131–140 of 144 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Free donuts. That's how you influence and win enterprise accounts.
Evernote didn't get everything for free. They still pay Google with some NDA stuff in the contract (better support, better pricing model, some free stuff here and there). I wouldn't have a second doubt the CEO's past employment at Google influenced the decision. After all, he had to sign it.
I just thought it was funny that they mentioned the donuts at all. Sales/solution teams bring stuff like that all the time. It's totally irrelevant, until you realize that the original article was a puff piece.
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…
Tap and hold the notification and Android will show you what app it belongs to. You can also view the most recent notifications in Android settings.
[1] https://d17oy1vhnax1f7.cloudfront.net/items/1Q1L2Y2f3R3v0m1n...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How would you move an S3 user off cloud? Do you have networking, load-balancing and performance experts on call if something goes sideways? 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 equipme…
The vast majority of S3 users have loads that can be handled with a couple of low end dedicated servers.
If you can afford to pay the S3 bandwidth charges, then by the time you can't serve the load with a handful of servers, you're paying so much that you can afford hefty retainers with consulting/devops companies larger than mine and still make massive savings.
S3 can be cost effective, but only if you rarely retrieve the data.
> 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.
Same with my customers, which is why they pay me to set up and operate systems for them. Still ends up far cheaper than cloud setups.
> 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.
I'm sure they do, the problem is they're not passing those savings on. Especially on bandwidth.
As an example, S3 bandwidth out for up to 10TB/month is $90 per TB. I pay ~$2 per TB for most of my own projects. Depending client needs we use providers that charge from ~$2/TB to $20/TB.
It sounds to me as if you've not actually looked at prices at alternative providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building/running your "own" cloud doesn't require owning bare metal servers. You can rent and lease for a fraction of the price of renting cloud instances. Once you start paying up front of reserved instances, the capital invested tends to start stacking against you. You certainly can burn through ridiculous amount of money if you insist on purchasing servers outright and pick expensiv brands. Conversely, the "privat…
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 don't tend to care that much what control I have over the network as most of the systems I deploy are set up to allow us to tie in compute or storage resources "anywhere", which means we put encrypted overlay networks in place for all inter-server traffic no matter what to get a consistent fabric to build on top of. It costs a bit of CPU resource, but I've yet to run into anywhere where's it's been an issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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…
You have to deal with outages when using cloud providers too. So you design for availability in either case, and pay someone to wake up at 3am when there's an actual emergency.
We're the ones taking the calls if our customers systems goes down at 3am, and it eats into my profits if it happens because they pay us monthly fees that are structured so they're far more profitable for us if nothing goes wrong.
Guess what's most profitable for me? Bare metal setups. Despite the fact that we end up charging my customers less to manage them, because it's harder to justify high fees when the overall costs are so much lower.
> Sure you can save some money by running a server yourself but if your business it as the point where that's the deciding factor in being solvent than you might as well close shop.
I had a client last year where we cut the hosting costs including the hourly rates for operational tasks by 90% by moving them off AWS.
While they were on AWS their hosting fees made up ~30% of their burn rate. It's an extreme example, but there are a lot of companies out there for whom hosting makes up a sufficient portion of their cost that it is a matter of survival for them to cut them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
One note: you don't even necessarily need your own colocated equipment. If you're in a location with expensive real estate and/or power it is often hard to beat dedicated rented servers for smaller installations, because you often have more flexibility in renting servers further from wherever you have staff than what would work if you colo and need to be able to reach your setup in person.
Rented managed servers still tends to beat cloud with good margins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renting a dedicated server requires no labor cost of your own (if a drive fails, your provider replaces it), and is almost always cheaper than the equivalent cloud resource, especially when it comes to bandwidth.
That still leaves sysadmins that you no longer need when using the cloud. The cloud allows your developers to run free without the need for infrastructure and sys admin teams to worry about the servers.
Looking at our timesheets, managing cloud setups takes more time on average than managing bare metal server setups, and the amount of time spent handling hardware issues make up ~1%-2% of ops time spent on the bare metal setups for our systems. We "save" that on the cloud setups, but end up having spend more to account for dealing with crappy APIs to do all kinds of things we have much more direct control over instead.
Sadly the article never describes HOW they transfer the data. Simply sending 3PB on the wire will cost a fortune. Maybe Google does have some non-public service like AWS Snowball?
Nothing against the author, but it sounds like another story that Google PR pitched and influenced. It is normal these days. I am sure AWS does the same. That is why the technical details may be light. The submitter is likely a Social Media Manager for Google (nothing wrong with that - kudos for not obscuring it!) I, too, have wondered about the technical details when I see stories like this. If the data was original…
1TB out would be closer to $0.09 * 1024 == $92.16 (still expensive) -- think you may have misplaced a decimal there.
