We decided to base our new platform on serverless - previously docker. Couldn't be any happier. Everything runs as expected and I don't need to worry about a tone of things.
People talk about vendor lock-in and all that. If you don't write things from scratch there is a vendor lock-in everywhere. Open source is also vendor lock-in. For example, we used to use xulrunner from Mozilla for some time and look where it is right now - nowhere.
I was also concerned initially with being locked in into a particular platform but then again, what I realised is that if your project is extremely successful you can always spend big to migrate when you have the funds to do it. As a startup, that is not the case. You start with nothing. So platforms like AWS are absolutely amazing because not too long ago you still had to buy your own datacenters.
> So platforms like AWS are absolutely amazing because not too long ago you still had to buy your own datacenters.
But just in terms of dollars, how much does it cost to own hardware? I have never worked in an "infrastructure" team so I'm am outsider looking at it with no experience but I hope someone will correct me.
Imagine a startup needs a 42U cabinet in four co locations. Each one costs a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a month? Let's say that puts the colocation bill at $5k a month. Next, we need the actual computers and it seems this is the expensive part? I simply searched for servers. Just for kicks, I selected a 2U supermicro 2023US-TR4. With 2x epyc 7301 16 core processors, 16 x 4GB RAM, 2TB Intel P4600 SSD, 4TB Hitachi 7K6000 HDD, and a five year next business day on site service quotes about $10k.
I imagine you can fit up to 20 such computers in a full 42U cabinet. This means just buying the computers will set us back 4 * 20 * $10k? Spending almost $1M on admittedly low end server hardware sounds expensive.
Colocation cost over let's say five years will be about 5 * 12 * $5k or about $300k.
I guess just because you have space for 20 computers doesn't mean you have to fill them all up. Also, I guess you don't need to be in four locations.
If we scale down our ambitions to 10 computers each in two locations, initial cost is 2 * 10 * $10k or about $200k and colocation costs are 5 * 12 * < $2k? or about $100k? because we no longer need a full cabinet...
I know I'm making a lot of assumptions and I'm hand washing a lot of important details but this seems like the smallest possible cost of self hosting, no? About $300k over five years is about $5k per month. It won't make sense for everyone but I guess if we have a thousand people paying us ten dollars a month, that pays for the hardware?
I welcome all corrections and insights. Like I said, I have no experience in these things.
You probably need a dedicated sysadmin as soon as you've got physical infrastructure that needs to stay online for your business to keep running - you honestly probably need this even if you're leasing dedicated hardware.
I used to work for a company that leased dedicated servers, and I talked to A LOT of customers that lost their business or lost a significant amount of their runway/savings/whatever due to mistakes caused by not having a real sysadmin around to handle their infrastructure. Long running issues they didn't have the experience to troubleshot, bad (or nonexistent!) backups or restoration procedures, extended outages due to server related issues, bad update/firewall/other security practices, etc.
There's pitfalls with every option, but running your own infrastructure is a completely different skillset from developing an application, and is a professional trade in and of itself - you can try to force this on a developer and hope they have the time and expertise to handle all of these different things and run the risk that they don't, or you can tack on another ~100k/yr for a professional. And as you grow, so does the complexity, and maybe now your infrastructure spans a lot of racks, and you need network engineers, you need multiple sysadmins, etc, etc, etc.
You can't DevOps your way out of managing physical infrastructure
Lambda and dynamo are currently 600% cheaper than running our own instances. For us, we are making substantial savings. In fact, the biggest cost is not Lambda itself but dynamo because we had to create quite a few indexes. Frankly, these things can be avoided with better planning. That being said, it is still way cheaper in our case.
People talk about vendor lock-in and all that. If you don't write things from scratch there is a vendor lock-in everywhere. Open source is also vendor lock-in. For example, we used to use xulrunner from Mozilla for some time and look where it is right now - nowhere.
I was also concerned initially with being locked in into a particular platform but then again, what I realised is that if your project is extremely successful you can always spend big to migrate when you have the funds to do it. As a startup, that is not the case. You start with nothing. So platforms like AWS are absolutely amazing because not too long ago you still had to buy your own datacenters.