News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by sneak on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:00PM (#27309096)
There's also the argument that some of the cloud advantages (such as AWS proprietary services like SQS) simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements. You end up needing a whole new team to do HA/scaling for a core service.

There are off the shelf things for, say, S3 and ALB which are entirely workable, but once you start getting into more complicated stuff (like S3's new consistency semantics, or SQS) then you're looking at a whole small company (at a minimum) worth of additional work. It's a non-trivial expansion, even for a large org with lots of money.

You can avoid using these sorts of services to maintain flexibility/independence, but you lose out on their unique benefits. This isn't an accident. It's not like you're going to be able to selfhost an SES clone and get the same kind of deliverability percentages as AWS netblocks, no matter how many engineers you throw at the problem.

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by toomuchtodo on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:10PM (#27309191)
There are ways to engineer around this, but it’s going to depend on balancing risk management with business agility. Maybe you use Backblaze for object storage instead of S3. Maybe you use Cloudflare for CDN and Serverless at the edge. Maybe you use Mailgun or another SES competitor. Containers let you use managed k8s off the shelf anywhere. Lots of options for technologists, PMs, or CTOs to pick from.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by sneak on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:10PM (#27309195)
Graviton2? Aurora? S3 global read-after-write consistency? Glacier? SQS's ability to scale?

Some of the goods you just can't get anywhere else, and they know it.

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by dilyevsky on Thursday May 27, 2021 @10:45PM (#27311191)
Graviton2 - there are arm vendors that sell arm hardware

Aurora - tidb or vitess or cockroachdb or citus etc etc

Glacier - there is backblaze, also onprem vendors

Sqs - just use Nats

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by rad_gruchalski on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:38PM (#27309454)
It can be done. Putting the right abstractions in front of these services makes it possible to migrate and replacements exist. Okay, granted, there will be complexity in self hosted infra but it is possible.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by sneak on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:52PM (#27309595)
I don't really think anyone with anything less than an 8 figure budget can get the perf/watt of Graviton2. They're literally not available for sale - AWS had them fabbed and then kept all of them to rent out.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by rad_gruchalski on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:19PM (#27309806)
Hardware is difficult, for sure. The managed services / proprietary services is another story.

Having said that, and please keep in mind that I do not have an idea much about hardware so this is a guesswork; more of a question than a statement..., I do think that the Graviton price vs performance might not have a direct benefit outside of AWS. It's cool for AWS because they have less stuff to manage at that scale and it might be cheaper for them to buy and iterate because only they use it. It looks great to the clients because the perception is that the value is better. But AWS runs 80 AZs in 25 regions so it benefits them at that scale.

Realistically, even if one had couple of hundreds of racks, does it matter at that scale?

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by TheCoelacanth on Friday May 28, 2021 @01:22PM (#27318113)
Anyone with less than an 8 figure budget shouldn't even begin to consider self-hosting.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by wmf on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:54PM (#27309610)
It's called Ampere Altra. Maybe you should have picked a different example like Aurora...
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by leesalminen on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:16PM (#27309781)
Aurora is the one service that got us to migrate to AWS! Honestly it saved us 5 digits per month over another MySQLaaS. For us it was a very good deal. We could’ve dedicated engineering time to reduce db cost on the old provider but Aurora was drop-in awesomeness.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by sneak on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:03PM (#27309690)
Have you tried? Us startuppy mortals can't buy those today, unfortunately. Maybe in a few years, when they trickle down from the people with 8 figure budgets.
Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by zozbot234 on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:55PM (#27309619)
> such as AWS proprietary services like SQS

SQS is a message queue service. It's a bit weird to claim that as "simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements", a message queue is pretty basic stuff.

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by sneak on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:55PM (#27309626)
SQS is "just a queue service" the way that S3 is "just an object store" and the iPhone is "just a smartphone".

I'm super into self-hosted shared-nothing queue services, but what AWS is doing with SQS is anything but basic stuff.

Re:The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox by rualca on Thursday May 27, 2021 @06:35PM (#27309430)
> There's also the argument that some of the cloud advantages (such as AWS proprietary services like SQS) simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements. You end up needing a whole new team to do HA/scaling for a core service.

It's not limited to some. You absolutely need a whole new team (or teams) to handle your infrastructure, your high availability needs, and also your security.

The nifty serverless offerings and other features are just nice-to-haves in comparison to the core infrastructure work that cloud providers put into your system to keep it running.

Just because cloud providers like GCP and AWS and Azure and etc have everything put together to let you setup your whole infra by running a small script that does not mean nothing needs to be done in order for that to work.