5 ms·

> Are they using AWS? Yes!

by re-thc 2y ago

Laaas 2y ago
You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.
- fendy3002 2y ago
  honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper? Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes. There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.
  - jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
    for compute of containerized payloads, in house servers is a no brainer for cost. almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the troubles of working with eks/ecs. now for storage and db, that's a different story.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.
- happyopossum 2y ago
  > if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit It’s clearly not if the founder isn’t taking a salary and they just had to lay off their only employee..
andrewstuart 2y ago
$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.
- dspillett 2y ago
  If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someone (or assign time from existing people) to manage the accounts with your various providers, you won't want tens+ of VPSs from just one provider like that. Of and on backups & failover, you need person-time (and other resources, but the people are probably the expensive part from the business PoV) to regularly test and adjust all of that, so you can be reasonably sure it all works when actually needed. And you need to manage replacing those people when/if they decide to move on to something new, etc… Also note that a lot of the things you are paying for (CPU cores, traffic, network throughput) in those nodes are shared resources (that Gbit link especially) and/or have “fair use” policies attached to them, and while the same might be true of cloud providers those policies are often either more generous or (perhaps more important from the business stability PoV) at least better defined. “Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes, even if you add in all the above and the things I no doubt forgot to mention, but it does give a lot more than the same cost in individual nodes than this sort of comparison suggests. And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense. In DayJob we use Azure a lot, and sometimes I see the costs of certain things¹² and balk, and we do still have infrastructure people to manage the platform, but overall it works better for us than managing our own resources more directly. We have an extra complication due to our client base (regulated companies like banks and insurers, who are storing PII of both their own people and their customers with us) in that we have to give a lot of assurances on security and such which would be more work (it is already a _lot_ of work as anyone else in that sort of B2B arena can attest) if we self-managed everything. ---- [1] $2,400/yr for SFTP access to a storage account if you need it available 24/7?! Especially given we have at least one such account per client as their requirements understandably require that level of separation. I think we'll keep using the relay & management dashboard I setup in a few cheap VMs, thanks… [2] and the performance given the costs: AzureSQL³ I'm looking at you! [3] though again, some of that cost is in things like the scaling flexibility and other infrastructure convenience, which the business finds worth paying for

> Are they using AWS? Yes!

by re-thc 2y ago

> Are they using AWS? Yes!

You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.

fendy3002 2y ago
honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?
- re-thc 2y ago
  > is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper? Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes. There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.
- jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
  for compute of containerized payloads, in house servers is a no brainer for cost. almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the troubles of working with eks/ecs. now for storage and db, that's a different story.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.
happyopossum 2y ago
> if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit It’s clearly not if the founder isn’t taking a salary and they just had to lay off their only employee..

andrewstuart 2y ago

$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.

dspillett 2y ago
If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someone (or assign time from existing people) to manage the accounts with your various providers, you won't want tens+ of VPSs from just one provider like that. Of and on backups & failover, you need person-time (and other resources, but the people are probably the expensive part from the business PoV) to regularly test and adjust all of that, so you can be reasonably sure it all works when actually needed. And you need to manage replacing those people when/if they decide to move on to something new, etc… Also note that a lot of the things you are paying for (CPU cores, traffic, network throughput) in those nodes are shared resources (that Gbit link especially) and/or have “fair use” policies attached to them, and while the same might be true of cloud providers those policies are often either more generous or (perhaps more important from the business stability PoV) at least better defined. “Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes, even if you add in all the above and the things I no doubt forgot to mention, but it does give a lot more than the same cost in individual nodes than this sort of comparison suggests. And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense. In DayJob we use Azure a lot, and sometimes I see the costs of certain things¹² and balk, and we do still have infrastructure people to manage the platform, but overall it works better for us than managing our own resources more directly. We have an extra complication due to our client base (regulated companies like banks and insurers, who are storing PII of both their own people and their customers with us) in that we have to give a lot of assurances on security and such which would be more work (it is already a _lot_ of work as anyone else in that sort of B2B arena can attest) if we self-managed everything. ---- [1] $2,400/yr for SFTP access to a storage account if you need it available 24/7?! Especially given we have at least one such account per client as their requirements understandably require that level of separation. I think we'll keep using the relay & management dashboard I setup in a few cheap VMs, thanks… [2] and the performance given the costs: AzureSQL³ I'm looking at you! [3] though again, some of that cost is in things like the scaling flexibility and other infrastructure convenience, which the business finds worth paying for