I’d like to thank the admins for being so open and direct about the issues that they’re facing.

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88 points

To be fair, with a proper autoscaling scheme in place these services should scale down significantly when not in use.

That being said, a big reason for using AWS/GCP is all the additional services that are available on the platform… If the workload being run isn’t that complicated, the hyperscalers are probably overkill. Even DO or Linode would be a better option under those circumstances.

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64 points

This. AWS architect here. There are a lot of ways to reduce pricing in AWS like horizontal scaling, serverless functions, reserved instances. Most people aren’t aware of it and if you’re going to dive in head first into something like cloud, you’ll need to bear the consequences and then learn eventually.

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24 points

Even with ASGs, ec2 costs a bomb for performance.

And “serverless” functions are a trap.

If you’re gonna commit to reserved instances, just buy hardware for goodness sake, its a 3 year commitment with a huge upfront spend.

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6 points

You can do one year dedicated spend.

But yes. Serverless is a trap to be avoided.

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2 points
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And “serverless” functions are a trap.

How are serverless functions a trap? They seem like a great cheap option for simple CRUD / client > server > db apps (what most apps end up being).

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11 points

Yep. And if you want to really save some cash and don’t mind getting a little crazy, use an EKS node orchestrator that supports spot instances. I’m starting to do a serious dive into Harness at the moment actually.

Google recently released a white paper on cost saving in kubernetes as well.

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1 point

Azure has something similar in AKS as well

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1 point

If you’ve got a kubernetes cluster running on 10 different spot instances, isn’t there a risk that all ten could be revoked at the same time? Even if they are built out across regions and availability zones?

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4 points

I’m in a similar boat. I’m a sysadmin supporting a legacy application running on AWS EC2 instances and a new ‘serverless’ microservice based platform as well. It’s really really hard to scale and optimize anything running on EC2s unless you really know what you’re doing or the application is designed with clustering in mind.

You tend to end up sizing instances based on peak load and then wasting capacity 90% of the time (and burning through cash like crazy). I can imagine a lot of Lemmy admins are overspending so fast they give up before they figure it out.

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6 points

Nowadays I feel like EC2 is either used for legacy support or testing. Most prod nowadays should probably be built with some kind of container solution so you can scale it easier.

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2 points
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