4 ms·

For what reason should we move from SNS/SQS to RabbitMQ? Our SaaS processes ~20 events/second.

by edweis 2y ago

declan_roberts 2y ago
That's like $0.50/day in aws costs. Absolutely no reason to switch if it's working.
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago
  When you said that number, I had a completely different reaction. 20 messages per second is absolutely nothing, $0.50 per day for that is dreadful. A $5 per month ($0.16 per day) VPS can deliver many thousands of messages per second.
  - zedpm 2y ago
    $10/month difference is, to use your phrasing, absolutely nothing. It's not worth anyone's time to make that switch unless it's some toy app paid for out of pocket.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Alupis 2y ago
      Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket. The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage. The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead. A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software. It's not always that clear cut, however.
      - infecto 2y ago
        I think it is fairly clear. If you are building a product of passion that you may tinker with for years, by all means cut costs as much as possible. If you are an actual early stage venture I don't believe those costs meet a high enough threshold to matter.
        Alupis 2y ago
        It depends, as things usually do. $20 here, $10 there, eventually ends up as $600 monthly or more, and no customer anywhere in sight. That may, or may not be sustainable or make sense. Flush with cash? Knock yourself out. Bootstrapping? You can spend that money a lot more effectively than just loading up on a bunch of overpriced SaaS products to make life easier. You have to earn the easy route by growing your revenue.
        infecto 2y ago
        It does not depend though. It’s pretty clear that it’s how you value your time which is what I was getting to.
        bdcravens 2y ago
        This math works if you're not paying salary.
  - infecto 2y ago
    When I read this message I think this an absolutely terrible waste of time for a startup/small company. I want to spend my time building features not infrastructure.
    - RadiozRadioz 2y ago
      This stuff is so trivially easy these days. 20 years ago it was hard to deploy a clustered message queue application, but now we've got so much open source tooling. Are you telling me you can't deploy RabbitMQ in an afternoon? Give it a day or two and you've got a monitoring stack and some swanky GitOps. Now your OpEx has been reduced 80x for hardly doing anything. As for continual maintenance, us-east-1 has gone down more times in the past year than my RabbitMQ cluster has gone down in 5. Because the tech really has improved, and it really is easy now.
      - declan_roberts 2y ago
        Who wants to monitor and be oncall for a critical rabbitMQ service that someone only runs to save $15/month? Even if there's one outage it's already worth just paying for it.
      - infecto 2y ago
        Depends if you value your time more than minimum wage. There is certainly a time and a place for everything but I don’t really feel like being responsible for something that costs the $N a month managed. Sure I could do it myself but my time is worth more. When you think about it, ideally most managed services have found some natural price for their services that helps make the above logic work. And if it does not, it might be actually overpriced. I suspect a lot of folks that say roll your own are undervaluing their time.
        RadiozRadioz 2y ago
        You should also consider the value of being in total control of your infra. I value that immensely.
  - halfcat 2y ago
    Your time is worth more than the $0.34/day saved.
stackskipton 2y ago
You TRULY NEED to be multicloud? That would be only reason. Otherwise, assuming SNS/SQS is meeting your needs well, I wouldn't even consider it. You are paying ~20 USD per month with no maintenance costs. That's hell of a deal.
pantsforbirds 2y ago
I probably wouldn't swap unless you have a specific complaint with SNS/SQS. I do like how easy it is to spin up Rabbit locally via docker-compose for testing, but I don't think that convenience is worth refactoring a significant portion of your code base.

For what reason should we move from SNS/SQS to RabbitMQ? Our SaaS processes ~20 events/second.

by edweis 2y ago

For what reason should we move from SNS/SQS to RabbitMQ? Our SaaS processes ~20 events/second.

declan_roberts 2y ago

That's like $0.50/day in aws costs. Absolutely no reason to switch if it's working.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago
When you said that number, I had a completely different reaction. 20 messages per second is absolutely nothing, $0.50 per day for that is dreadful. A $5 per month ($0.16 per day) VPS can deliver many thousands of messages per second.
- zedpm 2y ago
  $10/month difference is, to use your phrasing, absolutely nothing. It's not worth anyone's time to make that switch unless it's some toy app paid for out of pocket.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket. The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage. The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead. A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software. It's not always that clear cut, however.
    - infecto 2y ago
      I think it is fairly clear. If you are building a product of passion that you may tinker with for years, by all means cut costs as much as possible. If you are an actual early stage venture I don't believe those costs meet a high enough threshold to matter.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        It depends, as things usually do. $20 here, $10 there, eventually ends up as $600 monthly or more, and no customer anywhere in sight. That may, or may not be sustainable or make sense. Flush with cash? Knock yourself out. Bootstrapping? You can spend that money a lot more effectively than just loading up on a bunch of overpriced SaaS products to make life easier. You have to earn the easy route by growing your revenue.
        infecto 2y ago
        It does not depend though. It’s pretty clear that it’s how you value your time which is what I was getting to.
        bdcravens 2y ago
        This math works if you're not paying salary.
- infecto 2y ago
  When I read this message I think this an absolutely terrible waste of time for a startup/small company. I want to spend my time building features not infrastructure.
  - RadiozRadioz 2y ago
    This stuff is so trivially easy these days. 20 years ago it was hard to deploy a clustered message queue application, but now we've got so much open source tooling. Are you telling me you can't deploy RabbitMQ in an afternoon? Give it a day or two and you've got a monitoring stack and some swanky GitOps. Now your OpEx has been reduced 80x for hardly doing anything. As for continual maintenance, us-east-1 has gone down more times in the past year than my RabbitMQ cluster has gone down in 5. Because the tech really has improved, and it really is easy now.
    - declan_roberts 2y ago
      Who wants to monitor and be oncall for a critical rabbitMQ service that someone only runs to save $15/month? Even if there's one outage it's already worth just paying for it.
    - infecto 2y ago
      Depends if you value your time more than minimum wage. There is certainly a time and a place for everything but I don’t really feel like being responsible for something that costs the $N a month managed. Sure I could do it myself but my time is worth more. When you think about it, ideally most managed services have found some natural price for their services that helps make the above logic work. And if it does not, it might be actually overpriced. I suspect a lot of folks that say roll your own are undervaluing their time.
      - RadiozRadioz 2y ago
        You should also consider the value of being in total control of your infra. I value that immensely.
- halfcat 2y ago
  Your time is worth more than the $0.34/day saved.

stackskipton 2y ago

You TRULY NEED to be multicloud? That would be only reason. Otherwise, assuming SNS/SQS is meeting your needs well, I wouldn't even consider it. You are paying ~20 USD per month with no maintenance costs. That's hell of a deal.

pantsforbirds 2y ago

I probably wouldn't swap unless you have a specific complaint with SNS/SQS. I do like how easy it is to spin up Rabbit locally via docker-compose for testing, but I don't think that convenience is worth refactoring a significant portion of your code base.