In my first job, I was in a small startup where we had a 60 year old linux neckbeard as IT. He built an incredibly robust infrastructure out of free open source software and old cheap hardware.
@@robrider838the question is: at what cost. Could admins are also crazy expensive. So you pay a lot on the guy setting it up, running it and infrastructure. Just so that another expensive guy can take over? At a certain scale it might actually be advisable to simply have a team of 3 or 4 doing the thing. Not being that expensive because you train them and not having a high turnover because your company has a nice culture.
@@johanneskurz7122 And good luck overtaking their job after they leave most of the time it's outdated code structure from a nerd who wants to do it his way so nobody can understand what his doing.
Companies like AWS, Google, and Azure price on a curve. Its cheaper in the begining but once you use the handy dandy "scalability" you are effectively trapped in an overpriced money pit that you can't escape from
Yup. Used to sell those as a „consultant“ the cost to change the system is so high that companies stick to your solution and continue to pay you to maintain ist even tho they know it’s overpriced trap.
Yeah, we hit the million dollar AWS bill mark, the frugal CEO starts freaking out, and soon enough we have 6-7 fairly competent engineers iterating on the infrastructure for cost and other improvements anyways. Doesn't make a lot of sense at that point, but it also doesn't make sense to change.
@@1err3 not having the burden to buy, maintain, replace the hardware. Many years ago I had physical servers in a data center, and I had many dick failures. Unless you have a lot of machines, and you can save a ton buying your own hardware, getting a virtual machine is much better. Also you don't have to deal with the initial investment cost. And the time you spend to install, buy, upgrade, is money. It is more convenient use Linode or Digital Ocean, or other providers.
@@1err3hosting providers have built in power redundancy, some level of physical redundancy (host based), handle edge (firewall), they have publicly routable ranges (eg not CG NAT)- all for a few bucks a month for a basic package, it’s a no brainer.
@@1err3 in the video he can access his website on public network because he has public ip address, some internet providers doesn't allow that, so you have to rent a cloud server (usually cheaper than aws) and either host your stuff there or set up a reverse proxy. Another perk is that cloud servers tend to have much higher bandwidth (around 8Gbps in my case) and lower latency to mainframes so the end users might have a better experience.
This is a genuinely a really good self-hosting walkthrough, and you're right about the cloud's shortcomings. I'll be dead before I carry water for aws/gcp/etc, but i think it must be said that there's a pretty large gap between what you're showing and the sort of commercial-scale operations that the cloud is meant to be a practical replacement for (one where the cost of a devops department would run into six figures)
Well, if you have 1 devops then your cost is already six figures. And cloud doesn't fix it, as most developers are too bad with cloud stuff so you'll still need to hire someone with an expertise or suffer the consequences.
@@cloudboogie"most devs are bad with cloud stuff" hmmm... What? I see people developing/certifying themselves on it every single day man, and taking into account how many jobs there are available on that field... Just makes no sense unless you're thinking about the 40yo+ devs that have a beard, yellow glasses, "I'm on arch btw" and still think WSL is a desecration of the Linux Kernel or something.
for real. Have any of you been through a process-related audit (e.g. SOX, NIST, PCI, HIPAA)? Every single process in your enterprise will be reviewed, with varying degrees of thoroughness, depending on your industry. Your "it runs faster if I host it from the PC under my desk!" attitudes represent real risk to the company you work for. _Everything_ has to be logged, everything has to be auditable, and (at this point) nothing does that as well as public cloud.
As a software engineer who has worked with bare metals, hybrid infrastructure and Cloud I tell you cheap is a very relative concept. You can deploy anything on your cheap notebook, but maintaining it will be a pain. Backup, upgrades and disk replacement is just something you have to consistently consider when you host these things. I used to work in a company where the infrastructure was hybrid, we hosted our stuff through VMware and bare metal, and it was a pain. Setting up distaste recovery plans and monitoring was just annoying. No one wanted to do it. And with the cloud you just trust it will work. It’s truly on another level.
Everything is In your word trust. You trust until one day you notice issues in your data, then you open a ticket, the answer is yes we lost your data. You field a claim, the answer is in the contract your responsible for your data saving... Then you wonder why the cloud at the first point 😂
@@user-vb9vc1es3o "notice issues in your data". A competent software engineer would be able to discover the origin of these data issues and address them appropriately. The scenario you laid out assumes that the data/software engineer is not qualified for the role and needs to be let go.
The way you showcased how things would actually work if self hosted is really impressive. I, for the longest time, wanted to self host my website, blogs, packages, etc. But I couldn't figure out how to do it. This just gives me a reason to do it. Thanks.
oddly enough seeing (no music) bought me to the channel. This was a really interesting watch, thanks for posting it (and keeping the presentation simple :) )
dude i was already hooked after you started out saying everything ive been experiencing about industry in the first 2 minutes, and then you mentioned nixos and i literally started cheering. this video is what all developers and enterprise archtiects need to see. we waste so much effort over engineering simple scripts to work in aws that should be a collection of systemd units configured with nix on a SINGLE ec2 or, better yet, an on prem computer. i swear sometimes my work laptop could run our data pipelines every morning that we currently deploy with terraform and aws lambda
Currently in a startup: moved everything to linode from AWS, deployed on kubernetes using all open source solutions. Total operational cost for a horizontally scaled SaaS app is $50 per week.for a total of $2600 per year.
@@vcoolif a startup is able to logically expense the cost of a full rewrite to save $1k/year they either don't have a product or won't have any staff soon.
I'm also looking at something like Hetzner Cloud with k3s. I kind of still want to outsource DB to something like Neon or CoachroachDB, but cloud compute is too expensive, especially if your app is mostly I/O bound. Most of our line of business apps are literally sitting at sub 1% CPU on the smallest AWS Fargate instances
So my personal philosophy: - if project doesn’t demand absurd SLA or you just having fun, use home hosting - if initial or small deployment for high reliability, cloud makes sense. Cost of reliable internet and power usually exceeds cost of cloud (eg lambda + RDS instance) - the tipping point of dedicated local hosting is when the cost of backup power, real estate, and high SLA fiber can be amortized against cloud bill - cloud only makes sense for large loads in narrow circumstances. The overhead price for scalability is often not less than the cost of maintaining excess infra. The main variable here is time/consistency. Also worth differentiating “cloud” versus like private server hosting. I think that the typical shared data center renting rack space or even single bare metal server model looks more like home hosting with defrayed cost of reliable power and fiber. Personally being able to reconfigure my home network rack without taking down my public website is nice. Also if you try to do email from Comcast consumer IP space you will be permanently spammed. You need reverse DNS etc.
For my application I’d absolutely do home hosting if I didn’t have Comcast randomly taking out my Internet for 10-15 minutes at a time during business hours. It’s not a daily occurrence but I’m not certain paying for a business line would fix it. Plus I live in Florida, where a hurricane can wipe out power for 2 weeks. Not the usual result but it’s been known to happen.
@@headlibrarian1996 yeah the business plan does provide an SLA but it’s like proportional refund not actually a penalty. Usually if you want quite reliable internet you need your own AS number and multiple providers which is out of the ballpark for most home users. And yeah there’s a reason data centers tend to appear right next to power plants :)
I'm kicking myself as I definitely spent a long time trying to get some healthcheck scripts to work, when yeah a sleep for 30s or so would've definitely worked
This version is actually very good! Completely watchable, professional, and engaging, compared to the version with the loud music. Over there, I constantly felt like I want to turn the volume down, but I would also not be able to hear your voice
This is a great video and makes a fantastic case for on prem. But i disagree with it entirely, your cost breakdown for the cloud of 1mil a year is misleading. These are entire companies not one guy accidentally spinning up something that could be hosted in his bedroom. They would likely need to spend upwards of 1 million on rackspace if they were on premises anyway. For personal projects i disagree as well I too have a complex site with user login, logs, ssl, a db, and a backend that costs $1 a month. But it also requires 0 effort when i get new users, its scaling is limited manually, it has 100% uptime and i never have to touch anything. All of it took me maybe 4 hours to set up, the cloud is learnable and powerful. 94% of companies use it because it’s really good, not because they got tricked.
YESSS... I'm so happy I learned the LAMP stack doing everything by scratch before the insanity that is webdev now became what it is. I know how to do everything manually.
Nice video! I built my second startup using FreeBSD jails, Git, and Gitlab CI/CD. It's definitely possible to avoid cloud complexity until you really need it. Love your approach here, keeps things nice and simple but leaves options for later on the table. Bravo.
Yep. We essentially run a HA enterprise version of what he demos here in three DCs (FC SAN, NAS, , SDN, DB clusters). It's not as difficult as people make out to be. We do prototype and run some SaaS like email in the cloud but it's way cheaper for us to run almost everything in our private cloud.
I watched the first video and there were complaints about music. Got back on and you had re uploaded and fixed version. That was fast man. I just subbed this video was great.
I think the assumption of this video is incorrect. The cloud is obviously not for you or your scale. The cloud is for SCALE and RELIABILITY not simplicity. Although it is significantly simpler than running your own tools
When you need certifications to do something, then it isn't simple. What this video went through is the absolute rock bottom of competence, because the level of understanding required is low, and you can get by mainly following instructions. You can't do this in a day, you shouldn't work as a software engineer.
100% this, as a DevOps engineer for a massive company (30,000 engineers and billions in revenue) you don’t choose these tools for simplicity of setup, you choose them for simplicity of adaptation and scale.
For most businesses and people, those are just buzz words. Startups usually don't make money and some of the biggest ones don't have stable business models. If you need cheap cloud scalability to run your business, you probably don't have a viable business model.
That's a big one. The convenience of not having to set up and maintain your own equipment and just having something work. Your place could have a power outage or a flood and your site and services will still work. Amazon could have their equipment crap out but they have back up equipment ready to go and will deal with getting new equipment. There is a big value in having a service that will pretty much magically always work and maintain itself for you.
This is a great solution if you are young or unemployed, but when you are a business this is exactly what you want to avoid. This solution is very costly because you need to pay the wages for at least two employees who have such a deep understanding of those tools. Then you constantly need to monitor if this home grown solution still works and have to do software updates yourself all the time. While with AWS you don't need to spend money on those sysadmin guys and you have the confidence that your solution is tried and tested and will work all the time while not having to care about software updates at all.
@@vcool How would you automate software updates? You need to check if the application is still running after an update and be ready to revert the update if it fails. Plus you also need to check your homegrown solution if it is still compatible with the newer versions of the software it relies on. There's a reason why business spend so much on Amazon, because they would spend much more if they would do it themselves.
@@youtubevideos415tools like Jenkins are great for testing before deployment. All the automation software has processes to check for updates at build which generally happens at use, so the flow could be fully automated. While I believe Amazon is obviously more stable, you'll still need experts to understand, setup, monitor and grow. I guess for me I'd rather have the autonomy to fix things to work for me, and not essentially allow my company to be owned and operated by Amazon. Also AWS really just makes hardware easily accessible. Everything going on in the background needs someone to get paid to monitor it.
thank you, finally a voice of reason. also, what happens if the power goes out at your office? or your internet provider goes down? or the CTO spills coffee on the server? or the disk fails? are your users going to wait around while you drive to Best Buy? like I get the hate for the AWS alphabet soup services, but there's a middle ground between that and a box under your desk like it's the 90s. look at Digital Ocean, Hetzner Cloud, Linode, etc.
Look, I was going to make a tech joke about the video and all that, but the more I listened the more the video LITERALLY FUC.. ING showed what I do for a living. Including same decisions, mindset and more. Obviously you have more than 10 years of IT experience and have gone through the WTF moments as I have. This video touched so many points in so little time. So congratulations and I happily subscribed to the channel. Also the joke was "This video is for cases when you have less than 15 minutes for the cloud and server interview and no time to learn... But you need to sound knowledgeable".
The more I learn the more I realize the solution is to bullshit other people at work. No matter what industry or what role, just bullshit a sense of competence and results. I remember one company, I lied about literally everything on the application, in the interview, and even when I was "working." The wrong people were pleased and the right people were mad but powerless to inflict on me personally any consequence. The whole world works like this. Everyone should just start doing it as much as possible. Grind the system to a halt.
Without a too loud music. The video is still good ! Since you always show things on screen while never stop of talking. There is no blank and that’s perfect. That’s nice of you to have made this modification and that show your dedication in your channel. Anyway nice job. I didn’t subscribe in the first video but it’s now done ^^
This is soo good! I actually learnt the hard-way not to use the big vendors because I had 3 cosmosDB containers running slightly over free tier and it cost £150 for a month, absolute robbery. Now I use a $4/mo vps and it barely goes over 10% usage.
I was a network engineer before moving to software. Rack space is cheap. If you're paying more than maybe $1500 per month in cloud fees, its worth taking a hard look at self-hosting options.
You're comparing 1 mil of cloud spending by a startup to an old laptop running a docker container in someone's apartment. Is this a joke? Also, depending on the website (static vs dynamic), It might be cheaper to just run it in the cloud. Statically host it in S3 + use cloudfront for your CDN, and use lambda for API routes. Use a serverless DB like dynamo or aurora. Depending on your traffic, the cloud soultion could be cheaper. Also, it would come out of the box with: Unified metrics, logging, and alarms. 99.99+ SLAs on availability and persistence. IaC, no infra management, near infinite scalability, audit logs, ops console, etc... Perhaps people reach for cloud solutions too often -- but the self hosted docker container is not convincing me of anything.
Yup, there's a LOT of caveats. I've worked at startups that had such huge AWS spend. It is so much more complicated than this video suggests. For sure, you get to a point where it makes sense to hire a DevOps person or two and do it yourself on bare metal. Or even an AWS guru who can reoptimize things and cut down the bill, making themselves more than worth their salary (I've seen this before). Too many people these days *do* go for cloud hosting when it's just never going to be needed. (e.g. Vercel / Netlify) vs a $50 a month VPS. The startup example with $1million+ bill is a weird example.
The thing with AWS is you don’t have long term commitments and you can start and stop services on demand. BUT of course if you only need servers, there are also classic hosting providers that offer those on the same dynamic way as AWS for much less. Nobody says you can’t do this with normal servers. But you need more people, that is inevitable.
Which is paradoxical since it is only by paying upfront for the resources you plan to use that you can get the best pricing, the true spirit of the whole thing what was pitched years ago when the whole thing started.
@@StaffyDoo yes that's true and it is annoying. We offer a SaaS solution on AWS and we are working hard on cost optimization even though we have long term customers. If you can use spot instances then maybe you can have an advantage but for us it is not feasible. But we do benefit in that way that we have batch workloads where you would have to buy a lot of extra capacity if you used classic servers.
I've worked at a company that had their own servers sitting in Rackspace in a Datacenter nearby, the datacenter bill was laughbale compared to what we would've spent in the cloud, and surprisingly, 5 year old servers don't perform too bad. We were running on OpenShift and ArgoCD, including some very tight network firewall rules, meaning we could only log in to the control planes of those nodes from a Remote Desktop within the DC. It was honestly quite intruiging.
@@AstralJaeger if that fits your workload it is the best option. Server rental is always cheaper than cloud. But if you have a workload where you need like 5 servers for 4 hours and 1 for the rest of the day it can be problematic. On the other hand if you need fast disk I/O, servers are nearly always better as on AWS it is either slow AF or costs you an arm and a leg.
@@mudi2000a Oh I fully agree, it was a long term hosted SaaS Product that was hosted in 3 datacenters over 3 european countries. It was honestly impressive how far you can get when your are unwilling to spend money. But I still think you can host on AWS and Azure without getting fully locked in, but then it would be cheaper to just rent a dedicated box on Hetzner for 50$/mo
I’m an ex-AWS and ex-Microsoft engineer. This video is brilliantly creative and full of great advice and humor. Thank you and keep up the great work! I learned some things and I’m excited for the world to start understanding these software development patterns and principles. I’m committed to only building my products following four principles: my software must be open, portable, local-first, and decentralized. This is the way forward for many use cases. My favorite use case is for a family AI server. It’s trivial to apply these patterns to create a private ChatGPT like service with free API calls. These approaches will make the Internet more affordable and safe for everyone.
You should use nix build to create the iso or nixops to skip the whole first 5 minutes of this video. You can also define the docker container in the nixos config instead of arbitrarily doing that part imperatively. You're using NixOS but you're not really using NixOS.
ECS = Docker is a pretty bad take, you did save yourself later in the video though so i'll not be too harsh ECS is more like Kubernetes, would you say Docker is kubernetes? i don't think so Also multi-node clusters are not simple, doesn't matter if you are running bare metal self hosted or using a cloud provider. The complexity from modern cloud comes from the distributed nature and building fault tolerant systems. Sure you could go bare metal and save on your AWS bill, but what about your new increased bill for k8s experts and hardware maintenance people? Its all tradeoffs, and most early stage Startups will happily pay 100s of k per year to AWS/GCP/Azure instead of investing in complex k8s infrastructure and k8s experts which may end up costing more in the long term. Hiring usually always costs more than cloud bills If you are spending 1 million on AWS per year you best be making 10x that in revenue
This video is spot on. I laugh when I see these new startups building out their microservices, Kubernetes and then deploying their stack to the Cloud with their 2000 visitors a day. They literally could host the site from a Raspberry Pi without the hassles of managing Cloud infrastructure-absolutely hilarious!
The only think I look for a provider today is for managed databases, I still don't want to deal with the pain of managing database servers (snapshots, backups, updates, security, patches, etc...). I don't need that much to run stateless applications, just spawning a new docker container and works like a charm, but the data store is still a pain to manage myself.
Okay, so we run RDS with backups. Cool. Where do you want to host your compute? Your compute needs to be hosted close to the database or else the database hops are going to end up costing you a lot of latency, not to mention the traffic costs at the edge for the connection into AWS coming from public internet. (additionally there's security concerns here now because your database is exposed publicly rather than living in the confines of an AWS VPC. Okay, the security issue here can be solved with properly configured security groups to limit connections in, but the requirements are stacking up here, and this is an easy step to miss for a team that's not savvy on security) Then there's the question of routing into your compute. Amazon makes this insanely easy with ELBs (Elastic Load Balancer). With your home internet provider, you'll either have a dynamic IP, or be straight up natted and you'll have a very difficult time routing to your system. The dynamic IP can be worked around with tools that will monitor your public IP address and update DNS records accordingly, but this is another piece of infrastructure to manage, and there's no way to do it with zero downtime. To get reliable static IPs you're talking about creating a datacenter, and a datacenter specifically close to AWS datacenters where they've already bought up the best land in the area for that purpose. It's also a giant upfront cost in terms of money and time for a startup that needs to be quick to market. Self hosting is a LOT more than running a couple of containers on a machine.
@@patrickrobertshaw7020I would just set up a vpn to my database, something like zerotier, it’s super fast and doesn’t need to know your ip address. You don’t need to open up any ports on your firewall for it to work. For serving you app you can use something like Cloudfront tunnels. Or just buy a cheap 1-5$ vps and set your nginx on it. Although I prefer Traefik.
@@patrickrobertshaw7020 "or be straight up natted" " already bought up the best land in the area for that purpose." You can write comments normally lol
@@patrickrobertshaw7020 No self hosting is pretty much running a couple containers on a machine. All those services you describes are just open source tools with fancy UIs. And I mean the same open source tools. In a "real" company you don't run your product from a macbook, fucking obviously. You work with a datacenter that guarantees internet, power, cooling, drive replacement. You can just run your compute there, and it'll be a few orders of magnitude faster per hardware, because storage on the cloud is UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. I'm talking spinning disks levels of read speed, with your "ssd" tier.
Thanks for this great vid. This is a great intro into self-hosting. There are a lot of smaller companies in my area who are moving from clout to self-hosted solutions. This is a great way to get into those technologies and thinker a bit with them.
It's a bit of a hard claim that cloud is over engineerd. Too bad that the majority of the video was around deploying a simple webserver. It would better proof your point if you would be able to apply, integrate, secure and scale multiple different applications. Then add data processing and analytics on top and ensure that the entire stack is fully observable. My point is: cloud is very usefull, but merely overkill if you only have a very simple compute demand. Other than that, the additional services are worth their money very fast.
I'm head of engineering responsible for small business / start up with 150-200 headcount, round A-D funding for example I would not choose you to lead the tech team. You'd be great consultant for advisory role, or coming in hot to fix particular project, but you would not be in a decision making decision on tech roadmaps and strategies, vendor vs in-house engineering decisions, when to use cloud natively, hybrid, or 100% on-prem, risk of power / network ISP outages. For startup, it's about trading speed for growth and less about dollar optimization for self-hosted savings. First of all, you're not just going to buy 10 servers and get 20 engineer to share those 10 servers nicely, with various apps performance differences. Also, you can't adjust compute needs to match utilization for on-prem local hosted servers. In the Cloud, you can turn it off anytime you're not using it (for development, CI-CD). For production servers, if it generates significant traffic that underpins the start up growth value, would you be ok to have no physical staff on site 24/7 monitoring the hardware because it's hosted on your office condo IDF closet / electrical room? What's the cost of that on site service vs cloud again? Once you get to matured stage, then you can benchmark on-prem savings, but usually hybrid is necessary in most cases. But the complexity of hybrid environment is way more than meet the eyes as pointed by other comments. I don't think think you understand the overall business drag and labor black hole on competitiveness of self hosted vs outsourced to the cloud.
These are two different startups. He is talking about a startup with only him it sounds like. He also seems to know his product will never become huge, but it can gain traction and be a solid company. A company with 150+ headcount and funding has usally a proven market and product. You are working on a scale-up it sounds like. These cases are just very very very different and he is not solving the scale-up problem.
A person building his startup with sound business fundamentals is an entrepreneur. A person aiming for fast growth by expanding fast to create hype is a scammer aiming for VC's money. Its tough initially but you can have same or higher compute/storage power on your own servers at a far lesser cost compared to cloud over 5~10 years. When VC money tightens you will know what on-prem is !
wonderful video, sir! exactly what i was looking for. even as i'm not really a programmer, i do need to make my own tools from time to time and it always annoyed me to no end that whenever i'd try to get an actual professional to build a solution, they could never understand that i don't want it on a cloud, and that i also want to be able to control and change it myself, as i can't just sit around and wait for someone else to answer me when i have an error or something. so i would always actually end up crudely doing it myself, which took a bit longer, but it was at least working the way i needed it to. you explained this point very well at the end, most truly don't need such complicated tools and more often they take away too much in turn of some apparent advantages that few are actually asking for.
Recently I have found "docker compose up --scale" removes the latest created container. Finally I have found the way to remove the old container. Thanks.
Thanks for introducing me to nix (before fireship did)! I am using it for my home server and love it. One config file is my favorite method. Also, thx for introducing me to caddy. I am having a great time messing with my server!
Yeah, had me dying as well... of cringe! It's a text editor ffs, you open the config file with it, change what you need to change, save the change, and life goes on. But nooo, it's a self-hosting video, gotta rub the neckbeards that make up the majority of the target audience...
As someone who has self-hosted many websites, you seem to be missing the entire point of why people prefer using cloud servers for their startups. It's all about scaling applications on a need basis to handle sudden, dramatic increases in traffic, which all startups expect as a part of their projected exponential growth strategy. Using local machines is cheaper, yes, but that is when the traffic and scale is static; even then there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into running a data center.
This is an awesome video! I see so many cases where teams just default to the Cloud for everything. Then, they're fighting with things like IAM and networking policies and chasing down subtle issues for days that simply would not have even existed if they had chosen to deploy to their own data center. And, don't get me started on the AWS Lambda and managed serverless idea that was going to solve all our problems - no, solved some, created others. All, while 100% locking you into the vendor. There is a place for most technology solutions. And, you did a great job of mentioning some reasons to go Cloud. The Cloud serves a real purpose. However, it's still amazing to me how so many companies and otherwise great technologists have drunk the "Cloud kool-aid" and look at you with disdain if you even mention that they should consider another option. Hats off to the vendors for doing an outstanding job of marketing.
This video feels like an affirmation that I haven't gone crazy. Literally every professor this year in my faculty that had computer-related class (not programming, just the theory of computer architecture, professors that taught programming and oop were actually great) was telling us to use cloud, even when we were doing RAID.
@@Macheako Self hosting can be a major pain or outright impossible in some situations. You have to have a stable IP and you're ISP has to be ok with you hosting. If neither are true, then you simply can't self host. You could move, but that's quite the major life change just to avoid using someone else's computer.
@@Beakerbite Or maybe its about time to force ISPs to give all customers static IP leases without expiration on demand at no charge. I don't believe that there is any reasonable explanation that can excuse this failure.
hey great video! how do you make your server public? i know how to point domain names to public servers such as AWS ec2. but i am not able to make my server public. i suspect CGNAT is at play but would love some nudge in the right direction to self host.
Thank you so much, this is so inspiring that I want to setup a lab for myself and see how much do I need a cloud to "provide the solutions to my problems". Keep it coming!
i have done kubernetes from scratch on baremetal to having a vps box with docker and trust me, when it comes to starting your service this might be a good beginning but when it comes to scaling, security, config, maintenance and in the future also different people working on your project, there is no way aws is more expensive than running your own operation, sacrificing your time and possibly hiring an admin for that. yes, a vps with plain linux and docker is incredibly easy and simple but this ll goes to shit when the app actually needs to scale. I used the vps setup for my dev and home projects tho, cheap and reliable low performance hosting. Remember, your time is not free! And AWS certainly has a premium price but when building solo startups its an invaluable tool.
Great video. Thought it was going to be a talking point on cloud services. Was pleasantly surprised to discover what this video actually was. I like the workflow and your video taught a few tips and tricks that I hadn't previously known. P.S. You had me at "I refuse to use nano more than once per device"
The guys voice sounds quite young. Maybe he’s never had to forecast cpu and disc usage to purchase for a new project for the next 3 years that’s a lot harder to scale up once providers and installed than clicking a button in a cloud
I couldn’t agree more. I built a server rack for multiple thousands of dollars that’s way over what I need, and it’ll still pay for itself within 2 years compared to hosting on the cloud.
Nice Vid, But I disagree with the title. Cloud is not over-engineered, (That would imply it works). The cloud tends to be needlessly abstracted to fleece customers for more money. If you look at AWS most of the services are half baked, bug riddled and wrapped in a horseshit UI. Take for example; recently AWS started charging for IPv4 public IPs but guess what you can't run IPv6 on their shit because 88% of their services ONLY(not even duel stack) support IPv4. Tbh I don't care about IPv6, I am happy to sit behind NAT for the rest of my life but to be billed for something as basic as NAT just shows how much they are missing the plot.
@@fluffysheap You do pay for NAT, either via NAT gateway(costs a small fortune) or running a NAT instance. Without NAT the private ipv4 network is cut off from the internet.
@@muhammadosama3358 Haha, that is funny you are calling basic networking, a feature... Got any more jokes? No, really this is expected by their own name; "Amazon Web Services". If we wanted to run a web less server, we can just run a closet server. The EC2 costs should already include the networking costs of NAT at minimum. So to have a basic VPC you get billed for three separate things: EC2, EC2 traffic outbound per GB and then (NAT or Pub IPv4). There are cloud providers who do not double bill like this.
Too many compromises for long term large system especially security wise and complexity - great for starting off an mvp but this will quickly become risky and un maintainable and therefore will become more expensive than cloud to stick or scale this infrastructure stack
The point is, you rarely host a real big project with an application with users in the millions and higher. Even, in big enterprise or rising startups, this is extremely rare. Even in Big Tech, this will only be necessary for a few microservices (for the majority of them, it won't and some out time or slow latency doesn't matter that much). Most of the applications you deploy, will have only some users (in terms of much smaller than 1 Mio users - and indeed from experience, most application will have less than 1000 users), and will rarely need to be available with extremely short latency from all over the world. Or have a SLA with many 9s. If you happen to run into one of such application in your whole career, that's probably much over average of a software developer/admin/devops person. And as long as you don't have one of such killer criteria, having a self hosted process and your own computers or bare metal rented one in a computer center, will do the job (better, cheaper, faster in terms of development). Of course, you always should still keep multiple copies of your data in multiple locations, and probably also when you have some success run different computers in different locations serving the content for availability. The process, the video poster shows works even with several dozens replicas, hard disks, databases involved and so on. It only does not scale once you have to serve to potentially billions of users. The reality from my professional career in small and big enterprises is that the Cloud und Kubernetes is used to deploy usually 1-3 replicas of an application with usually a non distributed SQL database behind with extremely tight resource claims (yes, that's the way it's administred out of your control in big companies, and small ones usually don't want to pay expensive machines). In reality, most of the applications I deployed, had less resources than my mobile, and they worked for the user base. The only thing that changes once you use Cloud technology in practice, is that your bill is 10x of what it would cost, if you'd deploy it self hosted. And yes, I've seen this pattern over and over in the last 10 years. BTW, the reason most Fortune 500 companies use Cloud technology, is also not scalability. As outlined, that's completely irrelevant for most applications and usually internally blocked anyway. But Fortune 500 companies need liability for legal reasons that Cloud provider can provide and again for legal reasons and others (Fraud protection, bribery, money laundering), etc, they have to control what you as developer can do with consistent rules. That's something they can do in K8s, AWS, GCP, Azure in close to every detail, and they do. That's not a good reason to do in the same manner in a small or growing company, for at least, till you are so successful, that you get regulated and have to implement tight policies.
The setup is cloud ready. As long as ine is using docker for the apps, they can be deployed in cloud when required to scale up massively. DB migration will be an issue but not something unsolvable. One needs AWS when one is hitting bottlenecks if performance due to requests coming from different parts of the world at high rates. Even when I was intervieing for startup positions, they were hellbent on whether I use AWS services. I later figured out that they dont spend anytime creating their own setup, and also its part of the agreements during funding rounds.
ahhhh i love this. i’m still too much of an amateur/beginner that some of the steps here i’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but i wanna try following along sometime and see if it clicks when doing it in practice… precisely bc im an amateur/hobbyist none of the things im interested in doing as projects require like amazing speeds or never having any downtime, so if i learned how to properly self host stuff like this i’d feel so powerful :’)
Agreed. You probably already know but ECS isn't just docker like mentioned in the vid, it'll automate provisioning servers to scale to your traffic in a rubber-banding effect (hence elastic). When mentioned in the video that it's 'preferred to have the site crash and then provision more servers' makes me cringe because while that's fine for a random person's website that can be detrimental to a business whose infrastructure failed just as they may have finally gained the traffic they worked hard to get, and once user's see hiccups in your service then that's a lasting impression that you aren't trustworthy. There's ways of using cloud without being locked down to a provider.
@@coreycollins8554 Yeah it's never preferable to have the site crash, this guy has almost certainly never worked in a proper tech company if he recommends this. The bare minimum for an app with business customers is multi AZ and 4 nines - they likely wouldn't sign a contract for an app that does less. Docker swarm isn't a solution as stated in the video, since a powercut still kills all of your machines at once. No replication of customer data is a liability issue. No node autoscaling, and it's not really feasible to automate that at home. No CDN, so the frontend will load horrifically slow from a different country. There's many reasons we use PaaS.
@@coreycollins8554 In this context it, ECS is a term of abstraction. Docker is just an core component of that abstraction. SLA is up to client to choose. If you implement "ECS" in house you pick and choose the requirements. That includes hardware(owned/rented) and location(s).
Cloud has been oversold for nearly its whole lifetime. Outside of the original concepts of rapid scale out and scale back and software deployment speed, cloud makes little sense. If you are anything above a small business with predictable system load, clouds only purpose is to make the cost opex so you can sell it to the shareholders as something that can go down.
@NoOnesBCE most cloud companies enables you to set a threshold for scaling and a limit. If done properly you should never scale beyond what's within your budget.
I like that this video is way more popular and no one complains. Fixing mistakes is just as good as not making them in the first place as long as you don't repeat them
Incedibly well done video. Really covered a lot of topics in a short time. I think all the advice was great! Even for someone who knows and uses most of these tools already, it is great to see how others are setting things up. Just one critical thing you missed (in my opinion) is backups. I very much agree with you that I am not so worried about a bit of down time. Downtime is no such a big deal. But data loss is a big deal. So maybe some cron jobs that backup some data to S3 for example? Sure you are using cloud in that case but in a very minimal way usually very low cost to use S3. Doing this really adds a lot of value and peace of mind at minimal cost. And one last thing. It would be great if you included a git repo with the files you created in the video.
Thank you for having a version without music
😭😂🤣. Bro paid you for saving his ears
When are you donating us poor souls?
Thank you for donating. More videos should not have music.
Just curious, what's wrong with music?
@@imamuzzaki
distracting
In my first job, I was in a small startup where we had a 60 year old linux neckbeard as IT. He built an incredibly robust infrastructure out of free open source software and old cheap hardware.
Who let the grandpa stallman in?
But it was still shit as no one else could maintain it. What happened when he retired a few years later?
@@robrider838the question is: at what cost. Could admins are also crazy expensive. So you pay a lot on the guy setting it up, running it and infrastructure. Just so that another expensive guy can take over? At a certain scale it might actually be advisable to simply have a team of 3 or 4 doing the thing. Not being that expensive because you train them and not having a high turnover because your company has a nice culture.
@@johanneskurz7122 And good luck overtaking their job after they leave most of the time it's outdated code structure from a nerd who wants to do it his way so nobody can understand what his doing.
When you have a bus factor of 1, and neckbeards don't have that high a life expectancy
Nice one , music was a little loud
music is haram
😂@@user-zg2bx4oz2p
Music is haram
Yes music is HARAM
Can verify music is indeed haram
Companies like AWS, Google, and Azure price on a curve. Its cheaper in the begining but once you use the handy dandy "scalability" you are effectively trapped in an overpriced money pit that you can't escape from
Yup. Used to sell those as a „consultant“ the cost to change the system is so high that companies stick to your solution and continue to pay you to maintain ist even tho they know it’s overpriced trap.
Yeah, we hit the million dollar AWS bill mark, the frugal CEO starts freaking out, and soon enough we have 6-7 fairly competent engineers iterating on the infrastructure for cost and other improvements anyways. Doesn't make a lot of sense at that point, but it also doesn't make sense to change.
can you give examples with real numbers because the more data u use per month the less u pay per gb used
@@user-lrg3glm6rhdyv okay so that's true, but it depends on what features are attached. Those features are an absolute ripoff
the actual pricey thing in the cloud is storage. Compute isnt really that expensive nowadays.
I am simple person, I see self host, I like.
😆😆
You sound like you could be my friend
Ain't that the truth
Did we just become best friends?
No really I need friends. 😭 lol
@@jjones503 yeah we can be friends 😅
Things I learned:
a) How to self host
b) This video used to have annoyingly loud music
Well, you are still going to use the cloud, but it will be Linode or Digital Ocean, which are way cheaper than AWS.
@@biomorphic What makes it necessary to use hosting providers?
@@1err3 not having the burden to buy, maintain, replace the hardware. Many years ago I had physical servers in a data center, and I had many dick failures. Unless you have a lot of machines, and you can save a ton buying your own hardware, getting a virtual machine is much better. Also you don't have to deal with the initial investment cost. And the time you spend to install, buy, upgrade, is money. It is more convenient use Linode or Digital Ocean, or other providers.
@@1err3hosting providers have built in power redundancy, some level of physical redundancy (host based), handle edge (firewall), they have publicly routable ranges (eg not CG NAT)- all for a few bucks a month for a basic package, it’s a no brainer.
@@1err3 in the video he can access his website on public network because he has public ip address, some internet providers doesn't allow that, so you have to rent a cloud server (usually cheaper than aws) and either host your stuff there or set up a reverse proxy. Another perk is that cloud servers tend to have much higher bandwidth (around 8Gbps in my case) and lower latency to mainframes so the end users might have a better experience.
Love the VC -> Bezos pipeline. One of the all time classics
This is a genuinely a really good self-hosting walkthrough, and you're right about the cloud's shortcomings. I'll be dead before I carry water for aws/gcp/etc, but i think it must be said that there's a pretty large gap between what you're showing and the sort of commercial-scale operations that the cloud is meant to be a practical replacement for (one where the cost of a devops department would run into six figures)
Exactly. I’m really looking for a way to reduce our company’s AWS bill but this just wont cut it
Well, if you have 1 devops then your cost is already six figures. And cloud doesn't fix it, as most developers are too bad with cloud stuff so you'll still need to hire someone with an expertise or suffer the consequences.
@@cloudboogie"most devs are bad with cloud stuff" hmmm... What? I see people developing/certifying themselves on it every single day man, and taking into account how many jobs there are available on that field... Just makes no sense unless you're thinking about the 40yo+ devs that have a beard, yellow glasses, "I'm on arch btw" and still think WSL is a desecration of the Linux Kernel or something.
@@Jossarianz move to another provider - running your containers under VMs i.e. Linode, Equinix Metal, Digital Ocean, Vultur
for real.
Have any of you been through a process-related audit (e.g. SOX, NIST, PCI, HIPAA)?
Every single process in your enterprise will be reviewed, with varying degrees of thoroughness, depending on your industry.
Your "it runs faster if I host it from the PC under my desk!" attitudes represent real risk to the company you work for. _Everything_ has to be logged, everything has to be auditable, and (at this point) nothing does that as well as public cloud.
if this man disappears, we all know the reason
The music mafia got to him
He's an aussie, Bezos has no power over him.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 I don't think the music is from Amazon tho
Did he get trapped inside one of his own Docker containers?
The AWS death squadron is coming for you
As a software engineer who has worked with bare metals, hybrid infrastructure and Cloud I tell you cheap is a very relative concept. You can deploy anything on your cheap notebook, but maintaining it will be a pain. Backup, upgrades and disk replacement is just something you have to consistently consider when you host these things. I used to work in a company where the infrastructure was hybrid, we hosted our stuff through VMware and bare metal, and it was a pain. Setting up distaste recovery plans and monitoring was just annoying. No one wanted to do it. And with the cloud you just trust it will work. It’s truly on another level.
Exactly. Getting something to ”work“ and maintaining something are completely different things.
Everything is In your word trust.
You trust until one day you notice issues in your data, then you open a ticket, the answer is yes we lost your data. You field a claim, the answer is in the contract your responsible for your data saving... Then you wonder why the cloud at the first point 😂
Most companies grossly underestimate the costs
Also.. imagine trusting aws
@@user-vb9vc1es3o me when backups do not exist
@@user-vb9vc1es3o "notice issues in your data". A competent software engineer would be able to discover the origin of these data issues and address them appropriately. The scenario you laid out assumes that the data/software engineer is not qualified for the role and needs to be let go.
music was REALLY loud for a tech video. thanks!
The way you showcased how things would actually work if self hosted is really impressive. I, for the longest time, wanted to self host my website, blogs, packages, etc. But I couldn't figure out how to do it. This just gives me a reason to do it. Thanks.
oddly enough seeing (no music) bought me to the channel. This was a really interesting watch, thanks for posting it (and keeping the presentation simple :) )
dude i was already hooked after you started out saying everything ive been experiencing about industry in the first 2 minutes, and then you mentioned nixos and i literally started cheering. this video is what all developers and enterprise archtiects need to see. we waste so much effort over engineering simple scripts to work in aws that should be a collection of systemd units configured with nix on a SINGLE ec2 or, better yet, an on prem computer. i swear sometimes my work laptop could run our data pipelines every morning that we currently deploy with terraform and aws lambda
Currently in a startup: moved everything to linode from AWS, deployed on kubernetes using all open source solutions.
Total operational cost for a horizontally scaled SaaS app is $50 per week.for a total of $2600 per year.
what was it like before?
That's still a lot. Can you rewrite it into an efficient language with efficient algorithms to where a single node is sufficient?
@@vcoolif a startup is able to logically expense the cost of a full rewrite to save $1k/year they either don't have a product or won't have any staff soon.
@@vcoolrewriting a product can take 100’s of 1000’s of $, and can potentially fail.
I'm also looking at something like Hetzner Cloud with k3s.
I kind of still want to outsource DB to something like Neon or CoachroachDB, but cloud compute is too expensive, especially if your app is mostly I/O bound.
Most of our line of business apps are literally sitting at sub 1% CPU on the smallest AWS Fargate instances
So my personal philosophy:
- if project doesn’t demand absurd SLA or you just having fun, use home hosting
- if initial or small deployment for high reliability, cloud makes sense. Cost of reliable internet and power usually exceeds cost of cloud (eg lambda + RDS instance)
- the tipping point of dedicated local hosting is when the cost of backup power, real estate, and high SLA fiber can be amortized against cloud bill
- cloud only makes sense for large loads in narrow circumstances. The overhead price for scalability is often not less than the cost of maintaining excess infra. The main variable here is time/consistency.
Also worth differentiating “cloud” versus like private server hosting. I think that the typical shared data center renting rack space or even single bare metal server model looks more like home hosting with defrayed cost of reliable power and fiber.
Personally being able to reconfigure my home network rack without taking down my public website is nice. Also if you try to do email from Comcast consumer IP space you will be permanently spammed. You need reverse DNS etc.
For my application I’d absolutely do home hosting if I didn’t have Comcast randomly taking out my Internet for 10-15 minutes at a time during business hours. It’s not a daily occurrence but I’m not certain paying for a business line would fix it. Plus I live in Florida, where a hurricane can wipe out power for 2 weeks. Not the usual result but it’s been known to happen.
@@headlibrarian1996 yeah the business plan does provide an SLA but it’s like proportional refund not actually a penalty. Usually if you want quite reliable internet you need your own AS number and multiple providers which is out of the ballpark for most home users. And yeah there’s a reason data centers tend to appear right next to power plants :)
I just watched your previous video and now i am hooked to your channel. Nice content.
Bro really. Make a tutorial replicate this one using Kamal I can help you with the configuration
Thanks for this video, it changed the way how I view world.
no to mam nadzieję, że nie będziemy razem ze sobą pracować
"I sleep for 30 seconds since it's easier than doing a health check" best life advice here
I'm kicking myself as I definitely spent a long time trying to get some healthcheck scripts to work, when yeah a sleep for 30s or so would've definitely worked
Keep posting quality content man!
So caught me off guard with the nixOS spin. It was a pleasant surprise.
you saved me money that i would've given to the cloud so im giving to you
This version is actually very good! Completely watchable, professional, and engaging, compared to the version with the loud music.
Over there, I constantly felt like I want to turn the volume down, but I would also not be able to hear your voice
This is a great video and makes a fantastic case for on prem. But i disagree with it entirely, your cost breakdown for the cloud of 1mil a year is misleading. These are entire companies not one guy accidentally spinning up something that could be hosted in his bedroom. They would likely need to spend upwards of 1 million on rackspace if they were on premises anyway.
For personal projects i disagree as well I too have a complex site with user login, logs, ssl, a db, and a backend that costs $1 a month. But it also requires 0 effort when i get new users, its scaling is limited manually, it has 100% uptime and i never have to touch anything. All of it took me maybe 4 hours to set up, the cloud is learnable and powerful. 94% of companies use it because it’s really good, not because they got tricked.
Thank you for using "on premises" instead of "on premise" like most people.
Better without music
YESSS... I'm so happy I learned the LAMP stack doing everything by scratch before the insanity that is webdev now became what it is. I know how to do everything manually.
Ditto
You earned my trust in less than 15 minutes. Subscribed!
Nice video! I built my second startup using FreeBSD jails, Git, and Gitlab CI/CD. It's definitely possible to avoid cloud complexity until you really need it. Love your approach here, keeps things nice and simple but leaves options for later on the table. Bravo.
Yep. We essentially run a HA enterprise version of what he demos here in three DCs (FC SAN, NAS, , SDN, DB clusters). It's not as difficult as people make out to be. We do prototype and run some SaaS like email in the cloud but it's way cheaper for us to run almost everything in our private cloud.
I watched the first video and there were complaints about music. Got back on and you had re uploaded and fixed version. That was fast man. I just subbed this video was great.
I think the assumption of this video is incorrect. The cloud is obviously not for you or your scale. The cloud is for SCALE and RELIABILITY not simplicity. Although it is significantly simpler than running your own tools
“Although it is significantly simpler than running your own tools.”
Wut.
When you need certifications to do something, then it isn't simple.
What this video went through is the absolute rock bottom of competence, because the level of understanding required is low, and you can get by mainly following instructions. You can't do this in a day, you shouldn't work as a software engineer.
100% this, as a DevOps engineer for a massive company (30,000 engineers and billions in revenue) you don’t choose these tools for simplicity of setup, you choose them for simplicity of adaptation and scale.
For most businesses and people, those are just buzz words. Startups usually don't make money and some of the biggest ones don't have stable business models. If you need cheap cloud scalability to run your business, you probably don't have a viable business model.
That's a big one. The convenience of not having to set up and maintain your own equipment and just having something work. Your place could have a power outage or a flood and your site and services will still work. Amazon could have their equipment crap out but they have back up equipment ready to go and will deal with getting new equipment. There is a big value in having a service that will pretty much magically always work and maintain itself for you.
This is a great solution if you are young or unemployed, but when you are a business this is exactly what you want to avoid. This solution is very costly because you need to pay the wages for at least two employees who have such a deep understanding of those tools. Then you constantly need to monitor if this home grown solution still works and have to do software updates yourself all the time. While with AWS you don't need to spend money on those sysadmin guys and you have the confidence that your solution is tried and tested and will work all the time while not having to care about software updates at all.
Software updates for the most part are supposed to be automated or otherwise skippable.
@@vcool How would you automate software updates? You need to check if the application is still running after an update and be ready to revert the update if it fails. Plus you also need to check your homegrown solution if it is still compatible with the newer versions of the software it relies on. There's a reason why business spend so much on Amazon, because they would spend much more if they would do it themselves.
@@youtubevideos415tools like Jenkins are great for testing before deployment. All the automation software has processes to check for updates at build which generally happens at use, so the flow could be fully automated.
While I believe Amazon is obviously more stable, you'll still need experts to understand, setup, monitor and grow. I guess for me I'd rather have the autonomy to fix things to work for me, and not essentially allow my company to be owned and operated by Amazon. Also AWS really just makes hardware easily accessible. Everything going on in the background needs someone to get paid to monitor it.
thank you, finally a voice of reason. also, what happens if the power goes out at your office? or your internet provider goes down? or the CTO spills coffee on the server? or the disk fails? are your users going to wait around while you drive to Best Buy? like I get the hate for the AWS alphabet soup services, but there's a middle ground between that and a box under your desk like it's the 90s. look at Digital Ocean, Hetzner Cloud, Linode, etc.
The cloud isn't gonna maintain itself either. You got shared responsibility. Or you end up paying another MSP for doing that.
Look, I was going to make a tech joke about the video and all that, but the more I listened the more the video LITERALLY FUC.. ING showed what I do for a living. Including same decisions, mindset and more. Obviously you have more than 10 years of IT experience and have gone through the WTF moments as I have.
This video touched so many points in so little time. So congratulations and I happily subscribed to the channel.
Also the joke was "This video is for cases when you have less than 15 minutes for the cloud and server interview and no time to learn... But you need to sound knowledgeable".
The more I learn the more I realize the solution is to bullshit other people at work. No matter what industry or what role, just bullshit a sense of competence and results. I remember one company, I lied about literally everything on the application, in the interview, and even when I was "working." The wrong people were pleased and the right people were mad but powerless to inflict on me personally any consequence.
The whole world works like this. Everyone should just start doing it as much as possible. Grind the system to a halt.
"the video LITERALLY FUC.. ING showed what I do for a living."
Why do people write like this?
Without a too loud music. The video is still good !
Since you always show things on screen while never stop of talking. There is no blank and that’s perfect.
That’s nice of you to have made this modification and that show your dedication in your channel.
Anyway nice job. I didn’t subscribe in the first video but it’s now done ^^
this's some great reference material.
This is soo good! I actually learnt the hard-way not to use the big vendors because I had 3 cosmosDB containers running slightly over free tier and it cost £150 for a month, absolute robbery. Now I use a $4/mo vps and it barely goes over 10% usage.
I was a network engineer before moving to software. Rack space is cheap. If you're paying more than maybe $1500 per month in cloud fees, its worth taking a hard look at self-hosting options.
Guy says cloud services are worthless, and his proof is that he built hello world without using them.
You're comparing 1 mil of cloud spending by a startup to an old laptop running a docker container in someone's apartment. Is this a joke?
Also, depending on the website (static vs dynamic), It might be cheaper to just run it in the cloud. Statically host it in S3 + use cloudfront for your CDN, and use lambda for API routes. Use a serverless DB like dynamo or aurora. Depending on your traffic, the cloud soultion could be cheaper.
Also, it would come out of the box with: Unified metrics, logging, and alarms. 99.99+ SLAs on availability and persistence. IaC, no infra management, near infinite scalability, audit logs, ops console, etc...
Perhaps people reach for cloud solutions too often -- but the self hosted docker container is not convincing me of anything.
Yup, there's a LOT of caveats. I've worked at startups that had such huge AWS spend. It is so much more complicated than this video suggests.
For sure, you get to a point where it makes sense to hire a DevOps person or two and do it yourself on bare metal. Or even an AWS guru who can reoptimize things and cut down the bill, making themselves more than worth their salary (I've seen this before).
Too many people these days *do* go for cloud hosting when it's just never going to be needed. (e.g. Vercel / Netlify) vs a $50 a month VPS.
The startup example with $1million+ bill is a weird example.
The thing with AWS is you don’t have long term commitments and you can start and stop services on demand. BUT of course if you only need servers, there are also classic hosting providers that offer those on the same dynamic way as AWS for much less. Nobody says you can’t do this with normal servers. But you need more people, that is inevitable.
Which is paradoxical since it is only by paying upfront for the resources you plan to use that you can get the best pricing, the true spirit of the whole thing what was pitched years ago when the whole thing started.
@@StaffyDoo yes that's true and it is annoying. We offer a SaaS solution on AWS and we are working hard on cost optimization even though we have long term customers. If you can use spot instances then maybe you can have an advantage but for us it is not feasible. But we do benefit in that way that we have batch workloads where you would have to buy a lot of extra capacity if you used classic servers.
I've worked at a company that had their own servers sitting in Rackspace in a Datacenter nearby, the datacenter bill was laughbale compared to what we would've spent in the cloud, and surprisingly, 5 year old servers don't perform too bad. We were running on OpenShift and ArgoCD, including some very tight network firewall rules, meaning we could only log in to the control planes of those nodes from a Remote Desktop within the DC. It was honestly quite intruiging.
@@AstralJaeger if that fits your workload it is the best option. Server rental is always cheaper than cloud. But if you have a workload where you need like 5 servers for 4 hours and 1 for the rest of the day it can be problematic. On the other hand if you need fast disk I/O, servers are nearly always better as on AWS it is either slow AF or costs you an arm and a leg.
@@mudi2000a Oh I fully agree, it was a long term hosted SaaS Product that was hosted in 3 datacenters over 3 european countries. It was honestly impressive how far you can get when your are unwilling to spend money.
But I still think you can host on AWS and Azure without getting fully locked in, but then it would be cheaper to just rent a dedicated box on Hetzner for 50$/mo
12:33 This is exactly why I still use VPS servers, Self host, and use Docker, and Nginx. I want control and save a lot of money.
I’m an ex-AWS and ex-Microsoft engineer. This video is brilliantly creative and full of great advice and humor. Thank you and keep up the great work! I learned some things and I’m excited for the world to start understanding these software development patterns and principles.
I’m committed to only building my products following four principles: my software must be open, portable, local-first, and decentralized. This is the way forward for many use cases.
My favorite use case is for a family AI server. It’s trivial to apply these patterns to create a private ChatGPT like service with free API calls. These approaches will make the Internet more affordable and safe for everyone.
And Then, theres people become multi millionare selling your stuff.. that you actively develop each day.
You should use nix build to create the iso or nixops to skip the whole first 5 minutes of this video. You can also define the docker container in the nixos config instead of arbitrarily doing that part imperatively. You're using NixOS but you're not really using NixOS.
ECS = Docker is a pretty bad take, you did save yourself later in the video though so i'll not be too harsh
ECS is more like Kubernetes, would you say Docker is kubernetes? i don't think so
Also multi-node clusters are not simple, doesn't matter if you are running bare metal self hosted or using a cloud provider. The complexity from modern cloud comes from the distributed nature and building fault tolerant systems.
Sure you could go bare metal and save on your AWS bill, but what about your new increased bill for k8s experts and hardware maintenance people?
Its all tradeoffs, and most early stage Startups will happily pay 100s of k per year to AWS/GCP/Azure instead of investing in complex k8s infrastructure and k8s experts which may end up costing more in the long term. Hiring usually always costs more than cloud bills
If you are spending 1 million on AWS per year you best be making 10x that in revenue
This video is spot on. I laugh when I see these new startups building out their microservices, Kubernetes and then deploying their stack to the Cloud with their 2000 visitors a day. They literally could host the site from a Raspberry Pi without the hassles of managing Cloud infrastructure-absolutely hilarious!
Saved this. I’m a big fan of self hosting and love the thought you put in software you can run instead of picking defaults like nginx and Ubuntu.
Average linux user publishing an index.html file
The only think I look for a provider today is for managed databases, I still don't want to deal with the pain of managing database servers (snapshots, backups, updates, security, patches, etc...). I don't need that much to run stateless applications, just spawning a new docker container and works like a charm, but the data store is still a pain to manage myself.
Okay, so we run RDS with backups. Cool.
Where do you want to host your compute? Your compute needs to be hosted close to the database or else the database hops are going to end up costing you a lot of latency, not to mention the traffic costs at the edge for the connection into AWS coming from public internet. (additionally there's security concerns here now because your database is exposed publicly rather than living in the confines of an AWS VPC. Okay, the security issue here can be solved with properly configured security groups to limit connections in, but the requirements are stacking up here, and this is an easy step to miss for a team that's not savvy on security)
Then there's the question of routing into your compute. Amazon makes this insanely easy with ELBs (Elastic Load Balancer). With your home internet provider, you'll either have a dynamic IP, or be straight up natted and you'll have a very difficult time routing to your system. The dynamic IP can be worked around with tools that will monitor your public IP address and update DNS records accordingly, but this is another piece of infrastructure to manage, and there's no way to do it with zero downtime. To get reliable static IPs you're talking about creating a datacenter, and a datacenter specifically close to AWS datacenters where they've already bought up the best land in the area for that purpose. It's also a giant upfront cost in terms of money and time for a startup that needs to be quick to market.
Self hosting is a LOT more than running a couple of containers on a machine.
@@patrickrobertshaw7020I would just set up a vpn to my database, something like zerotier, it’s super fast and doesn’t need to know your ip address. You don’t need to open up any ports on your firewall for it to work.
For serving you app you can use something like Cloudfront tunnels. Or just buy a cheap 1-5$ vps and set your nginx on it. Although I prefer Traefik.
@@patrickrobertshaw7020
"or be straight up natted"
" already bought up the best land in the area for that purpose."
You can write comments normally lol
@@patrickrobertshaw7020 No self hosting is pretty much running a couple containers on a machine. All those services you describes are just open source tools with fancy UIs. And I mean the same open source tools. In a "real" company you don't run your product from a macbook, fucking obviously. You work with a datacenter that guarantees internet, power, cooling, drive replacement. You can just run your compute there, and it'll be a few orders of magnitude faster per hardware, because storage on the cloud is UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. I'm talking spinning disks levels of read speed, with your "ssd" tier.
Thanks for this great vid. This is a great intro into self-hosting. There are a lot of smaller companies in my area who are moving from clout to self-hosted solutions. This is a great way to get into those technologies and thinker a bit with them.
I mentioned something like this once in a job interview. They didn't want to hear it and didn't proceed, unsurprisingly...
You’re supposed to hide your “crazy” during interviews, and let it loose once they let you in.
Very wise. We’ve traded a strong magic aversion to layers of magic recently. Too much magic equals too little understanding.
Do you have a repository to view this code? For learning purposes
It's a bit of a hard claim that cloud is over engineerd. Too bad that the majority of the video was around deploying a simple webserver. It would better proof your point if you would be able to apply, integrate, secure and scale multiple different applications. Then add data processing and analytics on top and ensure that the entire stack is fully observable.
My point is: cloud is very usefull, but merely overkill if you only have a very simple compute demand. Other than that, the additional services are worth their money very fast.
I'm head of engineering responsible for small business / start up with 150-200 headcount, round A-D funding for example I would not choose you to lead the tech team. You'd be great consultant for advisory role, or coming in hot to fix particular project, but you would not be in a decision making decision on tech roadmaps and strategies, vendor vs in-house engineering decisions, when to use cloud natively, hybrid, or 100% on-prem, risk of power / network ISP outages.
For startup, it's about trading speed for growth and less about dollar optimization for self-hosted savings. First of all, you're not just going to buy 10 servers and get 20 engineer to share those 10 servers nicely, with various apps performance differences. Also, you can't adjust compute needs to match utilization for on-prem local hosted servers. In the Cloud, you can turn it off anytime you're not using it (for development, CI-CD). For production servers, if it generates significant traffic that underpins the start up growth value, would you be ok to have no physical staff on site 24/7 monitoring the hardware because it's hosted on your office condo IDF closet / electrical room? What's the cost of that on site service vs cloud again?
Once you get to matured stage, then you can benchmark on-prem savings, but usually hybrid is necessary in most cases. But the complexity of hybrid environment is way more than meet the eyes as pointed by other comments. I don't think think you understand the overall business drag and labor black hole on competitiveness of self hosted vs outsourced to the cloud.
These are two different startups. He is talking about a startup with only him it sounds like. He also seems to know his product will never become huge, but it can gain traction and be a solid company. A company with 150+ headcount and funding has usally a proven market and product. You are working on a scale-up it sounds like. These cases are just very very very different and he is not solving the scale-up problem.
A person building his startup with sound business fundamentals is an entrepreneur. A person aiming for fast growth by expanding fast to create hype is a scammer aiming for VC's money. Its tough initially but you can have same or higher compute/storage power on your own servers at a far lesser cost compared to cloud over 5~10 years. When VC money tightens you will know what on-prem is !
as someone who worked in a company that only builds microservices on the cloud as my first job, this is exactly the type of content i was looking for
Been wanting to self-host and this was a great start. Awesome video, man!
wonderful video, sir! exactly what i was looking for. even as i'm not really a programmer, i do need to make my own tools from time to time and it always annoyed me to no end that whenever i'd try to get an actual professional to build a solution, they could never understand that i don't want it on a cloud, and that i also want to be able to control and change it myself, as i can't just sit around and wait for someone else to answer me when i have an error or something. so i would always actually end up crudely doing it myself, which took a bit longer, but it was at least working the way i needed it to. you explained this point very well at the end, most truly don't need such complicated tools and more often they take away too much in turn of some apparent advantages that few are actually asking for.
Recently I have found "docker compose up --scale" removes the latest created container. Finally I have found the way to remove the old container. Thanks.
Lawliet?
Thanks!
Thanks for introducing me to nix (before fireship did)! I am using it for my home server and love it. One config file is my favorite method. Also, thx for introducing me to caddy. I am having a great time messing with my server!
You had me at "I refuse to use nano more than once per computer" 👏
Yeah, had me dying as well... of cringe!
It's a text editor ffs, you open the config file with it, change what you need to change, save the change, and life goes on.
But nooo, it's a self-hosting video, gotta rub the neckbeards that make up the majority of the target audience...
@@THESERIOUSLYSMILEexactly
This video is great. No dragging, no padding content. Just straight to the point. Must TH-camrs should take notes. Thanks!
0:12 you had me sold in the first 10 seconds… here take my crippling AWS credit debt
This is the first video of yours I've seen. 2 minutes in I knew I wanted to sub.
As someone who has self-hosted many websites, you seem to be missing the entire point of why people prefer using cloud servers for their startups. It's all about scaling applications on a need basis to handle sudden, dramatic increases in traffic, which all startups expect as a part of their projected exponential growth strategy. Using local machines is cheaper, yes, but that is when the traffic and scale is static; even then there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into running a data center.
Using a hybrid Cloud Model with Focus on bare-metal 😉
is the bare metal focus for your machine or the cloud machine? and why the bare metal focus, what does it provide?
This is an awesome video! I see so many cases where teams just default to the Cloud for everything. Then, they're fighting with things like IAM and networking policies and chasing down subtle issues for days that simply would not have even existed if they had chosen to deploy to their own data center. And, don't get me started on the AWS Lambda and managed serverless idea that was going to solve all our problems - no, solved some, created others. All, while 100% locking you into the vendor. There is a place for most technology solutions. And, you did a great job of mentioning some reasons to go Cloud. The Cloud serves a real purpose. However, it's still amazing to me how so many companies and otherwise great technologists have drunk the "Cloud kool-aid" and look at you with disdain if you even mention that they should consider another option. Hats off to the vendors for doing an outstanding job of marketing.
This video feels like an affirmation that I haven't gone crazy.
Literally every professor this year in my faculty that had computer-related class (not programming, just the theory of computer architecture, professors that taught programming and oop were actually great) was telling us to use cloud, even when we were doing RAID.
It really did just sweep the industry by storm and people haven’t looked back at all 😢
@@Macheako Self hosting can be a major pain or outright impossible in some situations. You have to have a stable IP and you're ISP has to be ok with you hosting. If neither are true, then you simply can't self host. You could move, but that's quite the major life change just to avoid using someone else's computer.
@@Beakerbite That's what colocation datacenters are for. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre
@@Beakerbite Or maybe its about time to force ISPs to give all customers static IP leases without expiration on demand at no charge. I don't believe that there is any reasonable explanation that can excuse this failure.
@@Moe_Posting_Chad Won't work unless we all switch to ipv6
Your passion is contagious, I know what I will do this summer.
Deleting docker would make this small scope use case much simpler and better IMO
I ran a website from a single binary executable as a systemd service and caddy installed on bare metal Debian. It works really well
hey great video!
how do you make your server public? i know how to point domain names to public servers such as AWS ec2. but i am not able to make my server public. i suspect CGNAT is at play but would love some nudge in the right direction to self host.
I am verry impressed by the details and all in one description you are delivering here. Thank you verry much!
Thank you so much, this is so inspiring that I want to setup a lab for myself and see how much do I need a cloud to "provide the solutions to my problems". Keep it coming!
The cloud is just someone else's computer.
*virtual computer. It's virtual computers all the way down
@@tomasprochazka6198 virtual computers running on somebody else's computers you pay yet cannot access directly
@@tomasprochazka6198 ...that still needs to run on someone else's computer.
Dumbest comment
i have done kubernetes from scratch on baremetal to having a vps box with docker and trust me, when it comes to starting your service this might be a good beginning but when it comes to scaling, security, config, maintenance and in the future also different people working on your project, there is no way aws is more expensive than running your own operation, sacrificing your time and possibly hiring an admin for that.
yes, a vps with plain linux and docker is incredibly easy and simple but this ll goes to shit when the app actually needs to scale. I used the vps setup for my dev and home projects tho, cheap and reliable low performance hosting.
Remember, your time is not free! And AWS certainly has a premium price but when building solo startups its an invaluable tool.
Great video. Thought it was going to be a talking point on cloud services. Was pleasantly surprised to discover what this video actually was.
I like the workflow and your video taught a few tips and tricks that I hadn't previously known.
P.S. You had me at "I refuse to use nano more than once per device"
awesome content dude, you've got a new fan :D
Where did you get that $1,160,000 figure from?
I'm curious too
From my experience having worked at a startup, it is absolutely in the ballpark.
From my experience helping many small businesses and startups, this number is outrageously high.
Awesome video. Will you be able to share the scripts you put in the automation folder?
The guys voice sounds quite young. Maybe he’s never had to forecast cpu and disc usage to purchase for a new project for the next 3 years that’s a lot harder to scale up once providers and installed than clicking a button in a cloud
Last minute wise words much needed, thank you gentlemen for making this video ❤
nice comeback dude, i saw how fast you acted on feedback, big ups!
Love the content. Using everything with it's purest form
Good for you to reupload this. Great video, totally agree (as a cloud engineer myself!!)
I couldn’t agree more. I built a server rack for multiple thousands of dollars that’s way over what I need, and it’ll still pay for itself within 2 years compared to hosting on the cloud.
Nice Vid, But I disagree with the title. Cloud is not over-engineered, (That would imply it works). The cloud tends to be needlessly abstracted to fleece customers for more money. If you look at AWS most of the services are half baked, bug riddled and wrapped in a horseshit UI. Take for example; recently AWS started charging for IPv4 public IPs but guess what you can't run IPv6 on their shit because 88% of their services ONLY(not even duel stack) support IPv4. Tbh I don't care about IPv6, I am happy to sit behind NAT for the rest of my life but to be billed for something as basic as NAT just shows how much they are missing the plot.
They only charge for public IP. You can have all the 10.x, etc addresses you want, and use those to access their ipv4 only services.
@@fluffysheap You do pay for NAT, either via NAT gateway(costs a small fortune) or running a NAT instance. Without NAT the private ipv4 network is cut off from the internet.
can you blame them? it was probably the most abused feature ever. basically free hosting forever (in the context of EC2 with a public IP attached)
@@muhammadosama3358 Haha, that is funny you are calling basic networking, a feature... Got any more jokes? No, really this is expected by their own name; "Amazon Web Services". If we wanted to run a web less server, we can just run a closet server. The EC2 costs should already include the networking costs of NAT at minimum. So to have a basic VPC you get billed for three separate things: EC2, EC2 traffic outbound per GB and then (NAT or Pub IPv4). There are cloud providers who do not double bill like this.
Too many compromises for long term large system especially security wise and complexity - great for starting off an mvp but this will quickly become risky and un maintainable and therefore will become more expensive than cloud to stick or scale this infrastructure stack
simple != easy. Such a gold statement. Instant DeepCopy, right there :D
Alright I agree with close to all the points but what would you say about traefik and saltstacking?
Your example, is for small or pet project. Its not suitable for big projects. And who is using plain docker in project?
That’s exactly his point. This thinking that you shouldn’t use Docker alone…
The point is, you rarely host a real big project with an application with users in the millions and higher. Even, in big enterprise or rising startups, this is extremely rare. Even in Big Tech, this will only be necessary for a few microservices (for the majority of them, it won't and some out time or slow latency doesn't matter that much).
Most of the applications you deploy, will have only some users (in terms of much smaller than 1 Mio users - and indeed from experience, most application will have less than 1000 users), and will rarely need to be available with extremely short latency from all over the world. Or have a SLA with many 9s.
If you happen to run into one of such application in your whole career, that's probably much over average of a software developer/admin/devops person.
And as long as you don't have one of such killer criteria, having a self hosted process and your own computers or bare metal rented one in a computer center, will do the job (better, cheaper, faster in terms of development). Of course, you always should still keep multiple copies of your data in multiple locations, and probably also when you have some success run different computers in different locations serving the content for availability.
The process, the video poster shows works even with several dozens replicas, hard disks, databases involved and so on. It only does not scale once you have to serve to potentially billions of users.
The reality from my professional career in small and big enterprises is that the Cloud und Kubernetes is used to deploy usually 1-3 replicas of an application with usually a non distributed SQL database behind with extremely tight resource claims (yes, that's the way it's administred out of your control in big companies, and small ones usually don't want to pay expensive machines). In reality, most of the applications I deployed, had less resources than my mobile, and they worked for the user base.
The only thing that changes once you use Cloud technology in practice, is that your bill is 10x of what it would cost, if you'd deploy it self hosted. And yes, I've seen this pattern over and over in the last 10 years.
BTW, the reason most Fortune 500 companies use Cloud technology, is also not scalability. As outlined, that's completely irrelevant for most applications and usually internally blocked anyway. But Fortune 500 companies need liability for legal reasons that Cloud provider can provide and again for legal reasons and others (Fraud protection, bribery, money laundering), etc, they have to control what you as developer can do with consistent rules. That's something they can do in K8s, AWS, GCP, Azure in close to every detail, and they do. That's not a good reason to do in the same manner in a small or growing company, for at least, till you are so successful, that you get regulated and have to implement tight policies.
@@janekschleicher9661 Thank you for your detailed explanation.
This is awesome. I love the intro to this. Ill be coming back to try this tutorial for sure.
Subbed after no music upload
Likewise lol
Same!
The setup is cloud ready. As long as ine is using docker for the apps, they can be deployed in cloud when required to scale up massively. DB migration will be an issue but not something unsolvable.
One needs AWS when one is hitting bottlenecks if performance due to requests coming from different parts of the world at high rates.
Even when I was intervieing for startup positions, they were hellbent on whether I use AWS services. I later figured out that they dont spend anytime creating their own setup, and also its part of the agreements during funding rounds.
0:51 Half-Life easter egg.
ahhhh i love this. i’m still too much of an amateur/beginner that some of the steps here i’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but i wanna try following along sometime and see if it clicks when doing it in practice… precisely bc im an amateur/hobbyist none of the things im interested in doing as projects require like amazing speeds or never having any downtime, so if i learned how to properly self host stuff like this i’d feel so powerful :’)
If you are a tinker, then do this, if you are a business, who wants to focus on business and not server maintenance, then use the cloud
Agreed. You probably already know but ECS isn't just docker like mentioned in the vid, it'll automate provisioning servers to scale to your traffic in a rubber-banding effect (hence elastic). When mentioned in the video that it's 'preferred to have the site crash and then provision more servers' makes me cringe because while that's fine for a random person's website that can be detrimental to a business whose infrastructure failed just as they may have finally gained the traffic they worked hard to get, and once user's see hiccups in your service then that's a lasting impression that you aren't trustworthy. There's ways of using cloud without being locked down to a provider.
@@coreycollins8554 Yeah it's never preferable to have the site crash, this guy has almost certainly never worked in a proper tech company if he recommends this. The bare minimum for an app with business customers is multi AZ and 4 nines - they likely wouldn't sign a contract for an app that does less. Docker swarm isn't a solution as stated in the video, since a powercut still kills all of your machines at once. No replication of customer data is a liability issue. No node autoscaling, and it's not really feasible to automate that at home. No CDN, so the frontend will load horrifically slow from a different country.
There's many reasons we use PaaS.
"I've never seen anyone actually use multi regions on the cloud for their services" ok yeah that's the nail in the coffin for this video
@@coreycollins8554 In this context it, ECS is a term of abstraction. Docker is just an core component of that abstraction. SLA is up to client to choose. If you implement "ECS" in house you pick and choose the requirements. That includes hardware(owned/rented) and location(s).
And get shoved down the throat a 10k bill at the end of the month because you have no idea what you’re doing
You are an expert in DevOps. I have zero idea on this other than Vercel and Netlify
Cloud has been oversold for nearly its whole lifetime. Outside of the original concepts of rapid scale out and scale back and software deployment speed, cloud makes little sense. If you are anything above a small business with predictable system load, clouds only purpose is to make the cost opex so you can sell it to the shareholders as something that can go down.
Even the scalability comes with massive risks as costs can scale out of control and tank a startup.
@NoOnesBCE most cloud companies enables you to set a threshold for scaling and a limit. If done properly you should never scale beyond what's within your budget.
How exactly did you point it to your server? Did you get a static ip and allow port forwarding on your router and stuff?
How did you manage your static ip and connected it to the DNS
I like that this video is way more popular and no one complains. Fixing mistakes is just as good as not making them in the first place as long as you don't repeat them
Incedibly well done video. Really covered a lot of topics in a short time. I think all the advice was great! Even for someone who knows and uses most of these tools already, it is great to see how others are setting things up.
Just one critical thing you missed (in my opinion) is backups. I very much agree with you that I am not so worried about a bit of down time. Downtime is no such a big deal. But data loss is a big deal. So maybe some cron jobs that backup some data to S3 for example? Sure you are using cloud in that case but in a very minimal way usually very low cost to use S3. Doing this really adds a lot of value and peace of mind at minimal cost.
And one last thing. It would be great if you included a git repo with the files you created in the video.
I learnt 100 years of self hosting material thanks to you! LOVELY! thank you sire