Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 782 posts

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

#641

Post by tonyarkles »

PreciousCarrot wrote: post #610
twic wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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's interesting that competent engineers is only a question about cost to you. Where I am at (north of Europe) it's really hard to find good engineers. Even though it doesn't mean mu…

> The pay well and have great benefits but it's just not enough people out there to take these jobs and manage a full on-prem infrastructure.

I’m from a small province in Canada and we have similar problems here sometimes. One of the questions I sometimes have to ask clients when they make a statement like that is: “do you pay well for the area? Or do you pay well enough to attract talent from out-of-province?”

This often leads to them arguing that “but the cost of living is low here!” And inevitably I have to mention my friends who left the province to go to the Bay Area for 10 years and came back with $500k USD in stocks they collected, on top of what they had left over after paying their high cost-of-living rent.

I feel your pain. Companies running in less desirable areas have to somehow pay a premium for top tier talent. One way, as you mention, is to outsource, whether to cloud providers or part time contractors.

This isn’t meant as a brag at all, but I do the independent contractor thing here and make “pretty darned good for the area” money. Inevitably clients will ask me to come work full-time for them, and we have a painful conversation where I tell them what my taxable income was the year before, as well as the investments I made into equipment and licenses I use to provide the services I provide. The result so far has always been to continue being happy with me as a part-time contractor!

Edit: sorry for the typos, written on mobile with the swipe text thing

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

#642

Post by gameswithgo »

Our business has had greatly increased load due to COVID-19. It would have been very nice to buy a 128 core EPYC bare metal server to run our SQL Server on at this time, to buy us time to rearchitect to handle the load. Instead we are stuck with 96vCPUs because that is the most Amazon can do.

Its also very very expensive to have a 96vcpu VM on amazon!

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

#643

Post by cmendel »

PreciousCarrot wrote: post #610
twic wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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's interesting that competent engineers is only a question about cost to you. Where I am at (north of Europe) it's really hard to find good engineers. Even though it doesn't mean mu…

How much do you think a competent System engineer should be paid?

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

#644

Post by jameshart »

kortilla wrote: post #517
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reads as fairly dismissive to me. Most people running serious gear have serious engineering payroll overhead. Sure, some folks are managing something fairly static like game servers, but many of us work for bigco with two dozen products and massive teams. Even with thousands of ec2 instances we continue to move our on-prem infrastructure to the cloud because developer productivity saves us big money in the long…

Does it actually save or does it just encourage waste by the developers and poor system design? I’ve heard stories of companies having each PR spin up something like 20 ec2 instances to build up a whole deployment. A CICD design like that used to be a fireable offense. Now people see that and assume it’s saving them money because it would have bottlenecked before.

That’s a pretty extreme example of CI infrastructure, but okay... so what?

20 t2 mediums costs under a dollar an hour at list rates, and if you’re using a lot of AWS infrastructure can cost a lot less.

How much is the confidence that that PR will not break master worth to you? How many hours of engineer code review time would it take to achieve that same level of confidence in your build that spinning up 20 ec2 instances and running regression tests wins? How much would a failed deployment into production cost you, per minute?

Before you assume that it’s wasteful for any organization to throw cloud at a problem, realize there are many orgs for which a few hundred dollars of cloud compute spend per production release is an entirely reasonable trade off, not a firing offense.

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

#647

Post by dbancajas »

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…

off topic: could you share how you started in the business? I thought running gaming servers was a low margin business.. Is there a particular size you have to be for it to be worth the pay off?

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

#648

Post by kaydub »

tjbiddle wrote: post #241
horsawlarway wrote: post #217

I'm slowly coming to the complete opposite opinion you seem to have. I've worked almost entirely for companies that run services in various cloud infrastructures - Azure/Heroku/Aws/GCP/Other. I recently started a tiny 1 man dev shop in my spare time. Given my experience with cloud services it seemed like a no brainer to throw something up in the cloud and run with it. Except after a few months I realized I'm in an in…

What's the time trade-off? I've been drawing out my plans lately for a hobby project, all 100% on AWS. Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all. I can't imagine buying hardware, ensuring my home is setup with proper Internet, configuring ev…

I'm a Millennial as well but I started out on hardware.

You're not missing anything. There are still some use cases for on-prem hardware or for not building out on a single cloud provider but they're getting harder and harder to justify. The main use case I can see for running your own hardware is if you need massive egress. There comes a point where it can make sense to run it yourself, I luckily work at places with large enough margins to still leverage cloud solutions for this though.

Some guys don't know how to build things out on the cloud and are stuck in their way. When I was getting into the industry the old guys were still stuck on bare metal vs VMs. You should know how that went, most apps migrated to VMs no problem and a few apps stuck to bare metal for their own reasons.

A lot of small/mid size companies don't have the manpower to properly move an app to the cloud. Sometimes products/companies have enough steam to build an app and barely support it but not quite enough to keep it competitive and current. Basically, it can be easy to get a profitable company/app started with a couple amateurs building the product. It can get very expensive when you need professionals. A lot of places don't have the margins to support a robust team of professionals.

These companies don't always lack the foresight, sometimes it's impossible to get some breathing room to see the big picture or to get project funding instead of just upkeep funding. It can be expensive migrating something to AWS/Azure/etc and not just money but also manpower.

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

#649

Post by PreciousCarrot »

cmendel wrote: post #643
PreciousCarrot wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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's interesting that competent engineers is only a question about cost to you. Where I am at (north of Europe) it's really hard to find good engineers. Even though it doesn't mean mu…

How much do you think a competent System engineer should be paid?

I think that's way too hard to answer since it depends on so many factors. But again, my experience isn't that the pay is too low. It's not like there are 10 people coming to the interview with no one taking the offer because of the salary. It's more like no one have applied for the job in three months and the external recruiters sniping LinkedIn didn't find anyone.

But to give some kind of estimate just so you know what page I'm at when I say they pay well I would say somewhere between $60-75k.

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

#650

Post by blaser-waffle »

Big public clouds have a genuine purpose but there is a shit-ton of marketing and FUD being thrown around about them -- I'd bet my hat that's what this post is, given the phrasing up top.

I'm not a fan. In short:

Cost. CapEx and depreciation vs. OpEx. The numbers look amazing for ~3 years until the credits and discounts wear off. Then it's just high OpEx costs forever. Meanwhile I can depreciate my $10k server over time and get some cash back in taxes; plus it's paid for after a couple years -- $0 OpEx outside of licenses, and CentOS has no license cost.

Once you have significant presence in someone's cloud, they're not going to just lower costs either -- they've got you now. What in American Capitalism circa 2020 makes you think they won't find a way to nickle and dime you to death?

It's not going to reduce headcount, either. Instead of 14 devops/sysadmins, now I have 14 cloud admins, sitting pretty with their Azure or GCP certs. Automation is what's going to reduce those headcounts and costs, and Ansible+Jenkins+Kubernetes works fine just with VMware, Docker, and Cisco on-prem.

Trust. The Google Cloud just had a 12-hour outage -- I first read about it here on HN. AWS and Azure have had plenty of outages too... usually they're just not as open as Google is about it. You also have to trust that they won't get back-doored like what happened to NordVPN's providers, and that they're not secretly MITM'ing everything or dup-ing your data. We (and some of our clients) compete with some of the cloud providers companies and their subsidiaries, and we know for a fact that they will investigate and siphon any data that could give them an advantage.

Purpose. We just don't need hyper-scalable architecture. We've got a (mostly) fixed number of users in a fixed number of locations, with needs that are fairly easy to estimate / build for. Outside of a handful of sales & financial processing purposes, we will never scale up or down in any dramatic fashion. And for the one-off cases, we can either make it work with VMware, or outsource it to the software provider's SaaS cloud offering.

If we were doing e-commerce -- absolutely. Some sort of android app? Sure, AWS or Azure would be great. But it's a lot of risk and cost with no benefit for the Enterprise orgs than can afford their own stuff.

Post reply on HN