Re:How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
by jerf on Monday February 06, 2023 @09:00AM
(#34677350)
I am responsible for about 10-12 t3.medium-class servers (number includes redundant servers) and the services running on them. All of them are fairly overprovisioned for what they are, excepting that the monitoring system we use on them for some reason likes to consume about half-a-gig of RAM so I can't run on even smaller servers. I write my services in Go, so the CPU isn't sitting there spending 98% of its time chasing pointers and can use multiple CPUs as needed for its heavy-hitting tasks. It's a rough day for those servers when they pass 5% average CPU for the day.
Could I switch some of them to lambda functions? Or switch to ECS? Or switch to some other cloud service du jour? Maybe. But the amount of time I spent writing this comment is already about six month's worth of savings for such a switch. If it's any more difficult than "push button, receive 100% reliably-translated service", it's hard to justify.
Some of this is also because the cloud does provide some other services now that enable this sort of thing. I don't need to run a Kafka cluster for basic messaging, they all come with a message bus. I use that. I use the hosted DB options. I use S3 or equivalent, etc. I find what's left over is almost hardly worth the hassle of trying to jam myself into some other paradigm when I'm paying single-digit dollars a month to just run on an EC2 instance.
It is absolutely the case that not everyone or every project can do this. I'm not stuck to this as an end-goal. When it doesn't work I immediately take appropriate scaling action. I'm not suggesting that you go rearchitect anything based on this. I'm just saying, it's not an option to be despised. It has a lot of flexibility in it, and the billing is quite consistent (or, to put it another way, the fact that if I suddenly have 50x the traffic, my system starts choking and sputtering noticeably rather than simply charging me hundreds of dollars more is a feature to me rather than a bug), and you are generally not stretching yourself to contort into some paradigm that is convenient for some cloud service but may not be convenient for you.
Could I switch some of them to lambda functions? Or switch to ECS? Or switch to some other cloud service du jour? Maybe. But the amount of time I spent writing this comment is already about six month's worth of savings for such a switch. If it's any more difficult than "push button, receive 100% reliably-translated service", it's hard to justify.
Some of this is also because the cloud does provide some other services now that enable this sort of thing. I don't need to run a Kafka cluster for basic messaging, they all come with a message bus. I use that. I use the hosted DB options. I use S3 or equivalent, etc. I find what's left over is almost hardly worth the hassle of trying to jam myself into some other paradigm when I'm paying single-digit dollars a month to just run on an EC2 instance.
It is absolutely the case that not everyone or every project can do this. I'm not stuck to this as an end-goal. When it doesn't work I immediately take appropriate scaling action. I'm not suggesting that you go rearchitect anything based on this. I'm just saying, it's not an option to be despised. It has a lot of flexibility in it, and the billing is quite consistent (or, to put it another way, the fact that if I suddenly have 50x the traffic, my system starts choking and sputtering noticeably rather than simply charging me hundreds of dollars more is a feature to me rather than a bug), and you are generally not stretching yourself to contort into some paradigm that is convenient for some cloud service but may not be convenient for you.