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I have seen multiple startups paying thousands of dollars a month in AWS bills to run a tiny service which could trivially run on an $800 desktop on a residenti

I have seen multiple startups paying thousands of dollars a month in AWS bills to run a tiny service which could trivially run on an $800 desktop on a residential internet connection. It's absolutely tragic.

hedora 1y ago
That’s like $24K a year. Assuming they have working failover and business continuity plans, it’s actually a really good deal (vs having a 10-20% time employee deal with it).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- whstl 1y ago
  AWS doesn't get magically expensive just because you put your website there. You don't get to an overcomplicated AWS madness without having a few engineers already pushing complexity. And an overcomplicated setup also means it needs maintenance. There are no personnel savings there.
  - hedora 1y ago
    For one VM, EBS with backups gives you business continuity. You could get manual failover with a single writer replicated managed Postgres setup and a warm VM. That’s on the order of a thousand a month for a medium workload. It’s probably a 10x markup vs buying the servers, but it doesn’t matter if it saves an employee.
    - whstl 1y ago
      It doesn’t save employees. Over-complicated infrastructure doesn’t magically appear out of nowhere. Someone has to setup and maintain. It’s expensive.
kaydub 1y ago
Then they architected and built it out wrong. It's pretty simple to run low cost services in AWS. If you're small enough that an $800 desktop on a home internet connection will handle it, surely you could run it completely serverless for much less. I'm surprised how many people I see wanting to go on-prem vs AWS/public cloud. Feels penny smart and pound foolish to me. Lots of people too deep into the technical side of things that they don't even understand the business side.
- winrid 1y ago
  Hard to say. A $800 desktop could easily equal the compute of $100k/mo in lambda costs.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
  You vastly underestimate what you can do on prem. Equivalent elastic compute for a $800 desktop that uses $100/mo in electricity is >$2000/mo. As sibling points out, it could easily be much much more depending on what you're doing. Bandwidth is usually the killer with AWS. Bandwidth on prem is free. Some cloud vendors are much better, in fairness.

hedora 1y ago

That’s like $24K a year. Assuming they have working failover and business continuity plans, it’s actually a really good deal (vs having a 10-20% time employee deal with it).

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
whstl 1y ago
AWS doesn't get magically expensive just because you put your website there. You don't get to an overcomplicated AWS madness without having a few engineers already pushing complexity. And an overcomplicated setup also means it needs maintenance. There are no personnel savings there.
- hedora 1y ago
  For one VM, EBS with backups gives you business continuity. You could get manual failover with a single writer replicated managed Postgres setup and a warm VM. That’s on the order of a thousand a month for a medium workload. It’s probably a 10x markup vs buying the servers, but it doesn’t matter if it saves an employee.
  - whstl 1y ago
    It doesn’t save employees. Over-complicated infrastructure doesn’t magically appear out of nowhere. Someone has to setup and maintain. It’s expensive.

kaydub 1y ago

Then they architected and built it out wrong. It's pretty simple to run low cost services in AWS. If you're small enough that an $800 desktop on a home internet connection will handle it, surely you could run it completely serverless for much less. I'm surprised how many people I see wanting to go on-prem vs AWS/public cloud. Feels penny smart and pound foolish to me. Lots of people too deep into the technical side of things that they don't even understand the business side.

winrid 1y ago
Hard to say. A $800 desktop could easily equal the compute of $100k/mo in lambda costs.
jcalvinowens 1y ago
You vastly underestimate what you can do on prem. Equivalent elastic compute for a $800 desktop that uses $100/mo in electricity is >$2000/mo. As sibling points out, it could easily be much much more depending on what you're doing. Bandwidth is usually the killer with AWS. Bandwidth on prem is free. Some cloud vendors are much better, in fairness.