We Saved $500k per Year by Rolling Our Own S3

https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-saved-500-000-per-year-by-rolling-our-own-s3-6caec1ee1143

by Bogdanp • 9 months ago

15 10 9 months ago

engineering.nanit.com

I'm always amazed by how firms let their AWS expenses get so huge before doing cheaper homegrown solutions.

They usually don't make sense optimizing before achieving these levels of expenses. I mean, for a really long time the expenses are so low that it would cost more to engineer these solutions in the first place, and then they suddenly run through the roof exponentially.

But mainly, priorities and "it's not that much in comparison to all else". And perhaps not even tracking the costs properly :)

BobbyTables2• 9 months ago

I see the practical angle but I still don’t get why companies are so happy to park their private internal data in S3.

They have that much faith that the world’s biggest target will never be hacked nor hire a dishonest admin?

ronbenton• 9 months ago

$500K is like 1 or 2 fully loaded engineer salaries in the US. It’s not all that expensive.

gigatree• 9 months ago

I wonder if there’s a point at which AWS decides it would be more financially responsible to make lower margins in order to keep more customers.

LeFantome• 9 months ago

Sure. But that point is probably not when they have 40% of the public cloud market.

mannyv• 9 months ago

It's strange that they didn't try to negotiate lower pricing or just use another storage service.

Or, just have the lambda delete the file or change its storage tier once processing is done.

Or, just use a lambda instead of a proxy.

Or, just use cloudflare.

Many times "why not" is more interesting than "why."

merb• 9 months ago

Just reading the blog post makes me wonder if they really saved 500k. How long did it take them to build the solution, how many people built it, how much does the new service cost while it’s running? How many ops ours does the new service need? The blog goes into many details that I doubt that they built it in less than a month. So maybe they will save money over years but they probably lost money while building the new solution

3abiton• 9 months ago

That was a fun read, great planning, and testing strategy!

We Saved $500k per Year by Rolling Our Own S3

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