Why we are not leaving the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#71

Post by neurostimulant » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:57 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #50

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

Care to share more details?

On paper, the cost differences between renting/colocating traditional dedicated servers and using cloud service with similar performance/capacity is huge, so it's pretty unusual to actually save money by migrating to cloud. I'd love to hear where the savings actually come from.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#72

Post by morgante » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:57 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #67

morgante wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, cloud bandwidth is expensive. I don't disagree with that. But it's not increasing in price. Obviously if you're growing your costs will grow, but that's basically a tautology. Bare metal costs also rise as you grow.

Will you stop calling me a liar if I correct that from "the costs" to "your costs"? I am assuming that you are growing, and I think there's a provable assumption that for high levels of service, hiring someone else to do it is more expensive than in-house.

That's an entirely different statement than your original one. Saying "the costs of cloud service are zooming up" disingenuously makes it sound like the price of cloud services are going up.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#73

Post by problems » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #50

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity.

To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do the job there, but just for that I'm at $620/mo. Then let's add bandwidth, 10TB out at $0.01/GB = $100/mo. Now for disk I have to use EBS which runs (let's say st1 will do the job) 0.045/GB/mo*3TB = $135/mo. And that's before any IO.

So to move from bare metal to amazon I go from $1.5k upfront + $90/mo to a total of $855/mo on Amazon.

I can buy a new server every few months for the same cost of hosting that at Amazon - unless I'm severely missing something. Maybe it's worth if it you're a very small installation or one with very unpredictable traffic? But I just don't see it.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#74

Post by morgante » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

keepper wrote: post #68

morgante wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running on rented hardware is the equivalent of a traditional product company renting all of their factories. Correct. Traditional product companies very rarely own all their own factories. Do you honestly think Netflix management is incompetent? They've run the numbers on this countless times. They have way more insight into their spend and operations than a random anonymous internet commentator.

Netflix runs their most expensive part (pushing those terrabits of traffic ), with their own hardware and network. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ so, you were saying? Or do you think facebook,google,aol,tripadvisor and pretty much anyone beside HotNewStartup are incompetent?

I know Netflix runs their own edge nodes, which is precisely why OP sounds incompetent and uninformed. Netflix has spent lots of time and effort into analyzing and building the architecture which is optimized for them.

> Or do you think facebook,google,aol,tripadvisor and pretty much anyone beside HotNewStartup are incompetent?

Far from it, and that's precisely my point. At Facebook scale, it certainly makes sense to run your own data centers. At HotNewStartup, it obviously doesn't. Competence is finding the solution which works best for your scale and organization, not following some generic rule.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#75

Post by morgante » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

problems wrote: post #73

mbesto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do…

You're not including the time costs of operating that server.

Also, most businesses don't have demand that steady. Nor is it advisable in a cloud architecture to rely on a single large server.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#76

Post by tbrowbdidnso » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:06 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #69

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field. The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs. In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong

Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings. There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs.…

I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. The hype will eventually die down and we'll see some kind of equilibrium.

I've been experimenting with "cloud over" where I only use cloud servers for spare capacity. With docker it's getting easier. My baseline CoLo has the same performance as a super high end AWS instance and costs a third as much after my fixed investment.

I still have the cloud if my box goes down or takes a big traffic hit, but I'm not paying for a bunch of cloud servers all the time either.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#77

Post by problems » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:11 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #75

problems wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do…

You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Also, most businesses don't have demand that steady. Nor is it advisable in a cloud architecture to rely on a single large server.

Yeah, but I'm just trying to ballpark it. I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones.

Most of it does need to remain online at all times including several large databases. Just running my logstash server alone eats 8 GB of RAM and 200+ GB of disk.

In bandwidth and storage alone I'm past the cost of the server - so even if I could split this up and keep it mostly offline it still wouldn't be close to worth it unless I'm missing something more significant?

> You're not including the time costs of operating that server.

Do you mean swapping the drives about once every 3 years with free DC remote hands? Operational costs there are almost nothing - maybe 10 hours a year of my time. Surely much less than it would take to get everything running on a cloud architecture. And that cloud architecture would still require some level of maintenance and monitoring I'm sure.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#78

Post by random28345 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

> [Netflix's] edge is in software alone, nothing that causes a huge barrier to entry like custom hardware.

Actually, they are a media company. Their "edge" is in content creation and licencing deals. They might have been first-to-market for mass-scale streaming, but streaming video technology is a commodity, and they know that they will live or die by the desirability of their media catalog.

> Netflix for example, is completely at the mercy of Amazon.

Amazon and Netflix were symbiotic for years, as Netflix was a headline corporate customer, and I'm sure they received preferential pricing. And given the quality of Netflix's engineering team, I would be very surprised if they don't have a plan to migrate by the expiration of their contract if necessary.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#79

Post by mbesto » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

problems wrote: post #73

mbesto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do…

Let me clarify - it isn't equivocal that every situation is money savings by moving from data centers to the cloud. I wouldn't have to provide an assessment if it _always_ saved money.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#80

Post by problems » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:18 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #79

problems wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do…

Let me clarify - it isn't equivocal that every situation is money savings by moving from data centers to the cloud. I wouldn't have to provide an assessment if it _always_ saved money.

Definitely, but I'm just wondering what the circumstances were where it was actually worth it - I thought my deployment was quite small, but it still didn't seem worth it. I guess due to high bandwidth and storage usage, maybe without those I could get away with it.