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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

>> if you don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams

Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts to get stuff done - it really does.

Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux can get all those servers installed and running without the spaghetti complexity of AWS.

The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think its the opposite of that - AWS is a nightmarish tangle of complexity and hard to configure, understand, relate and maintain systems.

Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way.

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> Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can take you an awful long way.

For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS.

Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

Bare metal is great, but you have to build a ton of shit to actually ship product.

> Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

What we lose sight of, is that those things aren't as important as we, as SREs would like to think. When you're a corporation of one person, trying to stay afloat, you can just rely on a single big box and spend your time dealing with all the other problems first. Make sure you have an escape hatch so you can scale up if need be, but don't overengineer for a problem you won't run in to.

Have managed all that in the past with bare metal and more (you forgot configuring routers, installing OS, managing upgrades, dealing with hardware swaps, etc). Its soooo much more sane to deal with that than AWS configuration, actually relatively easy for someone half competent. Luckily we can just employ people to mess around full time with AWS.

> Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

Who cares? At this point it's a hobby project that makes zero profit and is bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose the DB tomorrow. No more money is going to be lost if they go down for an hour or a day or a week (in fact, they might _save_ money if they don't get more AWS charges during the outage).

They have nothing to lose, and about 6k/month to gain by moving to cost-effective hosting, which could actually make this a decent side-project.

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