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I'm always surprised to read how much money companies are willing to spend on things that can be done for essentially nothing. I had a look at the site - why d

I'm always surprised to read how much money companies are willing to spend on things that can be done for essentially nothing. I had a look at the site - why does this need to run on a major cloud provider at all? Why use VERY expensive cloud storage at 9 cents per gigabyte? Why use very expensive image conversion at $50/month when you can run sharp on a Linux server? I shouldn't be surprised - the world is all in on very expensive cloud computing. There's another way though assuming you are running something fairly "normal" (whatever that means) - run your own Linux servers. Serve data from those Linux computers. I use CloudFlare R2 to serve your files - its free. You probably don't need most of your fancy architecture - run a fast server on Ionos or Hetzner or something and stop angsting about budget alerts from Google for things that should be free and runnong on your own computers - simple,. straightforward and without IAM spaghetti and all that garbage. EDIT: I just had a look at the architecture diagram - this is overarchitected. This is a single server application that almost has no architecture - Caddy as a web server - a local queue - serve images from R2 - should be running on a single machine on a host that charges nothing or trivial amount for data.

BigParm 2y ago
How much does it cost to have an ISP let you do that? What are the barriers generally?
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  Let you do what? What barriers do you see?
  - jazir 2y ago
    > run your own Linux servers He might have thought it meant running servers on a home network instead of managing remote Linux servers.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  If you're referring to hosting on a home network, you'll probably be behind CGNAT. Your ISP can give you a dedicated IP but it'll most likely cost something.
frankjr 2y ago
> I use CloudFlare R2 to serve your files - its free. I mean technically it's not free. It's just that they have a very generous "Forever Free" number of read operations (10M/month, $0.36 per million after).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
blibble 2y ago
yeah, as a crotchety old unix guy, 10k requests a second was a benchmark 30 years ago on an actual server today a raspberry pi 5 can do 50k/s with TLS no sweat
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Can you give me an example of how to do 50k/s with TLS on an rpi? Also what do you use to measure that? I've tried a little with httpd (apache) on an older desktop I use as my home server and got terrible results. I can't remember but it might have been single digit or low double digit rps.
  - andrewstuart 2y ago
    try with caddy
  - cuu508 2y ago
    Based on these benchmark numbers, 50k/s seems plausible (not sure about the no sweat bit though ;-)): https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfssl-on-pi5-benchmarks/ https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfssl-on-pi5-benchmarks/ Also found this bit: > But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions, which make it 45x faster at AES, for instance. With TLS almost everywhere, this keeps crypto performance from becoming the bottleneck. Nice. (https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-than-two-pi-4s/ https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-t...)
dyogenez 2y ago
If you're able to do that, then you have a huge skill! I'm not much of a devops engineer myself, so I'm leveraging work done by others. My skills are in application design. For hosting I try to rely on what others have built and host there. If I had your skills then our costs would be much smaller. As it stands now we pay about $700/month for everything - the bulk of it for a 16gb ram / 512gb space database.
ksnsnsj 2y ago
I have read this argument before. Of cause you can do everything yourself _but it is not free_ You are missing both development cost and much more importantly opportunity cost If I spent a person year on a cheap run architecture while my competitor spent a person year on a value add feature add, he will win
- cuu508 2y ago
  Depends on what skills you have, but running everything on a single machine rather than messing with multiple cloud services can also be cheaper in development cost.
Spivak 2y ago
Don't use cloud, use these two other clouds. This right here is the issue, the skills and know how to buy hardware, install it in a data center, and get it on the internet are niche beyond niche. Entering the world where you're dealing with Cogent, your Dell and Fortinet reps, suddenly having strong opinions about iDRAC vs iLO and hardware RAID is well beyond what anyone wants to care about just to run some web servers. When people talk about major cloud providers being expensive the alternative is never /really/ to do it yourself but move to a discount hosting provider. And it's not as if there isn't savings to be found there but it's just another form of cloud optimization. We're talking about a story where $100 of spend triggers an alert. The difference is so minuscule.
rob 2y ago
Looks like a site you could build in WordPress with some custom plugins like ACF and host on a single VPS for the most part.

BigParm 2y ago

How much does it cost to have an ISP let you do that? What are the barriers generally?

andrewstuart 2y ago
Let you do what? What barriers do you see?
- jazir 2y ago
  > run your own Linux servers He might have thought it meant running servers on a home network instead of managing remote Linux servers.
hypeatei 2y ago
If you're referring to hosting on a home network, you'll probably be behind CGNAT. Your ISP can give you a dedicated IP but it'll most likely cost something.

frankjr 2y ago

> I use CloudFlare R2 to serve your files - its free. I mean technically it's not free. It's just that they have a very generous "Forever Free" number of read operations (10M/month, $0.36 per million after).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

blibble 2y ago

yeah, as a crotchety old unix guy, 10k requests a second was a benchmark 30 years ago on an actual server today a raspberry pi 5 can do 50k/s with TLS no sweat

BenjiWiebe 2y ago
Can you give me an example of how to do 50k/s with TLS on an rpi? Also what do you use to measure that? I've tried a little with httpd (apache) on an older desktop I use as my home server and got terrible results. I can't remember but it might have been single digit or low double digit rps.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  try with caddy
- cuu508 2y ago
  Based on these benchmark numbers, 50k/s seems plausible (not sure about the no sweat bit though ;-)): https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfssl-on-pi5-benchmarks/ https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfssl-on-pi5-benchmarks/ Also found this bit: > But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions, which make it 45x faster at AES, for instance. With TLS almost everywhere, this keeps crypto performance from becoming the bottleneck. Nice. (https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-than-two-pi-4s/ https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-t...)

dyogenez 2y ago

If you're able to do that, then you have a huge skill! I'm not much of a devops engineer myself, so I'm leveraging work done by others. My skills are in application design. For hosting I try to rely on what others have built and host there. If I had your skills then our costs would be much smaller. As it stands now we pay about $700/month for everything - the bulk of it for a 16gb ram / 512gb space database.

ksnsnsj 2y ago

I have read this argument before. Of cause you can do everything yourself _but it is not free_ You are missing both development cost and much more importantly opportunity cost If I spent a person year on a cheap run architecture while my competitor spent a person year on a value add feature add, he will win

cuu508 2y ago
Depends on what skills you have, but running everything on a single machine rather than messing with multiple cloud services can also be cheaper in development cost.

Spivak 2y ago

Don't use cloud, use these two other clouds. This right here is the issue, the skills and know how to buy hardware, install it in a data center, and get it on the internet are niche beyond niche. Entering the world where you're dealing with Cogent, your Dell and Fortinet reps, suddenly having strong opinions about iDRAC vs iLO and hardware RAID is well beyond what anyone wants to care about just to run some web servers. When people talk about major cloud providers being expensive the alternative is never /really/ to do it yourself but move to a discount hosting provider. And it's not as if there isn't savings to be found there but it's just another form of cloud optimization. We're talking about a story where $100 of spend triggers an alert. The difference is so minuscule.

rob 2y ago

Looks like a site you could build in WordPress with some custom plugins like ACF and host on a single VPS for the most part.