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by awinder 2885 days ago
Respectfully, I disagree. If you use the services listed in the article, you're not really talking about that many more components than you're going to run on your own box. You've got a DB (dynamodb), an app server (lambda), and an http load balancer / content server (s3 / api gateway). And then you have to set up DNS anywhere but Route 53, why not. I don't see how this is dramatically a larger configuration haul compared to:

1. Nginx config & tuning 2. Postgres / MySQL config & tuning 3. App server config & tuning

It is dramatically different config & tuning, so we might exist in a time where people overvalue familiarity & it colors their impressions of effort, but I don't think it's a long-term viable crutch to lean on either.

As to core services going down, I read you loud & clear, it does happen. From my experience, it happens way less often than outages on a single box though, or even a collection of boxes you're managing. And I don't know if there has been a time where there were simultaneous region failures in AWS -- and with dynamo global tables its easier than ever to get a multi-region app launched.

Pricing is the kicker for sure though. Your bill line is going to be higher. You're also priced in though which from a biz standpoint is huge. It's very difficult to budget failure, it's probably a hidden component in your engineering team costs. For startups this can be mitigated through AWS' accelerator-linked programs though, otherwise, I'd encourage any CTO / CEO / founder team to really think about how cost is not measured in the data center bill, but in that cost, plus engineer cost, plus customer retention costs, plus opportunity cost.

1 comments

Also, couldn't you just set a limit in your budget in AWS. That and alarms on events etc?