Why we are not leaving the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#91

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:32 PM UTC

random28345 wrote: post #78

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…

> "Actually, [Netflix is] a media company. Their "edge" is in content creation and licencing deals..."

That's only partly true. But if you considering a lot of other "media companies" haven't been able to compete with Netflix's ease of use, then you have to ask the question how is Netflix different from any other media company. And the answer is because they are also a software company, where their successes is primarily attributed to making DRM video in browser easy and seamless for average folk.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#92

Post by mynameisvlad » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:32 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #66

throwtotheway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it. Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".

Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I ma…

> You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order.

Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to.

Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more likely to happen when you run your own bare metal if you don't pump sufficient time and resources into it, than at the company that has hired thousands of engineers and ops people specifically to provide these services.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#93

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:34 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#94

Post by throwtotheway » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:36 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #66

throwtotheway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it. Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".

Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I ma…

Google that ran on desktop computers isn't the same Google of today. Times change. Technology advances.

Glad to hear the vmware cluster is working out for you. Anecdotal but I've seen people having issues without touching vmware too. One personal experience doesn't diminish the cloud. Maybe different business needs? One sysadmin maintaining customer websites vs multi-person team managing a web app?

I'm not against running your own servers. Bare metal is fun, interesting, and possible. I'm just against blanket statements that "it's bare metal or nothing!".

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#95

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:37 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #40

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…

The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. It enables you to test demand for a service for a very low absolute cost. Spin up a tiny machine for $60/year? And you can pay for it by the month, or the hour? That's great. You can find out if anybody is going to buy your thing at all. You can probably get to ramen-profitable. As soon as you can confidently predict sufficient demand, the economically rational decision is to hi…

> The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic.

If it requires no or a smaller ops team then it seems like it might be.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#96

Post by novembermike » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:42 PM UTC

problems wrote: post #77

morgante wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

For a single host that you know you'll want in 3 years it probably isn't worth it. If demand grows 10x in the next year though, how does that look? What if the host has a sudden failure? What if the business dies and you want to get rid of the host?

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#97

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:43 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #40

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…

The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. It enables you to test demand for a service for a very low absolute cost. Spin up a tiny machine for $60/year? And you can pay for it by the month, or the hour? That's great. You can find out if anybody is going to buy your thing at all. You can probably get to ramen-profitable. As soon as you can confidently predict sufficient demand, the economically rational decision is to hi…

> The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic.

Most tactics in business are money-saving tactics, and cloud is clearly one: dynamic scaling means only spending now for what you need now rather than spending now based on anticipated future need, and someone-else's-server means economies of scale in ops.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#98

Post by tw04 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:43 PM UTC

tobltobs wrote: post #90

tw04 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that's only easier said than done if you insist on doing a roll-your-own open-source science project. If you default to established enterprise vendors, finding ops people isn't THAT difficult.

But then the cloud might be cheaper again.

It isn't, and it's not even close. Unless you're running at less than 40% efficiency the cloud is more expensive for infrastructure running 24/7. If you're a shop with 1 server and no IT guy? Sure, probably makes sense to use the cloud - although I'd argue you'd be better off with managed hosting so you actually have a number to call if something breaks.

An organization of even medium size? Not a chance.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#99

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:44 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #83

deegles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hire a good ops team I feel this is one of those "easier said than done" statements...

I'd argue that's only easier said than done if you insist on doing a roll-your-own open-source science project. If you default to established enterprise vendors, finding ops people isn't THAT difficult.

Established enterprise vendors are increasingly promoting cloud offerings, and their pricing reflects that.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#100

Post by x0x0 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:45 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #65

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running on rented hardware is the equivalent of a traditional product company renting all of their factories. Almost any company of reasonable size will want vertical integration of their supply chain and web companies are no different. Using Netflix as an example again, if they're pitted against a company that runs their own hardware but is otherwise equal, they will lose. A portion of their profit is siphoned off a…

> 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 is a classic case of very bursty demand when they eg regularly re-encode all video, or even just see huge audience swings when people get home from work and turn the tv on.

Most companies at even 1k servers will get enormous cost savings from O&O.

A former employer, then in the 600-ish box range, costed out moving to ec2. Our ops actually brought up our internal hadoop cluster on ec2 as well as ran parallel workloads for a week. Amazon at the time offered price deals to attempt to get them as a marquee customer, as well as a bunch of engineering time. Even so, ec2 cost 3-4x as much for 1/3 the throughput. ec2's prices have since fallen, but so has the price of bare hardware.

People also overestimate the cost of hands-on; this company contracted for 4 hours / week with a local person. If you get serious about puppet/chef you can successfully run lots of servers in a remote datacenter.