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Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#571

Post by f0ff »

mmmBacon wrote: post #276
AgentK20 wrote: post #207

Like many others have pointed out: Cost. I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwid…

A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and…

Avoiding cloud works well for small requirements too - worked for a company that ran a global store; we've opted for dedicated servers on OVH, all together had about 40 of them. It was 1/10th the price of running the infrastructure on AWS. We still used S3 though.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#573

Post by nojito »

mattbeckman wrote: post #151

We spend ~$50k/mo on serverless infrastructure on AWS. It hurts sometimes, given we were fully colocated about 4 years back, and I know how much hardware that could buy us every month. However, with serverless infra we can pivot quickly. Since we're still in the beta stage, with a few large, early access partnerships, and an unfinished roadmap, we don't know where the bottlenecks will be. For example, we depended hea…

Your costs are going to skyrocket in a nonlinear fashion as you exit the beta stage.

That’s the biggest counterpoint to using the cloud as a initial setup.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#574

Post by adim86 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #276
AgentK20 wrote: post #207

Like many others have pointed out: Cost. I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwid…

A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and…

I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but there are formidable companies all over the world running, and for them, this is one less unreliable aspect of their company.

To give you an idea, if you want to run a data center or your own servers in some countries you need a standby generator (because electricity is not a given) and the Diesel used to run these generators are imported and the economy of these countries is shaky so the exchange rate fluctuates, so suddenly the cost to keep your site up becomes a variable and is now subject to government announcements (not even in an evil authoritarian way), policies and import taxes. In the face of all of this, having a steady AWS bill with reliable infrastructure becomes priceless to these companies

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#575

Post by mwcampbell »

twic wrote: post #528
kortilla wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.

There are three things that make sense to me. Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem. (It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirem…

> What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.

I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only needs small-scale computing power but still cares about uptime.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#578

Post by urza »

I would like to add, that even for small teams/projects the cost is the reason. We have small business project, with only one server, few hundred customers, with varying traffic (database sync between thick clients, web portal,..). We were considering cloud, but with the features we needed (few different databases, few APIs,..) it would be cca $1000/month (with reasonable response times - could be cheaper but terribly slow). Having our own on premise server, the price is back just after few months and then just the minimal cost of connectivity, energy and occasional maintenance.. it just didn't make any sense for us to choose cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#579

Post by WilliamEdward »

adim86 wrote: post #574
mmmBacon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and…

I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but…

You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency reasons.

And you cannot have a website that doesn't cater to US and EU users, unless the website only solves local problems.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#580

Post by fxtentacle »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #504
fxtentacle wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost. We currently pay less than €5000 monthly for 500TB/month in traffic and 50 Ryzen CPUs. Amazon would be $30,000 traffic + $100,000 compute.

I think you forgot to include cost of engineers in this calculation.

It's a 1 person part-time job. Most of the work goes into coordinating package updates with Ansible. I can include $1000 in the calculation if that makes you feel better ;)

Everything is deployed with Ansible, monitored with Monit. The servers have redundant PSUs and SATA hot-swappable HDDs, so you can fix minor hardware issues without having to reboot. As the result, we have more than a year of uptime on a typical server.

On the other side, we've been hit with several S3 outages. My feeling is that the cloud needs fully automatic fail-over because it is failing much more often than all our bare metal server combined.

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