[Pooge]

What is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that we would need to have someone on payroll to have a usable machine? Then why not just have... a SysAdmin?

Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?

[jfim]

Because people aren't going on AWS for EC2, they go on it to have access to RDS, S3, EKS, ELB, SNS, Cognito, etc. Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

[graemep]

A lot of people do use AWS for EC2.

Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale

> Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.

[jauntywundrkind]

In absolute numbers maybe it's a lot, but I doubt even 10% are EC2 only.

Even "only" ECS users often benefit from load balancing there. Other clouds sometimes have their own (Hetzner), but generally it's kind of a hard problem to do well, if you don't have a cloud service like Elastic IP's that you can use to handle fail over.

Generally everywhere I've worked has been pretty excited to have a lot more than just ecs managed for them. There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom. I'd love some day if the stance could shift some, if the everyday operator felt a little more secure doing some of their own platform engineering, if folks had faith in that. Having a solid secure day-2 stance starts with simple pieces but isnt simple, is quite hard, with inherent complexity: I'm excited by those many folks out there saddling up for open source platform engineering works (operators/controllers).

[graemep]

>Even "only" ECS users often benefit from load balancing there. Other clouds sometimes have their own (Hetzner), but generally it's kind of a hard problem to do well, if you don't have a cloud service like Elastic IP's that you can use to handle fail over.

Pretty much everyone offers load balancing and IPs that can be moved between servers and VPSs. Even if you have to switch to new IPs DNS propagation will not take as long as waiting out an AWS shutdown.

10% of what? Users, instances/capacity...? If its users then its a lot higher because it it gets commoner the smaller users are.

> There's still a strong perception that other people managing services is a wonderful freedom.

The argument is really about whether that is a perception of a reality. If you can fit everything on one box (which is a LOT these days) then its easy to manage your own stuff. if you cannot you are probably big enough to employ people to manage it (which is discussed in other comments) and you still have to deal with the complexity of AWS (also discussed elsewhere in the comments).

[jauntywundrkind]

I'd be shocked if 10% of users only use EC2. And as you say, for the most part I expect these to be pretty small fry users.

I've used dozens of VPS providers in my life, and a sizable majority had not advertised any load balancing offerings. I can open tickets to move IP addresses around. But that takes time. And these environments almost always require static configuration of your IP address, which you need some way to do effectively during your outage.

Anyone who declares managing their own stuff to be easy is, to me, highly suspect. Day 0 setting stuff up isn't so bad, day 1 running will show you some new things, but as time goes on there's always new and surprising ways for things to break or not scale or not be resilient or for backups to not be quite right. You talk about employing people to manage for you, but one to three persons salary will buy you a lot of elasticache and rds. As a business, it's hard to trust your DBA's and other folks, to believe the half dozen people really have done a great job. Where-as you know there have been many people-decades of work out into resiliency at AWS or others, you know what you are getting, and it's probably cheaper than having your own team for many many people.

I want to be clear that I am 100% for folks buying hardware and hosting themselves. I think it's awesome and wild how good hardware is. But what we run atop is way way way too often more an afterthought than a well planned cohesive system that's going to work well over time. Thats why I am hats off to the open source platform engineering works out there. I think we're getting closer to some very interesting spaces where doing for ourselves starts to be viable, in a way that's legitimate & runnable in ways that everyone-figuring-it-out-for-themselved of the past was always quite risky and where the business as a whole or external systems reviewers rarely had a good ability to evaluate what was really going on or how trustworthy it was.

I aspire for us to outdo the perception that other people managing for us is a great freedom. I really long for that. But the kind of "meh it's not that hard" attitude I see here, to me, dissuades from the point: it undermines how hard and what a travail it is to run systems. It is a travail. But it's one that open source platform engineering is advancing mightily to meet, in exciting & clear ways, that the just throwing some shit up there past always made murky.

[vinnymac]

The last 18 years of tech companies I’ve worked for used AWS EC2, every single one.

[paranoidrobot]

I'm saying that if you do want to compare two different platforms on performance, it should probably be done in consultation with someone who has worked with it before.

To use an analogy it's like someone who's never driven a car, and really only read some basic articles about vehicles deciding to test the performance of two random vehicles.

Maybe one of them does suck, and is overpriced - but you're not getting the full picture if you never figured out that you've been driving it in first gear the whole time.

[Pooge]

Isn't the point of using AWS that it's never in 1st gear?...