Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hggigg 602 days ago
Worth noting us large AWS customers get huge discounts, huge credit, actual real engineers on hand 24/7 on Slack, contractual service guarantees that last years and a large market of people we can leverage to build stuff in there. And a lot of the services are low to zero cost that would be expensive to run on Hetzner or don't exist and you have to build out.

YMMV but all costs aren't instance costs.
1 comments
theshrike79 602 days ago
Yep, most corporations have 2-3 _named_ account reps who are available on the company Slack and will visit your office 1-2 times a year to sync up that everything is working as it should.

And they're not just salespeople, they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way.

link
JoshTriplett 602 days ago
> they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way.

Can you give examples of this? I'd love to hear more about the kinds of guidance they can give.

link
theshrike79 602 days ago
We were building a matchmaking service for our mobile game and thought about using Amazon GameLift FlexMatch[0]. On the surface it would've worked.

BUT, it's _very_ highly geared towards fully-online games where everyone playing the game is connected to a server all the time. Our game was asynchronous PvP where the attacker was online, but the defender wasn't.

I had a 30 minute chat with them and they confirmed that it _could_ be made to work, but it'd be extremely janky and expensive in our use case.

We ended up building our own (or actually expanding our existing setup a bit).

--

We've also got pretty good estimates on how much something might cost: we have an application that needs a specific number of writes/reads with X amount of data per write, what would be the cost on different Amazon services.

Again they came back with numbers and with many services (DynamoDB especially) it would've been either impossible or prohibitively expensive. We ended up changing the application structure to do less IOPS + more aggressive caching and ended up using plain S3 as storage.

Without their consultation (And inside knowledge about AWS internal hard limits) we would've spent weeks building a solution that will eventually fail as the data stored per user goes up.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/m...

link