alt Hacker NewsI think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run.
A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're using something like ECS or serverless, AWS gains nothing by optimizing the servers to make your code run faster - their hard work results in less billed infrastructure hours.
This 'microservices' push usually means that instead of having an on-server session where you can serve stuff from a temporary cache, all the data that persists between requests needs to be stored in a db somewhere, all the auth logic needs to re-check your credentials, and something needs to direct the traffic and load balance these endpoint, and all this stuff costs money.
I think if you have 4 Java boxes as servers with a redundant DB with read replicas on EC2, your infra is so efficient and cheap that even paying 4x for it rather than going for colocation is well worth it because of the QoL and QoS.
These crazy AWS bills usually come from using every service under the sun.
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The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is
1) Senior engineer starts on AWS
2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't)
3) New engineer comes in and panics
4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic
5) New engineer leaves
6) Second new engineer comes in and not only panics but outright needs help
7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" who claims to help "reduce cost" but who actually gets a kickback from the extra spend they induce (usually 10% if I'm not mistaken)
Calling it it ransomware is obviously hyperbolic but there are definitely some parallels one could draw
On top of it all, AWS pricing is about to massively go up due to the RAM price increase. There's no way it can't since AWS is over half of Amazon's profit while only around 15% of its revenue.
I don’t understand why most cloud backend designs seem to strive for maximizing the number of services used.
My biggest gripe with this is async tasks where the app does numerous hijinks to avoid a 10 minute lambda processing timeout. Rather than structure the process to process many independent and small batches, or simply using a modest container to do the job in a single shot - a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination.
A dynamically provisioned, serverless container with 24 cores and 64 GB of memory can happily process GBs of data transformations.
> If you're using something like ECS or serverless, AWS gains nothing by optimizing the servers to make your code run faster - their hard work results in less billed infrastructure hours.
If ECS is faster, then you're more satisfied with AWS and less likely to migrate. You're also open to additional services that might bring up the spend (e.g. ECS Container Insights or X-Ray)
Source: Former Amazon employee
Just this week a friend of mine was spinning up some AWS managed service, complaining about the complexity, and how any reconfiguration took 45 minutes to reload. It's a service you can just install with apt, the default configuration is fine. Not only is many service no longer cheaper in the cloud, the management overhead also exceed that of on-prem.
It's about fitting your utilization to the model that best serves you.
If you can keep 4 "Java boxes" fed with work 80%+ of the time, then sure EC2 is a good fit.
We do a lot of batch processing and save money over having EC2 boxes always on. Sure we could probably pinch some more pennies if we managed the EC2 box uptime and figured out mechanisms for load balancing the batches... But that's engineering time we just don't really care to spend when ECS nets us most of the savings advantage and is simple to reason about and use.
Agreed. There is a wide price difference between running a managed AWS or Azure MySQL service and running MySQL on a VM that you spin up in AWS or Azure.
> your infra is so efficient and cheap that even paying 4x for it rather than going for colocation is well worth it because of the QoL and QoS.
You don’t need colocation to save 4x though. Bandwidth pricing is 10x. EC2 is 2-4x especially outside US. EBS for its iops is just bad.
Fully agree to this. I find the cost of cloud providers is mostly driven by architecture. If you're cost conscious, cloud architectures need to be up-front designed with this in mind.
Microservices is a killer with cost. For each microservices pod - you're often running a bunch of side cars - datadog, auth, ingress - you pay massive workload separation overhead with orchestration, management, monitoring and ofc complexity
I am just flabbergasted that this is how we operate as a norm in our industry.