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by timerol 1212 days ago
> I'm pretty sure that maintaining a C++ codebase is less than 7.7 times more expensive than Node, even if you throw in extra development time etc.

The problem here is assuming that a 7.7x less expensive AWS bill is the same value as a 7.7x more expensive development time. Imagine an app that is maintained by one programmer costing $10k a month and running in AWS for $1k a month. It is not worth dividing that AWS cost by 10x if it means a 10% development time hit. Actual numbers may vary, but development often costs much more than running in AWS. (For startups it's even more of a difference, because you pay AWS as you get more traffic, but you pay developers before you have an MVP.)
2 comments
saurik 1212 days ago
FWIW, AWS is expensive... but mostly for networking and then second to that storage, with the cost for actual computation usually being a pretty small percentage of my overall spend. The only time I have seen computation itself be an interesting expense is when I am looking for some complicated hardware, such as their GPU or FPGA instances. That said, money is money... but it is much easier to figure out fun ways to save storage or bandwidth when the code is a bit more nimble, so I'm not sure I could justify larger teams or slower iteration times just to save on CPU.
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dilippkumar 1212 days ago
> but mostly for networking and then second to that storage, with the cost for actual computation usually being a pretty small percentage of my overall spend.

What portion of the bandwidth is end-user facing and what portion of it is connecting all the servers? Another way of asking this is if I need fewer servers because code runs faster, how much less bandwidth do I need?

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saurik 1212 days ago
AWS doesn't charge for internal server-to-server transfers, so the answer is precisely 0.
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caleblloyd 1212 days ago
That's only true for transfer in the same availability zone.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Data_Transfer_...

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saurik 1212 days ago
Availability and horizontal scale-out are separate axes, so that isn't relevant for this question.
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ReflectedImage 1212 days ago
"AWS for $1k a month" hahaha. People spend $90k on AWS by accident.
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