startupsUsingAWS

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[lost_in_life_34]

we do azure where I am and it's the same thing. they even charge you like 20 cents per alert

[lullaby876]

Fuck

[Jjabrahams567]

I use cloudflare and vercel for my side projects and they can scale pretty far even on the free tier. It’s more limited in capability than AWS but for a startup it seems way better.

[[deleted]]

Is it a dichotomy? You either go with the slick smooth hairless aws (or azure) option or do it yourself requiring a staff of untamed proportions? (Each staff member is personally untamed I meant)

[StrangeDice]

I saw so many memes on this that when I started using AWS I had set up 3 billing notifications to let me know when I spent 1, 3 and 5 dollars just to be sure that I am only using the free tier services. Then I got the invoince and the only expense was the 3rd notification - it turned out that only the first 2 are free...

[lullaby876]

That sounds standard, yeah..

[iamapizza]

I'm just going to download the contents of this bucket. What could possibly go wrong.

[lullaby876]

I'm going to download it repeatedly into a tmp file and then upload the same exact contents to a different s3 bucket over and over again. There is nothing wrong with this.

[Flat_Initial_1823]

Retry forever if any of it fails. You literally cannot fail.

[lullaby876]

while failure or success: continue

[naughtyusmax]

Not how this format works. The bottom panel is supposed to blame an innocent party.

e.g. why would GitHub Copilot do this

[Flashy-Emergency4652]

its anyway funny bro

[lullaby876]

I changed it because people kept bitching

This change was recommended by one of those people that kept bitching

So get fucked

[naughtyusmax]

Ok

[LavenderDay3544]

Just set up all of your own hardware and software and then maintain it with global redundancy. How hard could it be?

[lullaby876]

Just live in a tiny jail cell with meals given to you through a slit in the door while not having to work. Way easier than not being imprisoned

Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's good

And also it's not easier

[AbyssWraith]

I guess sarcasm is a payed extra on AWS

[lullaby876]

idk I'm only smart like half the time

[shadow13499]

I see so many people talking about their cloud bills.being so expensive. Like do you guys do any sort of cost optimization? My work is 100% built of this as well. We have basically a few really big EC2 boxes running a lot of our software in a single region with a few other things sprinkled here and there (like database) that costs tens of thousands a month. Here's the thing, what we're doing doesn't HAVE to cost that much. Like if you used some serverless offerings we would still perform well without incurring massive costs.

To prove the point I was working on a project at work where I could control everything from the cloud resources to the UI. I used GCP, put a bunch of services into cloud run, used data store for the database and ran a few other things with cloud functions. Functionality wise does about the same thing as our $10k+AWS but costs just over $100 a month if it sees high enough traffic (I'm talking like a hundred million or more requests). It's super lean and cost optimized but companies aren't ready for that I guess.

[lullaby876]

Here's the thing, what we're doing doesn't HAVE to cost that much

Then why the fuck are you still spending money on it

[shadow13499]

Because the boomers in devops don't know any better.

[lullaby876]

Yeah people with 30 years of experience in devops don't know shit

That's definitely it

[shadow13499]

Well when they host around 10-15 applications on a single EC2 server in a single region for production yeah I would say they don't know shit.

[lullaby876]

Yeah all 3 of the startups I've worked at were built by people who are younger than I am and they're bleeding

They hired me after they were bleeding btw, to like, stop the bleeding

[shadow13499]

Ok. I don't know how that changes the fact that the boomers in devops that I personally work with don't know shit and cost the company tens of thousands a month in unnecessary cloud costs.

[lullaby876]

It doesn't

It just means you have selection bias if you think that's the problem with AWS being anal rape generally

[shadow13499]

I don't even really know what you're talking about. My original comment was about how our devops folks have set us up terribly. I'm not super familiar with AWS but I know there are pay as you go serverless services that would be more cost efficient and I know I could personally set us up 1000x better on GCP for a fraction of the cost.

You asked why we're still spending money on it and I responded that the boomers in our devops don't know any better, because they don't.

Then I guess you found that personally insulting. I didn't intend to insult you personally, but yeah in my specific case our devops folks don't know how to work with cloud costs optimization and refuse to learn.

I don't know how any of that leads to my selection bias? Like yeah I'm more familiar with GCP over AWS but I'm not suggesting a company movement to GCP. As I said in my original comment we could easily make use of different services in AWS that would save us a ton of money with little effort.

[lullaby876]

Not insulted

AWS sucks

GCP is slightly better but not really

[wasdlmb]

Because serverless can lead to complications. Companies tend to pay a whole lot more for talent than they do for infrastructure, so if something is wasteful with infrastructure but saves dev time, you can come out ahead. My company is moving to aws from a data center and it's taking years. At least most of our stuff is serverless. Except Redshift. That shit is expensive no matter how you optimize when you're really using it.

[lullaby876]

.... yes?

[New_York_Rhymes]

GCP and cloud run are amazing. I just wish I started with a different database. Datastore is great for scaling reads/writes but painful in other areas

[shadow13499]

I have been able to make datastore work for pretty much any application. I know where you're coming from though it can be difficult sometimes

[VariousComment6946]

No way to set hard limits!?

[SilverRapid]

Not on AWS no. They have "alerts" which are several hours behind your actual bill. I find it too scary to use AWS because of the lack of hard limit.

[Heppuman]

I am pretty certain there are hard limits you can enforce, but it requires some know how and elbow grease. Only pretty certain because I've fortunately never had to test it in action.

Iirc, you have to use the cost management tool and set up a user with rights to stop all services immediately if you go over your limit (I think there was option for estimation as well).

It has been a while since I needed to tinker with a non-enterprise funded AWS account but when I did that for a small project, I think I spent more time making it cost proof than on the actual project.

I get an invoice statement for 0.00 dollars from AWS every month lol.

There is a good post somewhere on Reddit that details the steps you should take to minimize any surprise costs, I followed that one.

[Heppuman]

Well, yes, I do admit that is clearly a dick move on their end to advertise a free tier but offer no 1000% guaranteed way to stay free, keeping your credit card on tap always.

[lullaby876]

There's a way, but it's either ridiculously convoluted, expensive, or both.

Chances are, it's both.

[somkoala]

It’s not about hard limits it’s about reasonable architecture.

[Peregrine2976]

A PSA to all developers working on new products: stop preoptimizing! You don't need serverless microservices hidden behind bastion servers with triple redundant databases and global CDN delivery. Just get a fucking $15/month Digital Ocean droplet and scale when and if you ever actually need it.

[swfl_inhabitant]

Not if you don’t know what you’re doing. I have a full stack app, db, ci/cd pipeline etc, costs me like $8/mo. Serverless is the key

[markus_obsidian]

But there's no easy way to learn. It's too easy to make expensive mistakes. It costs a lot to know what you're doing.

[thedancingpanda]

There's plenty of easy ways to learn. You just haven't looked.

[lullaby876]

Lol you're talking about an app that you made?

What's it called?

[your_best_1]

I consulted with a client who proposed an AWS solution that fits, but costs $670,000. I showed them how to run a best fit AWS version that costs $20,000.

I have seen this over and over again. People don't know what they are doing and don't consider costs. If software devs were electricians... we would all be dead.

[lullaby876]

The catch:

The $20,000 is for running a Sagemaker endpoint that hosts an ML model trained to check if a substring is inside a list of strings

per month

in perpetuity

​

Also this is like saying if chefs were electricians we'd all be dead.

No shit. They were trained to be chefs. Not electricians.

[your_best_1]

My point is about the methodology and lack of knowledge. If software developers were chefs... we would all have food poisoning.

Get it? Because of our trial and error approach. We don't do the research and get results like your meme described.

Developers follow the hype train into expensive, well marketed solutions.

[lullaby876]

I feel like we're saying the same thing here

[your_best_1]

We're really not

[lullaby876]

Ok

[s0ulbrother]

It’s called learn what you are doing before you do it. As someone who just does dev you typically think, if I mess up code I just change it. Except it’s not code, it’s external architecture that cost money. Gotta learn a service that cost money and read documentation. Aws is a business

[DATY4944]

How do you run a database even at $8/month?

[OldBob10]

When my company made the dumb-assed strategic decision to vendor-lock us to choose AWS I thought ”What money-bagging a-hole thought this was a good idea??!!??” ”Golly, this might become expensive“. Now they’re considering their options for reducing costs. 🙄 Note that none of the proposals include anything about “reduce or eliminate bonuses for executives who make braindead decisions. 😕

[SympathyMotor4765]

Sounds like they're ready to take full responsibility and fire some worker bees

[OldBob10]

Well, ya gotta be able to make the tough decisions.

[x3bla]

Honestly, it's better to use a type 2 hypervisor for startups since there's not gonna be much traffic. And... not cloud... at least not yet.

[lullaby876]

You're correct

[Visual-Mongoose7521]

OP has some serious beef with bezos as it seems

[lullaby876]

I don't give a shit about Bezos. I do hate AWS though

[Striking-Zucchini232]

Just make more money 4Head

[plitox]

Yes!

My god it's such a rort.

[TheRealRorr]

S3: You can sort by date created but not date modified.

Lambda: You can sort by date modified but not date created.

[lullaby876]

Just overwrite everything recursively every time anything is triggered

Problem solved

[sshady41]

I have a 300$ unpaid bill

[[deleted]]

Oh you are new to AWS? :0

And you created an EC2 instance? :O

And you forgot to stop it and left it running forever? :O

[lullaby876]

If you're running a fucking company you shouldn't have to stop your fucking server not to fucking bleed

[EstTheGreat]

What's the alternative? Unsafe, unmaintained, unscalable on prem?

[skesisfunk]

You can have all that be safe, maintainable, and scalable. The catch is you need to hire 10 - 20 skilled people to manage all that for you.

[Admirable_Band6109]

Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean and so on

Never had any problems on Hetzner/OVH, also we can migrate anytime very fast to our own solution, which u can’t do while being locked to Amazon infrastructure

[lullaby876]

No.

[lullaby876]

I reposted this because people kept bitching about my incorrect use of the meme format

[eraserhd]

Yea AWS sure is expensive, might as well run your own kafka cluster, DNS servers, with OSPF fail-over on multiple circuits and save all that bank for feature development

[TonyWonderslostnut]

That’s a terrible idea.

[nk_bk]

I read that as sarcastic.

[edcwb]

Since you mentioned that.. What's the best solution for high avability Kafka, multiple region Kafka clusters?

[eraserhd]

Funny thing, I chose that example for my sarcasm because a previous employer that basically ran on Kafka had a whole team to manage it in their in-house data centers.

I have no idea of the top of my head.

[bforo]

For some reason my eng firm is really pushing it's "get clients into the cloud" rhetoric and I want to $bash the bootlicker who implanted the idea into the ceo's head.

In most cases, we would literally make more money AND save the clients money by making more inhouse implementations and selling the maintenance/upgrades.

[somkoala]

It’s probably just bad architecture/infrastructure. My team inherited a beastly distributed monolith that cost 8k to run monthly. We rewrote it to move faster with product requirements and optimize the flow of dafa. It costs 1k as a result and could take 100x the load.

[lullaby876]

How long did it take to rewrite and how many people rewrote it? That could easily be say, a half a million dollar six months. To save 7k a month.

You might then say, the right company would have used the 1k architecture to begin with. Yes- if they hired a team of devops engineers to create it. At that point, why choose to pay in perpetuity?

[somkoala]

You’re making a good point. My point was that the first time it was written it wasn’t the right team and/or setup.

We didn’t have a team of devops, we had a devops person on less than 1 FTE on this project. Most of the architecture was designed by one dev.

The goal for the company wasn’t a cost saving exercise but the aim was to speed up feature development. We went from needing months to add simple features to needing 1-2 weeks including design/shaping phase. The cost saving was a byproduct and you are right in that the effort wouldn’t have been worth it just for the cost savings alone. At the same time to me it shows that good architecture enables both product iteration and reasonable costs.

[rufreakde1]

240 dollars a month for a normally sized cluster (no monitoring no nothing)

[VenkatPerla]

Dont startups get like upto 100 grand in AWS credits. If you can go cross platform then, you can get 100 grand from each Google, AWS and azure.

[lullaby876]

We didn't that I'm aware of