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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't need to scale and even running 5x redundant servers is cheaper than a comparable cloud solution.

Running Lambda, I get a million calls per month for free. Then it's 20 cents per million calls.

Just curious - have you really researched cloud solutions or did you just compare the price of hosting EC2 instances in AWS vs having your own server? Because that's not what cloud is about.

And? I don't think you are aware of how cheap metal is these days.

Plus the OP has already decided that free tiers don't work.

So I'm actually in the process of doing Lambda versus persistent costing right now for a new project, where it's heavily load-based and very spiky, but the work on each packet of information is actually very lightweight. The tricky part here in AWS is not Lambda, which is pretty reasonable in general--the pitfalls I'm seeing are around data storage. DynamoDB is stealthily very expensive, either provisioned or on-demand. Right now I'm converging on lambdas for compute and RDS/S3 for storage, but what really makes AWS shine for this use case more than anything else is SQS.

SQS is so good and that there isn't a great, easily deployed (sorry, RabbitMQ) option for exactly what it does is a real push towards AWS. (GCP Cloud PubSub is close enough, but I know AWS way better than I do GCP.) If I didn't need this, and I felt confident managing RabbitMQ as a queueing solution, I don't think AWS would be a compelling solution because $60 in Hetzner nodes, in a HA configuration, could do a lot of work.

(If this thing works I'll need an on-prem solution anyway, so I'll probably have to build that too--but that's "good problems to have".)

DynamoDB is not required to use cloud functions. You can either use regular RDS like you said, Aurora or even just your own EC2-based cluster (all of these you can attach to the VPC the functions are attached to as well) and there's a lot of nice developments going on like Cloudflare D1.

Totally agree on SQS, knowing PubSub as well I'd say they're pretty much on the same level. All the interconnectedness is where cloud platforms shine

To clarify, I mentioned DynamoDB because it has a unit-costs model rather than an amortized-over-time cost model, and when you can harness that (and then focus on a simplified COGS model) you can do very well.

NATS and NSQ are better than SQS if you can deploy them yourself. ZeroMQ is a great option as well, but it probably will require some major brain changes, since it doesn't fit most people's mental model of what a queuing server looks like.

ZeroMQ is too weird for me, yeah. NATS JetStream and NSQ are both promising but their durability options are unclear and while I have a background in devops/system architecture, I'm looking at building something whose entire staff is literally only me and so while I'm sure I can deploy it, I'm not sure I can effectively run it. SQS will do what I expect it to do, and that's pretty powerful.

disclosure: I work at Synadia

We do have a hosted version of NATS called NGS that is multi-cloud, multi-geo and is really easy to set up https://synadia.com/ngs

Your pricing is really very fair, especially since it's based on resource consumption and not per-request. One suggestion: put your pricing right on the home page. I'm starting to wonder why I am running it myself!

And, you probably know a little bit about NATS, too, since, you know, you wrote it! :)

https://nats.io/support/

I think NATS is an excellent, and very easy to run and deploy. Pretty much has a "just works" attribute I like to assign to boring technology

> Running Lambda, I get a million calls per month for free. Then it's 20 cents per million calls.

And you are overpaying by a significant chunk. My raspberry pi - the old cheap one - can handle 10 million requests a day without breaking a sweat. If I push it, I can get up around 90 million requests a day without too much effort (it's only about 1 request/ms)

I really don't think most devs understand how fucking cheap hardware that's comparable to these services is.

Now - you might be using a host of other valuable features that your cloud provider gives you (things like edge servers near your customers, or truly significant outbound network traffic flows, or a very robust multi-region setup, or disk backing of some sort, etc).

But generally speaking - you ARE overpaying for cpu cycles in the cloud. It's not really up for debate.

Of course you are paying more for AWS than for a damn raspberry pi.

You say this like it's obvious that AWS is better.

There are certainly cases where AWS can be better (ease of edge networks and multi-region availability come to mind)

But outside of a very small set of cases (most of which are when companies are victims of their own success - which is actually a wonderful problem to have) what's the compelling reason to actually use AWS if "Of course I am paying more" for it?

In my opinion, if you can still run your db on a single machine - you don't fucking need the cloud yet. That covers a pretty large chunk of businesses.

Most of the "cloud" is convincing business that could self-host their entire stack on a raspberry pi in a basement that they should be spending thousands on cloud compute costs a year.

Fuck - the most damning evidence is simply how much fucking money these companies are making from upselling you cpu cycles that they're getting mostly for free. For the 4th quarter of 2021, amazon reported a profit of 5.2 billion on ~18 billion in revenue from AWS.

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