Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs

Re:Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by trog on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @10:39PM (#36413719)

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever.

Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

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Re:Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by jedberg on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @02:54AM (#36415256)

Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then.

Data Center (per month)

Servers: $6K

Cabinet (x3): $15K

Bandwidth: $2.5K

Support: N/A

Total: $23.5K

EC2 (per month)

Servers: $13K

Storage: $1.5K

Bandwidth: $1.1K

Support: $1.2K

Total: $16.8K

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Re:Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by trog on Thursday June 22, 2023 @09:46PM (#36441812)

Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?

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Re:Canva saves millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by jedberg on Friday June 23, 2023 @02:14AM (#36443435)

Yes, we ran Postgres on EC2. I admined it myself both in AWS and in the datacenter. RDS didn't exist at the time. :)

At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.

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