“Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS”

“Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS”(chaordic.io)

48 points by wfaler 3 years ago | 10 comments

Spivak 3 years ago |

> Yes, you get the benefit of backups, auto-restore, increased reliability etc, but.. How to set up HA databases with frequent backups and auto-restore is pretty common knowledge at this point.

Oh my god I’m gonna make this into a poster, my DBA friends will love it. But seriously these are not common skills — these are skills you pay $200k for and still struggle to find quality people. If you found yourself somewhere where the average SWE can set up a metal to production ready HA DB with turnkey live restores dm me your location so I can start looking on Zillow.

Also we’re just gonna gloss over that the AWS setup includes a HA managed load balancer that Hetnzer doesn’t as well as the k8s control plane.

Normally I’m on here telling people how not scary and complicated on-prem (ish in this case) deployments are but I think I’ve actually found someone who actually swung the other way.

wfaler 3 years ago | |

AWS, GCP et al have already commoditized DB management. These are pretty well-defined steps, there are no good reason why they should require you to pay someone $200k specifically for those.

I think the natural evolution is that both smaller cloud providers AND open source catches up, providing either managed services that are equivalent, or software that effectively makes your DB and other services feel like a managed service.

turtlebits 3 years ago | |

Access control is also something that gets overlooked, network security and centralized metrics, logging, alerting (personally not a fan of cloudwatch*, but it can get the job done).

jacooper 3 years ago |

I think people should just be more open to use other providers. Not immediately jump to AWS when they want to host anything, especially due to it's pricing and overhead.

Linode, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, OVH and many others will probably be enough or sometimes better for your use case while still being cheaper.

zxcvbn4038 3 years ago | |

AWS leads in support, my employer continues to pay their prices just because we know we can get someone on the phone in a couple minutes if we are in a jam, and we’ll get real help and answers from that person. GCP is always trying to win us with a truckload of free credits, but we know what their support is like, so we aren’t taking the bait.

I would be really curious to know what people think of the support from Oracle Cloud. Their pricing is significantly lower then AWS and many of the interfaces seem so similar it would just be search and replace on our terraform templates to start bringing things up. If I had to go multi cloud they would be the first place I investigated seriously, but it’s a no-go if their support is anything like GCP.

mpalfrey 3 years ago | | |

Yep. I've spent evenings on the phone with AWS support in the past. We spend a lot with them, but their support was excellent and I was able to get on the phone pretty quick (it was issues with an Elasticsearch cluster that crashed).

Overall they're different tools, for maybe different situations. I like AWS and it'd be my usual go to (I'm AWS certified) and also like Azure (I love Azure resource groups - they make life pretty nice). Not used GCP in anger. I've also spent years running software on premises (I kind of miss these days as I did a load of travel when things went wrong!).

The smaller players have insanely good pricing and I'd see why you'd want to use them. But for something like an e-commerce application I think I'd just feel happier hosting it on one of the big players. Not to mention it might be an easier sell from e.g. a compliance point of view (disclaimer, I've not read up into what e.g. Hetzner supports in terms of PCI etc compliance).

nkotov 3 years ago |

The writer concludes that we should deploy and manage our PaaS. This answer is in the same vain as "just buy your own servers". The point of using AWS is that I don't need to manage or even worry about of it. I pay the premium of using EKS & ECS so that I don't personally need to manage my clusters. Going backwards isn't an answer.

nobodyandproud 3 years ago | |

I think the author is on to something.

I imagine hybrid solutions and infrastructure software like Nextcloud (but for PaaS and businesses) will be the next step.

If the business is large enough, choosing to become vendor-locked means becoming less cost effective and therefore less competitive.

andrejguran 3 years ago |

In the AWS 80% of the bill is Cloudfront. Why not putting Cloudflare on top of AWS and you have almost the same price. This article is basically comparing paid vs free CDN...

wfaler 3 years ago | |

Why yes. The point is AWS is charging people through the nose for bandwidth.

Switch the bandwidth past Cloudfront, and you still pay bandwidth costs that no one else charges.

It's no wonder Cloudflare and a bunch of other providers have latched onto this in their positioning to AWS.