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0 pointspwinnski3y ago0 comments

On the contrary, self-hosting is only cheaper under some circumstances, which is why when those circumstances are met, it becomes a story worth a post on HN.

Whether economies of scale, or the efficiency of managed services at scale, or use-based loss leaders, there are many ways in which AWS services could be, and often are, cheaper than self-hosting. Of course, not always.

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pclmulqdq3y ago

In my experience, it is almost always not cheaper to use AWS services, unless your workload is exceptionally bursty in an unpredictable way or fits entirely in the free tier. Pretty much nothing at AWS is a loss-leader except the free tier. Also, if your workload is small and you don't need to hire cloud ops folks, you can come out ahead on TCO.

pwinnskiOP3y ago

So we have gone from a categorical "not cheaper" to "almost always not cheaper," except for two circumstances, no, three. Progress!

At my last company, providing SaaS for the education market, moving from a datacenter to AWS saved almost 70% year-over-year. In the datacenter, we ran machines to cover our peak load, which only happened a few times a year. In AWS, we scaled way down and auto-scaled up during those peak weeks.

Is the entire education market "exceptionally bursty?" I suppose it could be considered so. Bar exams and midterms and finals certainly don't happen every week.

I'll wait for people to tell me how AWS was the wrong solution, and how we did everything wrong before that, but the bottom line is we saved a lot of money, accelerated our development schedule by building all new functionality using the so-called "serverless" stack, and succeeded so well during the pandemic that another company acquired us... which is why it's my former company.

pclmulqdq3y ago

It sounds like you made a good decision, and yes, it sounds like your entire market (particularly the parts around exam hosting) is exceptionally bursty. I worked with some folks at a university on some of their IT systems, and they hit huge traffic spikes (literally 1000x their base load) around course registration and final exams. Their solution was to put 100 gbps NICs on their Oracle server...

I don't know how big your peak was compared to your average load, but if it was anything like that, serverless was a great call. Buying enough hardware for the bar exam and idling it 99.5% of the time sounds incredibly wasteful. However, this is an exceptionally bursty workload.

Most services do not have this level of traffic variability in such a way that a CDN can't handle it for you. 10x peak to trough variability (after your CDN) is fairly common, but still considered bursty, and in that case, AWS serverless still doesn't look great compared to DO droplets. Many services have daily or weekly cycles (without events like the bar exam), and run analytics workloads in their off hours.

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pclmulqdq3y ago

pwinnskiOP3y ago

So we have gone from a categorical "not cheaper" to "almost always not cheaper," except for two circumstances, no, three. Progress!

Is the entire education market "exceptionally bursty?" I suppose it could be considered so. Bar exams and midterms and finals certainly don't happen every week.

pclmulqdq3y ago

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