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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

I agree that there is weird cult-like thinking around AWS, when the reality is their base services like EC2 or s3 are pretty great but most of them are just mediocre. Yet, people will insist on using services just because AWS built it, mostly just brand mentality.

Running things on prem or on something like Hetzner cloud can be much simpler in some cases, and with Kubernetes now you can provide a great platform anywhere. It just isn't the solution for every use case.

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Agreed that you should be careful about all the auxiliary aws services but can you actually show real proof that on perm is cheaper as a whole while doing everything fast?

For sure you pay a premium for ec2, but at the least you get good reliability. Your data won’t disappear off S3 unless you delete it. What level of rigor do you need to put in your on premise game to promise the same?

Even for my side projects I nowadays just float an Elastic beanstalk flask app and a small rds instance. It costs 15 a month but I’m fine with that cost for the time it saves me. If you want to be truly cost conscious stick to lightsail. It’s a steal all things considered.

I think even on-prem should generally use S3 for the scalable storage parts like user image hosting, scaling storage sucks. But for app, database, or compute that’s anything but a one-off? Dedicated servers destroy in terms of cost/performance. And bandwidth on AWS is an incredible ripoff, so if you’re doing any heavyweight data hosting, you should absolutely bust out the calculator. OVH boxes with dedicated 1 gbit lines are just absurdly more cost efficient there.

Just checking bill from customer.

EC2 - $150 production plus few support instances = $500 Egress traffic - $4500

One of the major selling points of using cloud is serverless where it truly lets you build-once-and-forget with minimal maintenance overhead. Can you suggest comparable on-prem/Hetzner alternatives for the products I use: CloudWatch Logs, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis Data Stream, Step Functions, Lambda, CloudFront, API Gateway, Athena? Having used these services in my day-to-day job, I just can't imagine myself ever going back to the old way of doing things.

Well shameless plug but I’m working on providing SOME of those services with Nimbus[0]

[0]: https://nimbusws.com

If your running k8s there are lots of great serverless options

What are some of the top ones to consider from the AWS zoo?

I am only familiar with EC2 & S3.

CloudFront and Lambda, combined with S3 and a database (DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora Serverless), are quite powerful. You can do pretty much 90%-95% of web apps on these services.

Also API Gateway, if you need.

I think people forget that they used to be cheap. They built up a lot of brand equity and mind share in that time and then proceeded to boil frogs until AWS gross margins exceeded McDonalds.

What were their prices 10 years ago and what are they now?

I bet AWS loses even to inflation. Which means: in real terms - monetarily speaking - their prices went down.

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