711–720 of 782 posts
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Engineers cost $130,000/month? Thats a fulltime salary for 14 network engineers (salary from Indeed). There is no way you need that many for maintaining a fleet of 50 CPUs (chance is that in OPs case they got duel socket servers as well).
$130,000 a month is not 14 network engineers. Salary is not the full cost of an employee to the business.
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> because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies) Haha. This can't possibly be true.
Just to give a few examples, we are typically much more aggressive with RAID, ECC, redundant network links, redundant time sources, redundant cooling, redundant power supplies, etc. than cloud providers.
It does change right now.
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…
Lots of great insights here, which fully accord with my experience, even in the small end of town. About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS. We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind of customers. My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote…
I'm finally in a job that I'm happy with and can see myself staying here until retirement. I have noticed that has changed my technology recommendations. For example we recently started looking at configuration management tools. Ansible is the obvious choice from a resume perspective as it is very popular. I ended recommending Powershell DSC. Why, because our environment is mostly windows, the team is familiar with Powershell, and for our use case is much faster. Powershell DSC is not as popular so it won't help me get another job. When it comes time to expand the team, I can hire someone who understands configuration management tools or powershell, and get them up to speed in a day or two.
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…
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…
Same here - CTO of medium sized company. Our IT infra costs are 1/10th the cost of cloud, simply because I happen to be comfortable having on-premise machine and working on them (sometime myself). We have two dozen servers in two locations. It's more time to setup, but maintenance is actually quite low.
I'd rather not get put in that position. Pre-pandemic, business was pretty good, but that seems like an unwise assumption as we slide into a recession.
Maintenance burden that's avoided has two inflection points rather than one. In a large enough data center, there's enough work simply replacing hard drives that justifies having a team that manages it. From the other end, that's just not true if there's a small number of hard drives (like O(1)). There's a middle area though, where there's enough work for more people but the overhead of there being a team is too expensive.
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts. If I understood you correctly (the text's meaning appears somewhat fuzzy), your go-to-market strategy is to first collaborate (and/or consult?) - perhaps, through your "PoCs and Rapid Prototyping" services - and then allow users to "pull" your capabilities and core service into their labs. Right? Having said that, I haven't seen any science-focused channels, resources or offers on…
I do not advocate a go to market that prioritizes these markets. We started more with enterprise/federal data architects, which involved a different go to market - not self serve on a website. We (and our broader market) are now at point where it is easier for us to launch self-serve and help adjacent roles. Stay tuned :) This fits better with national labs market too afaict. We already quite heavily discount on-prem…
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Yes, you’re paying for a ton of stuff there that you probably don’t use and then are susceptible to bugs that have nothing to do with your use case. At $5B it would not cost anywhere near that much to replicate. Your infra would be better tailored to your workloads and your sw teams which would further drive costs down. The upsides are that you only drive features you need and keep things simple. The downside is that…
Snap was spending 2B over 5 years - so 400M/yr. By comparison, Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters. Who knows how much they are paying in engineering salaries so manage those datacenters. Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is wo…
we ran the numbers continually and like others mentioned, it was a no-brainer to build on-prem. that said, there are a few use cases where aws/gcp are a great fit. people selling cloud without putting in real engineering work to enterprises generally make my life harder than it already is.
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Automatic unattended updates are totally possible (I haven’t tried it in CentOS but it works fine on Ubuntu). Even kernel updates can now be done without a reboot. And with the proper setup even reboots can be automated.
How do you do kernel updates without a reboot? I've looked several times and found different technologies over time (kexec, (Oracle's) ksplice, kGraft, kpatch, livepatch). They do appear to have some use-cases, e.g. delaying the need for a reboot by being able to install a critical vulnerability fix/workaround so that the reboot can be done at a more convenient time. Because many of the patch mechanisms are function-…