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"AWS is expensive when you compare only the raw server costs and do not use reserved instances. But that premium lets you focus on building your product far mor

by timr 13y ago

"AWS is expensive when you compare only the raw server costs and do not use reserved instances. But that premium lets you focus on building your product far more than going with a self managed machine." Sometimes it's faster and more cost-effective to use AWS. Other times -- such as when you spend a lot of time and/or money making up for the performance limits of the platform -- you lose. It all depends on what you need, and there are clear engineering trade-offs at play. The problem comes when you don't make rational choices. If you're writing blog posts about how you're "all in" on one platform or another, you're either linkbaiting (this seems most likely to me), or you're not being rational about your choices. Let's be honest: it isn't that hard to manage a rack of servers. Any competent engineer should be able to do the basic sysadmin tasks necessary, and aside from the setup costs, the amortized maintenance costs should be on the order of a few hours a month. Certainly, the wildly overblown claims of entire teams spending months to set up a few colocated servers...well, those teams are either completely incompetent, or there's some exaggeration going on. Don't be afraid of colocating. Just be rational about what you need.

btgeekboy 13y ago
We don't use AWS/etc, we have 3 colo spaces in various locations around the country. We've never visited two of them; a small fee gets your equipment racked and connected, and remote hands does the rest as needed. The local one we visit maybe 3 times a year, usually to install new equipment. The overhead of dealing with hardware, especially for applications that don't have massive exponential growth, is really not as big of a deal as it sounds.
- spongle 13y ago
  Indeed. We have 6x 42U racks across three datacentres in the UK packed with network hardware, servers, san and other kit. Stuff doesn't really go wrong that often. Our ops guys probably go there once a quarter. Most of the time, you can manage it remotely. The only main failure point appears to be disks but you can just mail them to the DC and get them to stick it in for a small fee.

by timr 13y ago

btgeekboy 13y ago

We don't use AWS/etc, we have 3 colo spaces in various locations around the country. We've never visited two of them; a small fee gets your equipment racked and connected, and remote hands does the rest as needed. The local one we visit maybe 3 times a year, usually to install new equipment. The overhead of dealing with hardware, especially for applications that don't have massive exponential growth, is really not as big of a deal as it sounds.

spongle 13y ago
Indeed. We have 6x 42U racks across three datacentres in the UK packed with network hardware, servers, san and other kit. Stuff doesn't really go wrong that often. Our ops guys probably go there once a quarter. Most of the time, you can manage it remotely. The only main failure point appears to be disks but you can just mail them to the DC and get them to stick it in for a small fee.