If your scale is small (you're in the 'two people in a garage' phase of your company), then the cost of having your own server is small, even though you waste most of it. Hetzner will rent you a real physical server with an x86 processor and 32 GB of RAM for about 40 euros a month. I'm sure you can get smaller virtual servers elsewhere for less.
If your scale is large, you have enough work to make full use of however many servers you rent.
Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me. The actual cash money saving is just lost in the noise.
The only way i can see that i could be wrong is if there's a suppressed demand for huge numbers of tiny-scale services. Is there?
My scale is unpredictable. I don't sell software, I sell consulting and training services. To make our business run smoothly and maximize the available time of the two of us who run the place, we can't be held down by managing servers and services.
Investing in things like API Gateway and Lambda gives me the ability to keep my programming desires satisfied, while reducing the friction of tedious, time wasting operations, like automatically encoding a video of a class, extracting thumbnails, and setting permissions via API calls back to our home-brewed DAM system to make the video available for our students. Sure, I could do it myself each time. Six times per day of teaching. And turn down the process priority so it won't interfere with the rest of my job.
The costs of using AWS at that scale, while certainly nothing like the scale some of you are dealing with, are a considerable savings over the hourly rate I can charge for the time spent in my subject domain, and would have otherwise lost. We manage VMs for classes already, and most of that is now automated by our Hubot. In the coming weeks, the services/sites/apps we do have running will be migrated over to the docker-based infrastructure I'm building (in my copious free time, ha!), and the services therein will be interconnected with API Gateway and Lambda functions. It's a beautiful thing. I'm really quite pleased with it, and proud of what we've been able to do.
I'm know that I'm not alone, and maybe this post will encourage others in similar situations to share their experiences too. Maybe my peers don't frequent HN - that's an unknown to me, I guess. But there are far more entrepreneurs like me who enjoy the job we do, and will do everything we can to offload the time sucking administrivia to some other system, especially if we get to flex our programming muscles along the way.
Sounds very interesting. Are your classes webinars or some onsite classes? Do you have any online resource I could read up on? We've been looking to experiment with AWS API Gateway for some time, with something like JAWS [1] but it seemed too much to get somebody from the team to become an expert in all of this without knowing how it will turn out. It would be really cool to have a good online resource or even webinar that uses the AWS serverless stack.
> Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me
Agreed. I think what it avoids though is setting up ansible + puppet + firewall + updates + monitoring + blah blah stuff you do to secure and dev-ops a prod app (for a baby app).
You can half-arse this stuff in a day for a new company. I assume the defaults of lambda will be a little more secure... but amazon security is pretty complicated to set up right, so not totally sure what the max win will be.
> If your scale is large, you have enough work to make full use of however many servers you rent.
If this was close to true, AWS would not have existed. The thing is, when you're big, you're planning for spikes, and you're paying for your maxima per month. (Spare capacity aside, as that has to be a percentage of your desired monthly capacity.)
It doesn't matter if you are big or small, you're always wasting resources.. Just count how many servers you have using <50% cpu. By having thousands of users, amazon can organize servers in a way, no cpu is wasted.
If they kept CPUs 100% busy, how would they deal with a surge in demand or a failure situation? You HAVE to keep spare capacity or 1 failover crashes your entire fleet of 5 billion servers.
You could correctly argue that usage increases with scale.. so while you with 1 app can maybe only keep a server 20% busy, Amazon can afford to keep their servers 70% busy.. which is part of the story.
But the other part is you are paying for the convenience. You can get raw CPU way cheaper than what lambda gives it out at. Even if you only kept your CPU usage at 10-20% - for example Digital Ocean would still be cheaper than the Amazon Lambda app version. You are literally paying a surcharge to not have to set up your own servers, or deal with maintenance. I find it very unlikely you will save big money with lambda over your own servers.
If your scale is large, you have enough work to make full use of however many servers you rent.
Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me. The actual cash money saving is just lost in the noise.
The only way i can see that i could be wrong is if there's a suppressed demand for huge numbers of tiny-scale services. Is there?