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

721–730 of 782 posts

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

#721

Post by jonas21 »

XCSme wrote: post #280
jonas21 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like DigitalOcean... but they are a cloud service too.

I think the terminology is confusing. If I quote Wikipedia, which should never be done: "Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user". I personally refer to servers as "cloud" only if they have auto-scaling and usually to services such as AWS or GCP instead of VPSs such as DO, Linode, Vultr, etc.

Now that we're in the habit of quoting Wikipedia... "DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers."

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

#722

Post by rumanator »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #383
RachelF wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox did the same thing a few years back - moved everything from Amazon S3 to their own storage. My guess is they did it for cost reasons.

They did, but at Dropbox's size it should be pretty obvious. I mean, their whole business model is essentially acting as a cloud storage provider. Once they got big enough, of course it made sense for them to optimize their infrastructure instead of letting another company take x% off the top.

> Once they got big enough, of course it made sense for them to optimize their infrastructure

Isn't that true in all cases?

There is no doubt that rolling and maintaining your own infrastructure can be and is better than dumping cash on the AWSs of this world. The only question is what size marks the breakeven point.

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

#723

Post by mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #579
adim86 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If web site caters to EU customers, just rent it from the EU datacenter, no need for a cloud. A Hetzner server costs $100/month, an equivalent amount of cloud resources will run you into thousands.

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

#724

Post by AgentK20 »

pixtemp7384 wrote: post #716
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…

The Hypixel servers are at maximum capacity during the peak 4+ hours every day, meaning additional players cannot join. This is an obvious issue for other applications.

This isn't a limit of our ability to procure hardware, but instead a limit of one of our 7-year-old monolithic applications. We're working on increasing its stability at high player counts, but it's a totally separate issue from server provisioning and cloud vs bare metal.

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

#725

Post by AgentK20 »

bytematic wrote: post #714
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…

I'm super curious how you scale these Minecraft servers. I have a 60$ google cloud instance and it can barely handle 3 players with a few mods without lagging a few times per hour.

It's a bit off topic, but the challenge there is similar to a reply I wrote elsewhere in this thread about clock speeds. Minecraft is almost entirely single threaded, which means that you could get a $400 Google cloud instance and still only be able to hold those three players. To scale past that you're going to need higher clock speed processors. Take a look at OVH's "GAME" series offering or any dedicated host with E3's or i7s.

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

#726

Post by AgentK20 »

neeraga wrote: post #607
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…

Which dedicated infra host did you use?

We bounced around through a few different hosts in the first two or three years of our operation, but for the past four years we've been consistently with SingleHop, now an INAP company. They've been great through the entire time that we've worked with them and have saved our asses on more than one occasion, especially back before mitigation tech like CloudFlare Spectrum was available.

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

#727

Post by pixtemp7384 »

AgentK20 wrote: post #724
pixtemp7384 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hypixel servers are at maximum capacity during the peak 4+ hours every day, meaning additional players cannot join. This is an obvious issue for other applications.

This isn't a limit of our ability to procure hardware, but instead a limit of one of our 7-year-old monolithic applications. We're working on increasing its stability at high player counts, but it's a totally separate issue from server provisioning and cloud vs bare metal.

I see. Out of curiosity, what is the limiting application?

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

#728

Post by chillfox »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #293
wooly_bully wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.

I live in a software engineering world professionally but my background is in traditional "neckbeard" Linux system administration. This ends up making me "DevOps" but honestly a lot of what I've ended up doing in my career is basic sysadmin for organizations that get a remarkably long ways before realizing they need it - things like telephony and video surveillance become really unreasonably expensive when you end up…

From my experience, large enterprises sabotage the effectiveness of internal IT with bureaucracy and politics in a misguided attempt to eliminate all possibility of mistakes being made.

It's usually done with the "let's pretend it is ITIL" process.

Let me give two examples where if I had been the client then I would absolutely have sprinted for the cloud if I could, or at the very least start talking it up as much better.

1) System outage, time to fix 5 hours and 3 minutes. The 5 hours was me sitting in front of my computer with screens open showing the problem and waiting for various managers/decision-makers to fly by and take a look as they were ping-ponging around the office panicking about what would be impacted by the fix. Everything that was going to get impacted was already impacted by the system not working, and I had to explain that to them multiple times. Towards the end of the day, I eventually got the go-ahead to do the 3 minutes of work to fix the system. This system being down had prevented another team from doing any work for the entire afternoon.

2) Two full days of politics and paperwork to get approval to do 30 minutes of work, all while the client was impatiently asking "is it done yet" every few hours.

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

#729

Post by metalforever »

PreciousCarrot wrote: post #649
cmendel wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

too low.

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

#730

Post by AgentK20 »

pixtemp7384 wrote: post #727
AgentK20 wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a limit of our ability to procure hardware, but instead a limit of one of our 7-year-old monolithic applications. We're working on increasing its stability at high player counts, but it's a totally separate issue from server provisioning and cloud vs bare metal.

I see. Out of curiosity, what is the limiting application?

An in-house application that we (I) developed in order to handle game balancing, queuing, and overall network state for a multi-LB Minecraft network. The application's name is MasterControl, and it's architecture and design (or lack thereof, it was literally the first program I ever wrote) has been the source of many headaches over the last few years. Had I known years back that we would see the kind of player numbers that we have this year, we 100% would have completely rewritten it into our modern microservice architecture.
Post reply on HN