71–80 of 144 posts
The Stanford HPC team reported last year having sent more than 2PB to Google drive using Lustre/HSM. This was using the public API and the fact that gdrive is free for *.edu sites. See https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/lad16/07_thiell_cheap_n_de... (slides) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbE0nl5V8WE
2PB costs 6 figures for regular GCS a year, I probably wouldn't rely on Google to continue to provide that for free.
>Right now, the company is still in the process of migrating the last of its users’ attachments to GCP. I wonder if Evernote users can tell if they are on GCP or the previous infrastructure. I suspect not.
Please excuse the loose relation to this specific aspect of their relationship, but there's something bothering me about Google & Evernote. I recently set up a consumer grade LG Android smartphone. A few days later I got a push notification inviting me to install Evernote[1]. I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google? How does one unsubscribe from such app adverts? By disabling Google Play Store notif…
Then they started pushing magazines. I wish there was some way to tell Amazon that I'm not going to subscribe to a magazine. I ended up turning off notifications.
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This is why you should run your entire application on bare metal (colo or dedicated) with failover to the cloud. The benefit of the cloud is its elasticity. You can handle a 2000% traffic increase by spinning up VMs instantly; no need to wait a day or week or month for bare metal provisioning. And you should do this! But once you've structured your application this way, you are already horizontally scalable. There is…
At the dollar spend for the infrastructure for most apps, the labor costs of dealing with physical servers is not worth it. Saving $1K/month on infrastructure is meaningless if it costs me $10K in labor costs. Your numbers only work for the little guy when labor costs are discounted to zero.
Running a datacenter is still a hard problem to solve. Evernote just realised that.
What I get from this is that they want to use Google's available horsepower in machine learning and maybe, trying to build their own TensorFlow equivalent would have cost them extra and have added risk of becoming rapidly out of date, since Google is investing heavily in it.
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Why would it not make any sense? They probably did an analysis on this and decided that GCP overall is a better solution to their problem. I regularly move companies to the cloud because they cannot afford to setup their on services and just want to focus on the business side of tech and write software only that delivers business value. These companies tend to use queue services, CDNs, scalable file stores, clustered…
I regularly move people off cloud providers once they realise how expensive they are. We usually cut peoples fully loaded costs in two or more by moving them to dedicated hosting. Far more if they're bandwidth intensive (Google and AWS charge in the region of 5x to 50x as much for bandwidth as most other hosting alternatives) There is certainly segments that use a lot of disposable environments and complex services w…
I guess we are aiming for different companies, my clients want scalability and do not want to deal with BGP issues, power outages, vendor RMAs and the other things people forget to add to the basket when comparing cloud vendors to dedicated hosting. Amazon buys networking equipment and servers on a discount you would not able to buy, they also get a great discount for the networking bandwidth and energy as well. It would be very hard to beat them in the datacenter game. I worked for companies where we were in charge of datacenters (I have built few) and companies using cloud services. Based on my experience you cannot meet with the reliability, security, availability and efficiency of AWS/GCP when using a small dedicated hosting provider.
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> The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many valid reasons for smaller companies to consider cloud deployments, but I've yet to see one where it was the cheaper alternative. The cost of a server isn't just the hourly/monthly fee for running it. It's also the cost…
This is why you should run your entire application on bare metal (colo or dedicated) with failover to the cloud. The benefit of the cloud is its elasticity. You can handle a 2000% traffic increase by spinning up VMs instantly; no need to wait a day or week or month for bare metal provisioning. And you should do this! But once you've structured your application this way, you are already horizontally scalable. There is…
I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice. I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system, and if you build a new ground-up app this way going full cloud to start is easy and cheap for a while until you're successful and then the economics are.. complex.
I think there's also the weird angle to it that the folks who have the skill to architect apps like this are very hard to come by.
Would love to be proven wrong and hear about folks who've seen burst-to-cloud work out in practice though!
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Interesting point. In my experience buy vs rent depends on the company size. Which bare metal providers can you recommend? How much control do you have over your network?
I recommend OVH.com. They provide bare metal servers in a semi-automated way and have locations in US, Canada and France. For the type of application that I run, where our demand is not very elastic, I find it very cost-effective and more flexible (as long as you're comfortable with administrating KVM and ZFS). I also like that with ZFS, I can easily sync snapshots between providers at the filesystem-level.
I can understand that a company wants to do away with the distraction of having to worry about running a datacentre but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost. Now it may be that even if more expensive, it is a better use of your capital (renting instead of owning so that you can…
> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? At list prices? Pretty much never. Nobody sane with installations like Evernote are paying remotely close to the published prices, though. The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many val…
At list prices? Pretty much never. "
???
It's almost always 'cheaper' for small companies to use the cloud.
It costs a lot of money to pay people to figure what hardware to buy, install servers, networking gear, maintain it, pay for bandwidth, backup etc.
But the cost becomes 'non starter' when you start to access all the nice things that cloud offers: Lambdas, S3, easy backups, etc. etc. and the fact that it 'scales on demand'.
Then of course there are the financing aspects: you don't pay for expensive servers up front, you 'lease' them effectively - which has serious working capital benefits.
All those things have considerable business value.
So sure - if you want to compare only 'server instance costs' - maybe 'buying your own instance' - specifically on a server by server basis ... maybe it's cheaper to buy a server.
But for most small businesses - the advantage of the cloud far outweighs the cost.
I'd argue that 'rolling your own infrastructure' would be risky and costly initiative that boils down to a 'cost optimization' only, and can't really be considered until a business reaches an operational degree of maturity and visibility wherein someone could really sit down and plan quite far into the future.
And even then I'm not so sure - this is why so many big and successful companies still use the cloud.
So a large part of choosing GCE is possibly because CEO was a Googler and he was very familiar with how Google works and his contact at Google helped him scored a better negotiation and possibly even better support. Although I won't deny GCE team would snatch Evernote regardless because it's an important client to show off in GCE's client portfolio. > The decision to go with Google over another provider like AWS or A…
I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Free donuts. That's how you influence and win enterprise accounts.