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by mavdi 590 days ago
Hi everyone,

We've gone through a lot of pain to get this blueprint working since our AWS costs were getting out of hand but we didn't want to part ways with CDK.

We've now got the same stack structure going with Pulumi and Digital ocean, having the same ease of development with at least 60% cost reduction.
2 comments
vundercind 590 days ago
Keep an eye on reachability and performance. I’ve seen DO consistently perform terribly and/or drop connections for months (that is, didn’t look like some brief routing glitch somewhere) for some US and Canadian routes (not, like, Sri Lanka or something) on excellent Internet connections. The fix was moving to AWS, problem gone. It felt like a shitty-peering-agreements issue.
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nostrebored 590 days ago
People will pretend that this quality difference doesn’t exist in networking, uptime, server quality.

It’s not a drop in replacement. It might be worth it depending on what you’re doing.

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vundercind 590 days ago
Frustratingly, it’s also something that doesn’t meaningfully appear on any features list or comparison sheet.
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data_marsupial 589 days ago
How do you monitor the connection quality?
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vundercind 589 days ago
From the client side. You can’t know what it should be like without knowing the client.

I’m sure there are lots of DO clients seeing the same things we did, but not realizing it.

We did see it (multiple DCs—we didn’t just not try to fix this before going to AWS) in multiple cases with tens of clients so if there’s good news it’s that if you can monitor like 100 clients distributed over a wide area and all of them behave as expected you may not be experiencing what we did. What we saw was closer to 5% with absurd slowness or frequently-dropped connections than to 0.01%.

And if you are just operating a website and sticking Cloudflare or whatever in front of DO anyway, this doesn’t matter. I expect that’s why it’s not a more widely-reported issue.

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skywhopper 590 days ago
Please change the title text unless you add some discussion of the cost differences to the page you linked. However useful your tool is, nothing on this page mentions AWS or costs.
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