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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

Biggest mistake I’ve made:

Shifting any non trivial infrastructure into AWS verbatim is always more expensive than running it yourself. You need to rearchitect it carefully around the PaaS services to make a cost saving or even break even.

An extreme example of this is it cousin who works for a small dev company doing LOB stuff. They moved their SQL box into EC2 and it’s costing more to run that single RDS instance than their entire legacy infra cost was per year.

I’d still rather use AWS though. The biggest gain is not technology but not having to argue with several vendor sales teams or file a PO and wait for finance to approve it. All I do is click a button and the thing’s there.

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> The biggest gain is not technology but not having to argue with several vendor sales teams or file a PO and wait for finance to approve it. All I do is click a button and the thing’s there.

This is so ridiculous. I have to argue endlessly (and again for every employee) with IT support and enterprise security to give them the ability to upload attachments on Teams.

But giving that same person access to start a few $100/hour instances on AWS? No problem.

The balance is completely out of whack once your infra is on AWS.

But that's the thing. A senior engineer is also costing a business ~$100/h (all in) so even if you accept that there will be a fair amount of waste (misconfigurations, devs spinning up boxes and then forgetting about them, PoC projects never torn down, etc) it can still be a net-positive proposition. People always want to compare the cost of compute/storage/bandwidth but that isn't really the value proposition. Of course you are going to pay more for cloud-hosted infra than for equivalent infra in a colo or on-prem DC. But I used to spend hundreds of hours a year doing random busy work to deal with on-prem infrastructure. Need a new server, put in a ticket and when the ticket gets no response follow up with emails and finally setup a meeting to discuss with the ops team. Need a new firewall rule, same deal.

Have them build an s3 attachment service and just let finance know you are spending $X/yr and you have ideas for streamlining IT support that would eliminate the cost.

It's always more expensive to have someone else run your infrastructure than to do it yourself unless it's something you only use intermittently.

If you need 5 seconds of compute time per day then running that as a Lambda makes perfect sense. If you need a database server that's available 24/7 then I can't see how hosting that on Amazon could be cheaper.

(Unless you're employing a full time ops person to look after that one server, in which case you'll have to do your own maths.)

Previous job, I ran website on RDS for about 7 years and only touched the control panel to restore from a backup when we'd screwed up the data, and to tell it when to upgrade. That was worth quite a lot in ops time and piece of mind.

Database crashing on a hosted service is such a rate event unless you mess it up yourself running rouge queries. No surprise there. It doesn't have to be AWS though. Can be Digital Ocean or anything else.

Well that 24/7 db server is not going to back up itself and maintain itself when the HW fails or the power goes out. This is not trivial/cheap to assure and maintain. Likewise with hosting your own S3. The value is not in the HW really (and the cloud providers know this when pricing).

I have this setup on AWS and look at "bringing it home" every year but the nightmare of having to assure a good level of availability is not worth the saving of a few extra $1000 per year for us at least. Completely different issues not related to your HW can happen, your office internet simply goes down or power goes out while you're on vacation etc..

At least there is major competition between a lot of cloud providers nowadays so nobody can get away with insane prices anymore. Though, would be cool to see some kind of standardised price comparision metric for medium/high complexity cloud setups. Sort of how you compare grocery prices, you have a standard purchase list.

> Well that 24/7 db server is not going to back up itself and maintain itself when the HW fails or the power goes out.

Uh, yeah, that's why you pay IT people to do that sort of thing. Hiring your own will almost certainly be less expensive than paying Amazon's people, and provides you more control and more options in the event of any problems. It's not like AWS never has problems, and when it does all you can do is twiddle your thumbs until someone else fixes it.

In what world do you live in where competent IT support for production infrastructure is cheap?

The one that doesn't live in SV.

It’s cheaper for us to bring our own staff and licenses than pay for RDS at our scale :)

Once you hit that point, AWS will almost always cut you some specific pricing deals to ensure that your pain point is competitively priced, since they want you in the ecosystem anyways.

Yep that. Lambda is a massive win for me personally. I have some scraping and processing stuff that runs daily. Costs me $0.60 a month to run it even outside of free tier which is less than a cheap DO or linode box and I don’t have to look after the OS.

Same. Powershell script that collects links from Pinboard and posts them to my blog. It would be massively overkill to run a whole server for that. (And Microsoft charges me about £0.15 per month)

I can confirm that: cloud helps to evade the incompetent sales and infrastructure teams in many companies. Saving money never works once your product scales out.

> Shifting any non trivial infrastructure into AWS verbatim is always more expensive than running it yourself.

The free tier of AWS lambdas has enough room to do non-trivial applications for free, and in EC2 we can get t2.micro and t3.micro instances (2vCPU, 1GB RAM) with 750h/month for free, which pretty much means you can have the instance running the whole month for free.

Depending on what you need to do, in the very least it's possible to run a system (or parts of it ) for free, which is hard to beat.

Having said this, allowing a system architect to go nuts with AWS without being mindful of its cost is something that easily gets far too expensive far too fast. If all anyone wants is EC2 and there's no need for global deployments then you'd be better off going with cloud providers such as Hetzner. A couple of minutes with a calculator and a napkin at hand is enough to arrive at the conclusion that AWS makes absolutely no sense, cost-wise.

Wouldn‘t it make sense booki g typical SaaS on AWS marketplace? I mean you wouldn‘t have to talk to the billing department, just activate a SaaS within AWS and everything is put on your normal AWS bill?

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