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Comment by FpUser | Hacker News Reader

There is a life beyond AWS. I host applications (including ones responsible for 10s of millions in revenue) on dedicated servers rented from Hetzner and OVH. Do not even do containers as my normal deployment is server per particular business (with standby) and the cost of renting a dedicated server comparatively to revenue is microscopic. CI/CD / setup from scratch / backup / restore is handled by a single bash script and has virtually zero administration overhead. For my model I see zero business benefits doing anything on cloud. I did some deployments on Azure due to a particular client requesting it but management overhead was way higher and do not even start on costs vs performance.

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The business benefits of the cloud are ability to scale, an API for everything, cheap automation, cheap managed services for everything, and good customer support. Like you say for your model none of those things may be important, but they're killer features for others

>"ability to scale"

I write C++ business API servers. On the type of hardware I rent from Hetzner /OVH they're capable of processing thousands of requests per second. This would cover probably 90+ percent of real world businesses.

>"an API for everything"

Not sure what you mean here. API for what in particular? My servers talk to partner systems of real businesses. We consume their APIs and they consume ours. Integration is done by little plugins that translate requests should it be needed. I am not sure how Amazon will help in this department. The only generic API that everyone uses is email but you do not need Amazon for that. As for database - I always deploy one local to my business server.

>"good customer support"

Frankly in many years there was like 2-3 times when I needed something resembling support from Hetzner / OVH. In either case the response was prompt and satisfactory.

> > "an API for everything"

> Not sure what you mean here.

I assume referring to APIs for controlling and monitoring the infrastructure, not anything about APIs you may provide in your application or consume from external sources.

What infrastructure? Thanks to my primitive approach I hardly have any.

If you want to dynamically provision storage or grab an extra instance when you’re under load or something. It’s handy to not have to sit on a bunch of storage you’re not using just in case there’s a rush.

Unless the storage (or compute) is so cheap that it's cheaper to just always have enough on hand than bother with autoscaling and the added complexity and potential point of failure.

Old-school dedicated servers are so cheap that you can match a startups' peak autoscaled load and still pay less than their "idle" load.

Exactly my case. My peak load costs are way less than their "idle". Storage expansion if needed is even simpler to handle. Those cloudy people like to create problems where none exists.

Of course there are use cases where not using cloud facilities is cheaper, but unless your business is low margin the difference might still be irrelevant and having the managed services available easily can be handy if you ever need them.

There are many use cases where hosting fee is not the right thing to optimize for.

The last time I compared hosting prices of AWS with self-hosting. AWS based hosting would have cost us every three month the cost of buying over the top speced server hardware. These numbers are not directly comparable, but they are a large difference to account for colocation and maintenance. And we never managed to get a similar performance of postgres on AWS compared to the self-hosted version we use now. But the main advantage is the simplification you get. It is certainly not easier to use you own hardware, but it is far simpler.

Playing devil’s delegate with a normal process how we launch new service in big tech:

1. Have you done a security review and ideally pen-testing from a 3rd party? Are you fully TLS from end to end, are you aware of any exploitable vector from your API/UI and how you mitigate them

2. How do you handle software patching and vulnerabilities?

3. Do you consider your app Operational ready? Can you rollback, do you audit changes, do you need multi-AZ resilience, do you need cell based arch. Did someone other than yourself or outside your team look at your monitoring dashboard? Do you need to be paged at 3am if some of your dependencies or underlying node degrades. We have to answer a 50 questions template and review it multiple times..

4. Did you calculate the cost and forecast it with how the service/app may grow in the next 12-36 months?

While you still need to do all this when using a Cloud providers, you probably _should_ do much more if you manage the bare metal

If you have already done all those, Kudos to you, but I still find it hard to trust everyone who DIY

To beelzebub the devil...how many large scale hacks/data leaks/embarrassment from large companies are because of a misconfigured S3 bucket?

My clients do / pay for whatever the audits are required in their line of business. I do not get involved unless told to do some particular things.

>" but I still find it hard to trust everyone who DIY"

It depends on what is the actual DIY part is. In any way it is your problem. Not mine. Sorry to say but to me your whole post feels like typical FUD scaremongering client to cloud.

>"While you still need to do all this when using a Cloud providers, you probably _should_ do much more if you manage the bare metal"

No I should not probably do much more. I do much less as I have way less moving parts.

I just think all those features are necessary for any serious usage and it’s costly to build all on your own. But perhaps you are right since it fit your business model - you seems not interested in building a platform at all

>"you seems not interested in building a platform at all"

I build products. That is my primary output. And the actual delivery is a binary executable that does the job. And it does it with the stellar performance that makes all that horizontal scaling infra totally unneeded. I serve the needs of my clients, not the needs of Amazon.

I like this. Out of curiosity, could you share your bash script?

I do not want to clean it up from some revealing things, so no. But it is fairly trivial. If you are an experienced programmer you would not have troubles writing one up one yourself in no time.

Understood, it was pure curiosity anyway ;)

What do you use for backup?

I would guess rsync ;)

I would recommend to use borgbackup - it is very convenient for security (it provides very flexible encryption options with safe defaults) and efficiency (deduplication)

scheduled jobs running pg_dump and rsync

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