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Comment by brootstrap | Hacker News Reader

After years of working with AWS this is not surprising. You can have developers with minimal sys admin / dev ops building instances and running jobs. Back in early days of my startup I recall my team launching a big model run and leaving for weekend. We can back on monday to a 10k bill and thousands of compute hours... That did not go well, 10k on a few days of compute for a small startup haha! Still to this day we've got tons of EC2 instances lying around racking up charges. We dont have the devops support to build proper auto-scaling, making things really fit AWS. We just needed a server to run 24/7 and this was easy.

Can only imagine the insanity that goes on at huge Pinterest level scale. How many EC2 instances do they have? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

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Fender showcased how much they use AWS at the recent re:Invent. They moved more services to AWS, while still increasing usage, and still reduced their AWS spend. Because it sounds like they did it the right way and used AWS services effectively.

I've spent a lot of time helping web developers, that don't have a ton of infrastructure experience, that get into AWS and they almost always do it the wrong way (the most expensive way). As in, they take whatever they were running on-premise and just throw it on EC2.

Would that be the quick keynote excerpt? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F61GtueelP4

Or their IoT talk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7oqSTmrfVc

It’s the quick keynote. Starts around 6:30. AWS spend down 15% even though traffic is 21x what it was a year ago.

if you just have webservers, api gateway + lambda is the way to go Edit: to make myself clear, I meant the backend, frontend, of course, should be served like below

Cloudfront + S3 for static sites.

I've seen so many people just create an EC2 instance for serving static content.

If you have a banging new React app that generates static files, you don't need anything more.

of course, I meant it backend-wise

lambda gets incredibly expensive for anything that approaches even modest usage levels. Once you exceed about 10 requests/second, you'd be better off with the lowest tier virtualized instances ($2 - $5/mo from most providers including AWS)

Not if your usage patterns spike dramatically.

Once worked at a place that needed to do rapid crawls of websites on short notice and we saved a lot of money by moving from.dedocatrd instances to lamdas that we could scale out and down as needed.

How you use them is important.

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