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Moving from buying Ferraris to Toyota Camrys would save a lot of money too. These stories are always bs blog spam by companies trying to pretend they pulled off
by 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Moving from buying Ferraris to Toyota Camrys would save a lot of money too. These stories are always bs blog spam by companies trying to pretend they pulled off some amazing new hack. In reality they were burning cash because they hadn't the faintest idea how to control their spend.
When we were utilizing AWS, our setup consisted of a 28-node managed Kubernetes cluster.
Each of these nodes was an m7a EC2 instance. With block storage and network fees included,
our monthly bills amounted to $38,000+
The hell were you doing with 28 nodes to run an uptime tracking app? Did you try just running it on like, 3 nodes, without K8s?
When compared to our previous AWS costs, we’re saving over $230,000 roughly per year
if you amortize the cap-ex costs of the server over 5 years.
Compared to a 5-year AWS savings plan? Probably not.
On top of this, they somehow advertise using K8s as a simplification? Let's reign in our spend, not only by abandoning the convenience of VMs and having to do more maintenance, but let's require customers use a minimum of 3 nodes and a dozen services to run a dinky uptime tracking app.
This meme must be repeating itself due to ignorance. The CIOs/CTOs have no clue how to control spend in the cloud, so they rake up huge bills and ignore it "because we're trying to grow quickly!" Then maybe they hire someone who knows the Cloud, but they tell them to ignore the cost too. Finally they run out of cash because they weren't watching the billing, so they do the only thing they are technically competent enough to do: set up some computers and install Linux, and write off the cost as cap-ex. Finally they write a blog post in order to try to gain political cover for why they burned through several headcount worth of funding on nothing.
- Nextgrid 3y ago> The hell were you doing with 28 nodes to run an uptime tracking app? To be fair, considering the pocket-calculator-grade performance you get from AWS (along with terrible IO performance compared to direct-attach NVME) I can totally understand they’d need 28 nodes to run something that would run on a handful of real, uncontended bare-metal hosts.
- moduspol 3y ago> The hell were you doing with 28 nodes to run an uptime tracking app? Did you try just running it on like, 3 nodes, without K8s? I've seen this before. It happens when the people who manage the infrastructure are completely decoupled from the developers. The developers determine how much CPU / memory is "needed" for a given workload, and the infra team just adds it. Developers aren't responsible for infra costs. Infra team has limited ability to control costs. Add a few years and teams with their own container-based applications, Kafka, Elasticsearch, multi-instance Postgres, etc., and soon enough, it's a 28 node cluster and costs are out of control. Infra team can only do so much, and devs aren't incentivized to help, either. Everyone's shrugging their shoulders because now it'll take significant refactoring and cross-silo work to actually fix. If they told us what was running on those 28 nodes, we'd point that out immediately. But it's not just happening at this company. I've seen this pattern many times.
- m00x 3y agoThat's nutty spend for a company that tracks uptime. I ran a landing page hosting product with marketing automation with 10B daily events and 50B page views/day on 20 m3.larges. Our monthly AWS spend was like 20k. All deployed using capistrano.