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An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte e

An alternative to sophisticated cloud cost minimization systems is…….. don’t use the cloud. Host it yourself. Or use Cloudflare which has 0 cents per gigabyte egress fees. Or just rent cloud servers from one of the many much cheaper VPS hosting services and don’t use all the expensive and complex cloud services all designed to lock you in and drain cash from your at 9 or 12 or 17 cents per gigabyte. Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud.

throwaway2990 3y ago
[flagged]
- junon 3y ago
  There are a slew of reasons why people say this. Generalizing HN folks as "dumb" doesn't help your point either.
cdchn 3y ago
Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?
- dijit 3y ago
  you'd be harder pressed finding ones that do (before a reasonable limit). tilaa.com vultr.com hetzner.com linode.com
  - JoshuaRogers 3y ago
    While they might not charge you directly as a line item, you still get charged: Linode in the above list is what I use. I get a fixed cap of bandwidth each month. Anything beyond that is charged. So, you don't get charged IF you stay below the initial cap.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Exactly this. They're all charging for bandwidth. If anything you could say that AWS is the closest to actually having unlimited bandwidth (or at least, half-parity there) since they don't charge you for incoming data, where other VPS charge you for data both ways. Really which has more or less expensive bandwidth comes down to the shape of your data usage.
  - Sebb767 3y ago
    > before a reasonable limit Which is another way of saying you buy a lump sum of bandwidth included with your VM. The issue is not paying for bandwidth, the issue is the insane pricing.
- champtar 3y ago
  OVH (except for APAC data centers), I think Scaleway also has bandwidth included.
- frankjr 3y ago
  https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/#root-server-details https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/#root-server-details (with fair use policy)
- mciancia 3y ago
  https://www.scaleway.com/en/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/
  - cdchn 3y ago
    No, they charge for bandwidth. https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/network/bandwidth/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/network/bandwidth/
maeln 3y ago
> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fluctuation in you needs (storage, compute, etc...), cloud based solution can be a great fit. At the end of the day, it is just a tool. I worked in places where I SSH´d into the prod bare-metal server to update our software, manage the firewall, check the storage, ... and all that manually. And I worked in places where we were using a cloud provider for most of our hosting needs. I also handle the transition from one to the other. All I can say is: It's a tool. "The cloud" is no better or worse than a bare-metal server or a VPS. It really depends on your use-case. You should just do your due diligence and evaluate the reason why one would fit you more than the other, and reevaluate it from time to time depending on the changes in your environment. This whole "cloud bad" is just childish.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  >> This whole "cloud bad" is just childish. Not childish…. it’s a growing line of thought in the IT community that has bought the cloud sell unquestioningly for 20 years.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    But it's the same mindset as "cloud good", which was also a growing line of thought once. Mantras aren't useful; tradeoff analysis is useful.
    - whstl 3y ago
      The GP said "[if X happens] consider dropping the cloud". Which is totally different from a mantra. There is virtually nobody saying "cloud bad" without nuance.
    - mcny 3y ago
      Mantras are good for orgs that are not mature enough to do actual analysis. A lead developer left recently where I work and while it was likely higher pay that was the biggest decision to move, I suspect the real reason he left is higher ups simply don't listen when he says things like you can't just take full virtual machines on azure, refuse any rewrite/redesign while complaining about high azure spend.
api 3y ago
There are also many bare metal and VPS providers that charge radically less for bandwidth or even charge by size of pipe rather than transfer. Cloud bandwidth pricing is… well the best analogies are very inappropriate for this site.
antonvs 3y ago
> Host it yourself. If you're actually using the features of cloud - i.e. managed services - then this involves building out an IT department with skills that many companies just don't have. And the cost of that will easily negate or exceed any savings, in many cases. That's a big reason that the choice of cloud became such a no brainer for companies.
- sgarland 3y ago
  Next you’ll tell me that full-stack is a lie, and devs don’t actually know how to run a DB.
  - blantonl 3y ago
    Maybe I don't want to manage a db, I just want to run one.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    Full stack is a lie because devs don't build their own hardware.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      I don’t think it’s that ridiculous (the next obvious goalpost being producing your own silicon), but since microservices means your DB is purely for your service, it stands to reason that you should also then know how to configure, backup, maintain, and tune the DB. This is of course a wildly unrealistic ask, which is why I think the idea of merging jobs to save money is stupid. Let people who like frontend do frontend. Let people who like DBs do DBs. Let people who tolerate YAML do DevOps.
crabbone 3y ago
I don't think "host yourself" in this instance would've helped. I think AWS in this instance is operating at a loss. Author found a loophole in AWS pricing and that's why it's so cheap. Doing it on their own would've been more expensive. Now as to why the AWS pricing the way it is... we may only guess, but likely to promote one service over the other.
- amluto 3y ago
  AWS is surely operating at a loss for this particular case (zero S3 charge). But there is no way that cross-AZ traffic costs AWS anywhere near what they charge for it.
Jean-Papoulos 3y ago
>Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. The blog post's solution is relatively simple to put in place ; if you're already locked-in to AWS, dropping it will cost quite a lot and this might be a great middle ground in some cases.
belter 3y ago
Those VPS hosting services are a solution for a startup but not to run your internet banking, airline company or public sas product. Plus their infinite egress bandwidth and data transfer claims are only true, as long as you don't...Use infinite egress bandwidth and data transfer....
overstay8930 3y ago
If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go back on prem, or you just don't give a shit about reliability (start pricing up DDoS protection costs at anything higher than 10G and tell me the cloud is more expensive). We spend 100k+ on AWS bandwidth and it's still cheaper than our DIA circuits because we don't have to pay network engineers to manage 3 different AZs.
- qvrjuec 3y ago
  >someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab What does this mean? They steal company resources for themselves, or just configure things incompetently?
  - ttul 3y ago
    Incompetence. Take my friend’s company for instance. They were frustrated paying $60K/mo to Amazon so their brilliant sysadmin bought $600K of servers and moved them into a cheap colo. Over Christmas, everything died, and the brilliant sysadmin was on holiday. Nobody could get things going again for many days and so their entire SaaS business was failing. They lost a lot of business and trust as a result. The sysadmin is now gone and they are back on AWS.
    - lijok 3y ago
      No key person risk management -> no risk register -> no management. Your friends company will fail regardless of poor sysadmin decision making or not. They need to hire competent management ASAP.
      - mdale 3y ago
        With cloud and SaaS services you are paying to reduce person risk profile. Your forming a larger dependency on a team lead against a custom system that now is a liability as new people come to the organization don't want to adopt an abandoned poorly understood project.
barkingcat 3y ago
also, if you really need to transfer hundreds of TB's of data from South Africa to the US, put it on a palette of disks and send it via bulk shipping. then load the data into the datacentre and then just pay for the last sync / delta.
- esafak 3y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/
lijok 3y ago
This makes no sense. So what do I do if I'm at the point where I'm doing sophisticated analysis of on-prem costs? Do I move to the cloud?
Turing_Machine 3y ago
The tipping point for self-hosting would be the point at which paying for full-time, 24/7 on-call sysadmins (salary + benefits) is less than your cloud hosting bill. That's just not gonna happen for a lot of services.

throwaway2990 3y ago

[flagged]

junon 3y ago
There are a slew of reasons why people say this. Generalizing HN folks as "dumb" doesn't help your point either.

cdchn 3y ago

Which VPS services don't charge you at all for bandwidth?

dijit 3y ago
you'd be harder pressed finding ones that do (before a reasonable limit). tilaa.com vultr.com hetzner.com linode.com
- JoshuaRogers 3y ago
  While they might not charge you directly as a line item, you still get charged: Linode in the above list is what I use. I get a fixed cap of bandwidth each month. Anything beyond that is charged. So, you don't get charged IF you stay below the initial cap.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Exactly this. They're all charging for bandwidth. If anything you could say that AWS is the closest to actually having unlimited bandwidth (or at least, half-parity there) since they don't charge you for incoming data, where other VPS charge you for data both ways. Really which has more or less expensive bandwidth comes down to the shape of your data usage.
- Sebb767 3y ago
  > before a reasonable limit Which is another way of saying you buy a lump sum of bandwidth included with your VM. The issue is not paying for bandwidth, the issue is the insane pricing.
champtar 3y ago
OVH (except for APAC data centers), I think Scaleway also has bandwidth included.
frankjr 3y ago
https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/#root-server-details https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/#root-server-details (with fair use policy)
mciancia 3y ago
https://www.scaleway.com/en/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/
- cdchn 3y ago
  No, they charge for bandwidth. https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/network/bandwidth/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/network/bandwidth/

maeln 3y ago

> Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. Which would mean that you loose part of the reason to use the cloud in the first place... A lot of org move to cloud based hosting because it enable them to go way further in FinOps / cost control (amongst many other thing). This can make a lot of sense depending on your infra, if you have some fluctuation in you needs (storage, compute, etc...), cloud based solution can be a great fit. At the end of the day, it is just a tool. I worked in places where I SSH´d into the prod bare-metal server to update our software, manage the firewall, check the storage, ... and all that manually. And I worked in places where we were using a cloud provider for most of our hosting needs. I also handle the transition from one to the other. All I can say is: It's a tool. "The cloud" is no better or worse than a bare-metal server or a VPS. It really depends on your use-case. You should just do your due diligence and evaluate the reason why one would fit you more than the other, and reevaluate it from time to time depending on the changes in your environment. This whole "cloud bad" is just childish.

andrewstuart 3y ago
>> This whole "cloud bad" is just childish. Not childish…. it’s a growing line of thought in the IT community that has bought the cloud sell unquestioningly for 20 years.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  But it's the same mindset as "cloud good", which was also a growing line of thought once. Mantras aren't useful; tradeoff analysis is useful.
  - whstl 3y ago
    The GP said "[if X happens] consider dropping the cloud". Which is totally different from a mantra. There is virtually nobody saying "cloud bad" without nuance.
  - mcny 3y ago
    Mantras are good for orgs that are not mature enough to do actual analysis. A lead developer left recently where I work and while it was likely higher pay that was the biggest decision to move, I suspect the real reason he left is higher ups simply don't listen when he says things like you can't just take full virtual machines on azure, refuse any rewrite/redesign while complaining about high azure spend.

api 3y ago

There are also many bare metal and VPS providers that charge radically less for bandwidth or even charge by size of pipe rather than transfer. Cloud bandwidth pricing is… well the best analogies are very inappropriate for this site.

antonvs 3y ago

> Host it yourself. If you're actually using the features of cloud - i.e. managed services - then this involves building out an IT department with skills that many companies just don't have. And the cost of that will easily negate or exceed any savings, in many cases. That's a big reason that the choice of cloud became such a no brainer for companies.

sgarland 3y ago
Next you’ll tell me that full-stack is a lie, and devs don’t actually know how to run a DB.
- blantonl 3y ago
  Maybe I don't want to manage a db, I just want to run one.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Full stack is a lie because devs don't build their own hardware.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    I don’t think it’s that ridiculous (the next obvious goalpost being producing your own silicon), but since microservices means your DB is purely for your service, it stands to reason that you should also then know how to configure, backup, maintain, and tune the DB. This is of course a wildly unrealistic ask, which is why I think the idea of merging jobs to save money is stupid. Let people who like frontend do frontend. Let people who like DBs do DBs. Let people who tolerate YAML do DevOps.

crabbone 3y ago

I don't think "host yourself" in this instance would've helped. I think AWS in this instance is operating at a loss. Author found a loophole in AWS pricing and that's why it's so cheap. Doing it on their own would've been more expensive. Now as to why the AWS pricing the way it is... we may only guess, but likely to promote one service over the other.

amluto 3y ago
AWS is surely operating at a loss for this particular case (zero S3 charge). But there is no way that cross-AZ traffic costs AWS anywhere near what they charge for it.

Jean-Papoulos 3y ago

>Seriously, if you’re at the point that you’re doing sophisticated analysis of cloud costs, consider dropping the cloud. The blog post's solution is relatively simple to put in place ; if you're already locked-in to AWS, dropping it will cost quite a lot and this might be a great middle ground in some cases.

belter 3y ago

Those VPS hosting services are a solution for a startup but not to run your internet banking, airline company or public sas product. Plus their infinite egress bandwidth and data transfer claims are only true, as long as you don't...Use infinite egress bandwidth and data transfer....

overstay8930 3y ago

If you're at the point you're doing sophisticated cloud cost analysis you are doing the cloud right, because that is completely impossible anywhere else. I swear the people who say go on premise have no idea how much the salary costs of someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab is. Even Apple iCloud is in AWS and GCP because of how economical it is, you suck at the cloud you think you have to go back on prem, or you just don't give a shit about reliability (start pricing up DDoS protection costs at anything higher than 10G and tell me the cloud is more expensive). We spend 100k+ on AWS bandwidth and it's still cheaper than our DIA circuits because we don't have to pay network engineers to manage 3 different AZs.

qvrjuec 3y ago
>someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab What does this mean? They steal company resources for themselves, or just configure things incompetently?
- ttul 3y ago
  Incompetence. Take my friend’s company for instance. They were frustrated paying $60K/mo to Amazon so their brilliant sysadmin bought $600K of servers and moved them into a cheap colo. Over Christmas, everything died, and the brilliant sysadmin was on holiday. Nobody could get things going again for many days and so their entire SaaS business was failing. They lost a lot of business and trust as a result. The sysadmin is now gone and they are back on AWS.
  - lijok 3y ago
    No key person risk management -> no risk register -> no management. Your friends company will fail regardless of poor sysadmin decision making or not. They need to hire competent management ASAP.
    - mdale 3y ago
      With cloud and SaaS services you are paying to reduce person risk profile. Your forming a larger dependency on a team lead against a custom system that now is a liability as new people come to the organization don't want to adopt an abandoned poorly understood project.

barkingcat 3y ago

also, if you really need to transfer hundreds of TB's of data from South Africa to the US, put it on a palette of disks and send it via bulk shipping. then load the data into the datacentre and then just pay for the last sync / delta.

esafak 3y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/

lijok 3y ago

This makes no sense. So what do I do if I'm at the point where I'm doing sophisticated analysis of on-prem costs? Do I move to the cloud?

Turing_Machine 3y ago

The tipping point for self-hosting would be the point at which paying for full-time, 24/7 on-call sysadmins (salary + benefits) is less than your cloud hosting bill. That's just not gonna happen for a lot of services.