Far too expensive vs dedicated servers for our infrastructure. Bandwidth alone would cost more than all our servers combined.
Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#32Ignoring cost, security, etc, the biggest issue with a cloud platform is that if you need a feature (custom networking arrangement, custom hardware, custom kernel, custom software) and the provider haven't implemented it yet, you're dead in the water. Dedicated, colocated, and virtual private servers are harder to set up, but being able to treat them as normal computers saves you in the long run.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those seem like problems the public cloud providers would be highly motivated to solve. Why haven’t they?
Business continuity: Providing a good SLA isn't in the AWS business model, which allows for widespread, lengthy outages. They have a so-so SLA and if they miss you get AWS credits, big whoop. They make their money on people who are insensitive to high cost, middling performance and reliability. Not sure about the other providers. At a certain point it's cheaper and easier to do it yourself than to support a hybrid cl…
Sure, but is there some structural reason AWS can’t have an offering tailored to requirements like yours, or have they simply not bothered to start one yet?
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#34At least for us there is a simple reason: We live in Iran and every major public cloud company would immediately blocks any Iranian account, without previous notice.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#35We use OVH and Hetzner dedicated (2X providers, 5X data centers for redundancy). Our application is CPU bound and it's approximately 10X cheaper than AWS/MS/Google and 3-5X cheaper than Vultr and Digital Ocean. If you need a lot of CPU bare metal is vastly more cost effective. It's also a bit faster.
Bare metal is only a little more work to set up if you're using orchestration and provisioning tools. We use Chef and Consul/Nomad.
IMHO Amazon and the other big cloud providers are not a good deal if you only need compute, storage, and bandwidth and if you have any in-house IT expertise. They only make sense if you're taking full advantage of all their managed services e.g. S3, Redshift, managed SQL, lambda, etc. If you only need raw compute and bandwidth the smaller providers (DO, Vultr) and bare metal (OVH, Hetzner) are far better deals.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#36I suspect there's still a lot of FUD regarding public cloud as well as on-prem admins and engineers actively pushing back for fear of losing their jobs. (I've seen this in action) There certainly are legitimate reasons not to move to public cloud, but it shouldn't be an emotional one. Measure cost (including manpower), SLA's, performance, governance, and compliance. After that it should be simple to stay on-prem, go…
as on-prem admins and engineers actively pushing back for fear of losing their jobs. The funny thing is: those jobs already went years ago outsourced to “smart hands” in the DC. You still need people to plan and operate all this stuff. SAs who make the jump willingly have nothing to fear from cloud.
A lot of the folks in these roles have gotten lazy in legacy jobs. Lots of enterprise ops organizations are doing stuff with 10 people that could be done with 3.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#37I’ve worked in a few different settings on large-scale scientific computing. For those applications: - Not cost-efficient at large scale. When you expect and plan to run thousands of nodes at near 100% CPU and memory usage for years at a time, running a machine room can still be less expensive. - Specialized hardware not available in public clouds, e.g., very low latency networks configured in an optimal topology. -…
I've (unfortunately) run scientific computing applications on aws. The experience is awful.
1 - aws is very very very expensive for sustained load.
2 - aws offers highly variable performance characteristics, both cpu and networking. It's a best practice after creating a set of ec2 machines to immediately spend 10 minutes perf testing them and dropping slow ones, either cpu or network.
2a - machines in aws that didn't start slow may become slow, particularly for networking. What you really want for many applications is a dedicated rack with very high speed TOR switches. You do not get this in AWS.
3 - Designing ML applications for variable tradeoffs between cpu and network is extremely ugly. Detecting and dealing with network links that can suddenly become extremely slow is awful.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#38Price. It's SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper for me to run high bandwidth/CPU applications on dedicated hardware from ex. OVH. I end up only spending a few hundred a month on hosting vs. thousands or tens of thousands. Tools like Rancher / Saltstack / etc. work just fine for me without being in The Cloud(tm) too, so nothing is pushing me to switch.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#39The expectation is that the system will run many years, so there is more long-term trust and control or own infrastructure. The same institution is still maintaining some old systems.
Some of smaller cheaper systems do run in cloud, but nothing more important or big yet. It takes time to gain trust.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#40There's a trend for people to give up all of their information without the slightest regards for privacy or possible abuse. People do this with Facebook by allowing Facebook to, quite literally, track them throughout pretty much all aspects of life - communications, personal habits, photos, location, purchasing, et cetera.
On the business side, there's this trend to stick everything in to "the cloud" and just trust it's OK because everyone else is doing it.
It seems it's too much effort for people to imagine all the ways this could go wrong. Some of us, though, actually think and care and don't simply believe everything we're told.
What happens when we find out the true extent that our information is being used against us? For a majority of us, it'll be too late because chasing fads and trends and doing what everyone else is doing is too appealing, somehow.
For those of us who are too paranoid to just hand over data, you can't even say we're wrong any more - just look at what Edward Snowden taught us about the extent to which our own government has been flagrantly disregarding the law. Keep in mind that's barely scratching the surface.