Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 4, 2025 18:58 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Suprised we aren't seeing more of this by niner
Parent article: Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)

> Those numbers are meaningless for this discussion.

Why?

> And how many of these 33 million businesses use a Redis hosted by a hyperscaler or have their own k8s load or anything?

You want to say that when company grows large enough to need to use Redis or want to run something besides simplest web site it needs to, suddenly, forget everything it did before? Why?

> The whole point is that people blindly assume that hyperscalers are the cheapest option when that is quite often just not true in my experience.

Yes. But for the company with 3 or 5 employees it's often cheapest option if you include the price of freelancer work into equation.

Simply because hardware costs are negligible no matter where you host your web site with 1000 visitors per day and freelancer that would work with hyperscaler is cheaper than someone for less common setup.

> No, I meant 100k Euros cost for the company. All taxes and insurance included. That's in central Europe.

Ouch. Yeah, if that's in place where 100k is good salary “all taxes and insurance included” then use of Google cloud is highly questionable.

It's not hard to find decent IT support that wouldn't cost arm and leg in these places.

> And there we are back to that unproven assumption.

Try to find someone on freelancer who would help you create some website with budget measured in less that $100. The best you may hope for is some student that only knows “the big three” and then not very well.

And that's where most companies start.

Granted, the fact that people would still use hyperscalers when they start paying thousands and even, in some cases, millions for hyperscalers is crazy… but that's how life works: they started where it made perfect sense, then grew till it stopped making sense… but only started to question their assumptions when it started killing them.

Suprised we aren't seeing more of this

Posted May 5, 2025 6:56 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

> You want to say that when company grows large enough to need to use Redis or want to run something besides simplest web site it needs to, suddenly, forget everything it did before? Why?

A company running the simplest web site doesn't use a hyperscaler (directly) either. If all you need is a website for a lemonade stand, you go to Wordpress, Squarespace or the like, click around and go online. Or go to some marketing agency that will do that for you. I don't understand how a company needing the simplest web site even relates to this discussion.

> but that's how life works: they started where it made perfect sense, then grew till it stopped making sense… but only started to question their assumptions when it started killing them.

Indeed. And that just makes me sad. Most of all because it doesn't have to be this way. Even in the other startup I co-founded, we started out on Google cloud, because if you have practically 0 load on your hand full of k8s pods, the cost is indeed almost 0. It made sense. But then our Postgres queries became more interesting and needed more memory to complete and we suddenly had to upgrade our Postgres from the cheapest to the enterprise offering, despite the database still being tiny and 99 % idle. That's when we got the hell outta there and now run the whole setup (including fully redundant k8s, PG and backup) on Hetzner VMs for less than half of what just the database cost on Google.