Comment by pinkgolem
4 days ago
>At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.
How sure are you about that one? All of my hetzner vm`s reach an uptime if 99.9% something.
I could see more then one small business stack fitting onto a single of those vm`s.
100% certain because I started by self hosting before moving to AWS services for specific components and improved the uptime and reduced the time I spent keeping those services alive.
What was work you spend configuring those services and keeping them alive? I am genuinely curious...
We have a very limited set of services, but most have been very painless to maintain.
A Django+Celery app behind Nginx back in the day. Most maintenance would be discovering a new failure mode:
- certificates not being renewed in time
- Celery eating up all RAM and having to be recycled
- RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart
- random issues with Postgres that usually required a hard restart of PG (running low on RAM maybe?)
- configs having issues
- running out of inodes
- DNS not updating when upgrading to a new server (no CDN at the time)
- data centre going down, taking the provider’s email support with it (yes, really)
Bear in mind I’m going back a decade now, my memory is rusty. Each issue was solvable but each would happen at random and even mitigating them was time that I (a single dev) was not spending on new features or fixing bugs.
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Just because your VM is running doesn't mean the service is accessible. Whenever there's a large AWS outage it's usually not because the servers turned off. It also doesn't guarantee that your backups are working properly.
If you have a server where everything is on the server, the server being on means everything is online... There is not a lot of complexity going on inside a single server infrastructure.
I mean just because you have backups does not mean you can restore them ;-)
We do test backup restoration automatically and also on a quarterly basis manually, but so you should do with AWS.
Otherwise how do you know you can restore system a without impact other dependency, d and c