or more. Except to get the same service in a colo as a $26k/month AWS bill, you'd need to spend way more and have much more than the single server in a rack that I started with. Thankfully, with something like Equinix Smart Hands, no one has to drive to the colo to futz with a server when it develops a bad hard drive. Graph it out for your particular use case which one is better, but cloud infrastructure has the benefit of opex vs capex, as well as the opportunity cost of time. AWS Amplify will let you stand up a whole platform hacking on a Saturday before Dell can even quote you a price on a server or Equinix can answer the phone. I also did reject a raspberry pi or old laptop server early on, but that's not to be underestimated. If I've already got some server running at home for my house, running a service on that, fronted by Cloudflare can take you quite far. It really just depends on your use case.

taylodl 3y ago
Additionally, you need software to run on-prem. Rare is the application that is simply an executable running on a server and not having any dependencies on things such as databases. That software requires licensing, and there's always on ongoing annual tail that will be charged. On AWS all that licensing and support is rolled into their pricing. That turns out to be a substantial savings, along with all the other things you've mentioned.
tw04 3y ago
Your entire premise is based on a pair of servers - we're talking about fortune 500s. I'll ignore for a second the fact that $20k/month in server spend for a pair of servers to be database+web is grossly overpriced, even at LIST, which no fortune 500 ever comes close to paying. All of the "and you don't get all these other services" is just a red herring because, again, we're talking about a fortune 500 that isn't building their services on a pair of servers. They buy racks at a time, at minimum, and unless they're grossly oversizing what they're buying, will have better performance per-dollar all-in, including the people cost and the surrounding infrastructure cost, to say nothing of the egress bandwidth because you know, their customers aren't just other AWS servers...
- fragmede 3y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting $20k/month for on-prem from. The number in my post for on-prem for a pair of servers, which is grossly underestimated, was $1,130/mo, amortized. Still, $1M in servers, over 5 years is $200k/yr, or $16k/month, not including hosting costs for that size of a system. Equinix is the gold standard, but they're what one would call expensive. Mind throwing out some numbers you think are realistic for "racks at a time"?