[gryf]

I just worked on a massive "optimised" cloud migration like you've never seen. We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are. We were realistically expecting 2x which gave us some regional agility and was expected but the unconstrained growth and misunderstanding of the cost model was terrible. It's designed to be so convoluted that you can't possibly estimate costs until you get the first bill at which point you are committed on a multi-month or year project. On top of that the assumption at the time of development is the cost is someone else's so the sprawl since the migration is dangerous which means we cannot leave ever now we've embraced the PaaS options.

The whole proposition relies on the idea of a sunk cost being accepted.

So yes, back to servers please. IaaS should be the maximal offering that is accepted by a business from a risk perspective unless the tool or technology is disposable in a 6 month window. There is space there for gains. PaaS hell no.

Edit: worth mentioning that AWS support is somewhere near dire. We've had issues with multiple services and despite being a VERY high roller with enterprise support we can't get anything fixed in any reasonable time. It's just someone else's crap you're using and they aren't any better at it than you are, just adding lead time to any issues. In some cases I've had to actually call out complete bad implementations that break function guarantees provided by open source projects (I can't logically warn people away from services as it's pretty obvious who I am if I do). One rule I've developed is that if it's not a core project: S3, EC2, EBS, ALB etc then it's probably a commercial liability in some way. There are no people working or with any knowledge on some major bits of AWS infra.

[tester756]

>We moved from multiple DCs to AWS and the costs are approximately 8x what the pre-migration costs are.

8x?? that's crazy, what where you doing wrong then?

[gryf]

Everything, all at once.

SMEs can't reliably manage that transition with any skillset and still deliver a product at the same time.

[jiggawatts]

I’m very curious to hear more details!

Did you use reservations to reduce costs?

Was it a lift and shift with VM configs staying as-is? (I’ve seen a lot of empty 1TB “app” drives burning money in the cloud!)

You complain about PaaS services, but I can’t imagine 8 data centres worth of stuff being converted to PaaS in hurry!

[gryf]

Cost savings are mostly consolidation, scaling down stuff we don't need (we have peak hours) and migrating stuff to kubernetes and packing it tight.

[jiggawatts]

Despite that you were paying 8x the previous amount!?

How is that possible?

E.g.: With Kubernetes and AWS you ought to be able to use clusters with a base of "reserved" capacity plus spot pricing for peak hours on top, right?

From what I've seen (in my limited experience), that should reduce costs for most orgs, not increase them!

[gryf]

I have identified the limits of human incompetence.

Please someone hire me so I don't have to live through this nightmare any longer.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> How is that possible?

TLDR: AWS is really expensive compared the equivalent compute elsewhere, to the point of overwhelming its advantages.

---

Long answer that I wrote before realizing how long it was:

I'm not the person you're replying to, I don't know the exact details, I don't know their company. However:) I can tell you that AWS is a factor more expensive than renting or owning your own metal. They (claim to) offset this by 1. taking care of management for you so you need fewer ops people, and 2. letting you scale up and down as needed. The first is plausibly legitimate, but really depends on the size of your compute and the size of your human teams (and how much benefit you get from AWS-managed offerings). The second can help, but only if you've got really spiky workloads, that are only really running a tiny fraction of the time, with absolutely tiny base load. Scaling up and down helps reduce your AWS bill compared to not scaling up and down on AWS, of course, but it doesn't help that much when their elastic offerings are that much more expensive. Say, for the sake of argument that you can run most of your EC2 instances just 6 hours a day, during peak hours. That lets you win... if, and only if, EC2 instances are less than 4x the cost of just owning your own bare metal machines. I've gone so far as trying to price out using spot instances for CI work - just selectively, when they were the cheapest! - to augment instances on Hetzner Cloud. Guess what? They're so expensive that even at spot prices EC2 is a factor more expensive.

[tester756]

it feels like the "refactor" was the way to improve

[gryf]

I love reading people saying this. Try a couple of thousand DB tables evolved organically. Nope not happening.