Use One Big Server (2022)

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider.

Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago.

At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstate how far apart these machines are in raw computational capacity.

There are approaches to problems that make sense with 10x the capacity that don't make sense on the much smaller node. Critically, those approaches can sometimes save engineering time that would otherwise go into building a more complex system to manage around artificial constraints.

Yes, there are other factors like durability etc. that need to be designed for. But going the other way, dedicated boxes can deliver more consistent performance without worries of noisy neighbors.

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options!

I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage.

I implemented the whole thing in Python, Django, and PostgreSQL (initially used SQLite) put it in a $25/m unmanaged VPS.

I have not got any complaints about performance, and it's running continuously updating product prices, details, processing PDF invoices using OCR, finding missing products in shipments, while also serving the website, and a 4 core server with 6GB RAM is handling it just fine.

The load is not going to be so high to require AWS and friends, for now. It's a small internal app, probably won't even get over 100 users, and if it ever does, it's extremely simple to migrate, because the app is so compact, even though not exactly monolithic.

And still, it probably won't need a $100 AWS server, unless we are scaling up much larger.

Without understanding the architecture and use case better, at first read, my gut says that isn’t an AWS problem - it sounds like a solutions architecture problem.

There are cheaper ways of building that use case on AWS.

Most AWS sticker shock I’ve seen results from someone who doesn’t really understand cloud trying to build on the cloud. Cost has to be designed in from the start (in addition to security, operational overhead, etc).

In general, I’ve found two types of engineering teams who don’t use the cloud: the mugs and the superstars. And since superstars are few and far between, that means…