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> It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. So, I've got 6 different backend services running as monolithic Lambda functions

> It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. So, I've got 6 different backend services running as monolithic Lambda functions. They all must be up for a number of nines per year, each going down will cost our company actual money for every second of downtime. They've never been down except when AWS broke something - and then the customers couldn't have accessed them anyway. Can you tell me how I can host 6 services that can't be on the same machine in a managed system cheaper than my current setup? 6 servers, preferably each duplicated. We'll assume that all the other AWS services we use can "just" be replicated in managed hosting too. (DynamoDB, S3, Aurora and a bunch of others).

vidarh 3y ago
Without more details I can't give you numbers, but I've gone through this with countless customers. Every time I offered to do the work for a percentage of savings. Unfortunately most of them did the maths and had me bill by the hour instead. I've yet to come across a setup where we couldn't trivially halve costs. Often you can halve costs over a well optimized AWS setup (most AWS setups are nowhere near well optimized, and most AWS customers haven't even caught on to the ability to start pushing for discounts once their bills are high enough; you can still beat that with more traditional setups) even while just migrating to cheaper cloud services elsewhere. Often the cheapest is a hybrid, because it allows you to benefit from the resiliency of cloud providers while only rarely having to put any load that costs on them. I get that you've left out a lot of details, but what you describe is not a complex setup. Try thousands of VMs over multiple countries with dozens of database and everything replicated at minimum in three locations, and with zero downtime migration of loads between countries on a hybrid setup across multiple providers, several colo facilities and managed hosting providers. Even with the fully loaded devops cost a setup like that came out at less than just the egress bandwidth would've cost us at AWS. There are plenty of loads where cloud providers are the right choices, but they are almost never a cheap choice, and when they are, AWS and tge other big ones are rarely even breaking the top 5 cheapest cloud options.
- bob1029 3y ago
  For us, our partners and mutual clients, minimizing the cost of provisioning IT services is something like priority # 4 or 5. Security, correctness, compliance, performance and availability are gonna be far more important to the business. As long as the cost isn't absolutely insane no one is going to blink. Zero stakeholders care that we can do it marginally cheaper with a nerd sniper rifle.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    And that's a valid choice to make when your margins are significant enough to let you afford not to spend effort cutting hosting costs. I've opted for cloud hosting many places for that reason myself as well. In fact, my current job involves a 100% cloud based setup, and it's a fine choice in this instance because we do have the margins for it. At the same time, many other places I've worked or done consulting that is not a choice their businesses can survive. One place the cost difference between cloud and managed servers was large enough it'd have been several times their profit. We're not talking "marginally cheaper". It's rare to be talking about cost savings lover than 50%. That still doesn't mean it's always worth switching away from cloud environments - if that 50% saving is small enough to you to not matter, that's totally valid. But you ought to understand that you're making that choice because the costs are currently too insignificant to be worth it, not because it's the cheapest option. The argument is not that you should never pick cloud, but that claiming to choose cloud because the alternatives are "untenable from a financial point of view" to quote part of the comment that I first replied to is totally backwards and suggests to me nobody has actually done a cost analysis.

vidarh 3y ago

Without more details I can't give you numbers, but I've gone through this with countless customers. Every time I offered to do the work for a percentage of savings. Unfortunately most of them did the maths and had me bill by the hour instead. I've yet to come across a setup where we couldn't trivially halve costs. Often you can halve costs over a well optimized AWS setup (most AWS setups are nowhere near well optimized, and most AWS customers haven't even caught on to the ability to start pushing for discounts once their bills are high enough; you can still beat that with more traditional setups) even while just migrating to cheaper cloud services elsewhere. Often the cheapest is a hybrid, because it allows you to benefit from the resiliency of cloud providers while only rarely having to put any load that costs on them. I get that you've left out a lot of details, but what you describe is not a complex setup. Try thousands of VMs over multiple countries with dozens of database and everything replicated at minimum in three locations, and with zero downtime migration of loads between countries on a hybrid setup across multiple providers, several colo facilities and managed hosting providers. Even with the fully loaded devops cost a setup like that came out at less than just the egress bandwidth would've cost us at AWS. There are plenty of loads where cloud providers are the right choices, but they are almost never a cheap choice, and when they are, AWS and tge other big ones are rarely even breaking the top 5 cheapest cloud options.

bob1029 3y ago
For us, our partners and mutual clients, minimizing the cost of provisioning IT services is something like priority # 4 or 5. Security, correctness, compliance, performance and availability are gonna be far more important to the business. As long as the cost isn't absolutely insane no one is going to blink. Zero stakeholders care that we can do it marginally cheaper with a nerd sniper rifle.
- vidarh 3y ago
  And that's a valid choice to make when your margins are significant enough to let you afford not to spend effort cutting hosting costs. I've opted for cloud hosting many places for that reason myself as well. In fact, my current job involves a 100% cloud based setup, and it's a fine choice in this instance because we do have the margins for it. At the same time, many other places I've worked or done consulting that is not a choice their businesses can survive. One place the cost difference between cloud and managed servers was large enough it'd have been several times their profit. We're not talking "marginally cheaper". It's rare to be talking about cost savings lover than 50%. That still doesn't mean it's always worth switching away from cloud environments - if that 50% saving is small enough to you to not matter, that's totally valid. But you ought to understand that you're making that choice because the costs are currently too insignificant to be worth it, not because it's the cheapest option. The argument is not that you should never pick cloud, but that claiming to choose cloud because the alternatives are "untenable from a financial point of view" to quote part of the comment that I first replied to is totally backwards and suggests to me nobody has actually done a cost analysis.