> Not sure about the price, to me $75 for a decently beefy server seems low?
You can argue whether Hetzner is reputable hosting or not, but $75/month will get you a v3 Xeon with 32GB of ECC RAM.
> Also serverless might sound silly but isn't it nice to not have to do ops works? Surely worth $200/month.
Hosting something on Amazon doesn't absolve you of operations work, it's just a different kind of operations. Instead of managing the OS/software updates, you need to manage S3, IAM, CloudWatch, optimise time/memory consumption to reduce cost, etc.
Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc.
> Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc
Thank you. Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience - a growing but much smaller pool of people, ime. Getting IAM permissions correct for complex stuff is just not simple, for example, and there's some use cases IAM stuff doesn't (or didn't) cover.
Had a client who couldn't give me EC2 access because - at least at the time - they'd have to give me access to all their EC2 instances, not just the ones I needed. Now... this may have been IAM-inexperience, although, at the time, my digging seemed to indicate it was the correct conclusion.
I keep recommending people look at places like Hetzner over AWS. People keep wanting to do AWS anyway, and then end up paying 2x-3x as much for the servers and more for the ops work. I shouldn't complain - people who opt for AWS even when it doesn't make sense are what my profit margin is made of.
(I have clients I recommend AWS to as well, but reducing ops time and/or reduced cost are rarely if ever part of those discussions; AWS is the luxury option)
It would typically be if they have use cases where they either want to do large batch jobs, or have other needs where "add-on" services AWS provides is worthwhile. Often it's a matter of urgency, and AWS will be a good first approximation, and we can start migrating onto a hybrid or fully dedicated environment depending on what's most cost effective down the road when they know more about what they actually need.
Sometimes it's a matter of politics and trst - AWS is trusted, and if their hosting cost doesn't add up to much of their total costs, then that trust is sometimes more worthwhile than squeezing the cost down. E.g. I'm working on a project for a VC now, and their yearly hosting costs are likely to be below what I'm charging them for the initial development of their system, so spending time selling them on a cheaper provider is just not worth it for either them or me.
> Instead of being able to find a server ops guy from a large pool of experienced folks, you now have to find someone specifically with AWS-ops experience
Yes, and too many companies don't realize that by moving to AWS, they are not only narrowing the pool of developers/operations people they can hire from, but the salary of these people is higher.
I'm not against AWS, there are absolutely businesses where AWS makes sense (as the article describes). However it's more than just a question of dollars and cents to move to AWS, you also have to factor in the HR consequences of losing access to dime a dozen developers/sysadmins.
For most businesses I have worked with, I would argue losing access to developer/sysadmin talent outweighs their perceived benefits of moving to serverless.
replying to myself - the client at the bottom had a "move to AWS" mandate from management, they moved, then found out that at least some of their use cases weren't supported. As silly as it sounds, research a tool before you commit to it. Some things are certainly not discoverable until midway in to a project - life happens - but moving ops to AWS in ... 2014, 2015, 2016 - there's enough "known" caveats and gotchas already documented that basic things shouldn't be a surprise. The cost of working around those gotchas often surpasses any first year savings from a migration, but as I've learned - "that's someone else's budget" is sometimes a valid excuse (from some perspectives anyway - as a shareholder, I wouldn't want that justification).
OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of:
- making sure you don't run out of inodes
- having to manage DB backups
- making sure your cache didn't stop working
- updating your box for security updates (beyond just your application requirements)
It's a tradeoff (architecturally as well), and for a lot of stuff you'll end up wanting full-ish control of your box. But for getting the ball rolling it's nice to not have to first spend a bunch of time getting postgres to start consistently on boot.
You still have to actually manage deploys themselves, of course. And keep an eye on costs, too. But a lot of these services are getting close to "the code that you are running locally, but in the cloud". A far cry from "OK, first lets get apache up, then set up some proxy servers, then set up supervisor" etc etc.
> OK well here's the sort of ops work that serverless kinda absolves you of
I wasn't trying to list every bit of ops work for server/serverless. My point is that as a business you cannot expect that once you move to serverless you don't need anyone to manage it anymore, or that the time to manage it drops to zero.
Yes, serverless does have its distinct advantages over rolling your own, there is no question about that. But serverless still requires experienced people to configure/manage/monitor it. I've seen way too many managers get giddy at the thought of having their developer/ops time completely free to perform other tasks, and that's not the case. You still have to budget for people and time to manage serverless architecture.
You can argue whether Hetzner is reputable hosting or not, but $75/month will get you a v3 Xeon with 32GB of ECC RAM.
> Also serverless might sound silly but isn't it nice to not have to do ops works? Surely worth $200/month.
Hosting something on Amazon doesn't absolve you of operations work, it's just a different kind of operations. Instead of managing the OS/software updates, you need to manage S3, IAM, CloudWatch, optimise time/memory consumption to reduce cost, etc.
Maybe we just have different definitions of "ops works" but it bothers me when people claim that you don't need to have anyone minding AWS because it's serverless. You still need to have people monitoring, managing permissions, optimising to reduce cost, pushing updates, etc.