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Why we are not leaving the cloud

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#181

Post by dapz »

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…

Actually, unfortunately I think that the price is more like 9 cents per GB, so the calculation looks even worse. The $0.01/GB you saw must be across zones within AWS?

So ~$900/month for bandwidth alone.

The disk and CPU costs for me are worth it, much better to pay $600/month and let that be someone else's headache. But the bandwidth makes this totally a nonstarter.

Out of curiosity, what are you moving?

I'm also not sure how these smaller datacenters somehow charge so much less for bandwidth.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#182

Post by dx034 »

pestaa wrote: post #13

What about managed dedicated servers? You don't need to go all in full metal, and be responsible for networking and swapping disks and all that. I know it's more than a handful of deployment recipes, but it's not like they don't manage their cloud instances either... This article is a false dichotomy with a seemingly rushed decision.

I was wondering the same. Why not manage servers without managing the hardware? There are several hosting providers that offer enough capacity and data centers to provide enough capacity.

You'll still need people managing servers, but no one has to live close to a datacenter and you can emulate at least some cloud-like features (e.g. spinning up a new server if one server fails and dealing with the failing server later).

The only companies where that doesn't work is when you need physical security for your data (locked cabinets that no one from another company can enter), but that's no concern if you already had your data in the cloud before.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#183

Post by donarb »

keepper wrote: post #149
scott_s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just too harsh, it's not true. See the comments from those involved in the decision in this thread.

Why is it not true? Their main competitor, github, runs their own datacenter? Why is that?

What's not true is that Gitlab relied on random commenters to influence its decision.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#184

Post by dx034 »

As much as I like gitlab, that decision seems weird. I'd expect a business to come up with numbers for different scenarios, not just quotes (even if those weren't the only deciding factor).

What I mean is, instead of writing about 8TB disks vs 2TB disks, get hard numbers for those and calculate costs for different versions to the costs in the cloud.

Instead of saying that engineers are expensive, look at market data to determine how much you have to pay to hire these people.

Instead of writing about the potential of full cabinets, get quotes from data center providers of what they can provide and how they would deal with this. I'm sure Equinix has solutions for that kind of problem.

And in addition to that, it seems that managed dedicated wasn't considered at all. Why hire someone to swap disks for you? Why not just renting capacity for servers and have the data center provider taking care of hardware issues? They operate at bigger scale and can do this with little overhead costs. You're still much cheaper than the cloud but don't need to drive somewhere to swap a server (you just switch to a spare one until the data center fixed the problem). With Gitlab's scale, it shouldn't be too hard to get a decent bespoke quote from companies like OVH.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#185

Post by stephenr »

viraptor wrote: post #116
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…

3 things I think you should consider in this situation. 1. Reserved instances. If you've got a running business and are expecting to be around for 1-3 years, you get 40-60% discount on that 4xlarge. 2. Do you want to move the service exactly as it is? Maybe you don't need the large ebs? Maybe you can rewrite the storage to S3 instead which is much cheaper? Do you have heavy, sporadic tasks that you can move out of yo…

> rewrite the storage to S3 instead which is much cheaper

So, pay for the privilege of being vendor-locked to Amazon. What a wonderful idea.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#186

Post by stephenr »

emodendroket wrote: post #95
dsr_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

If you needed a team to manage it before, you still need Ops with "the cloud"

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#187

Post by stephenr »

badloginagain wrote: post #84
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 article has some really good points why being in the cloud is a good idea. GitLabs core competencies are in software, not hardware- similar to many startups. Sure, they could hire up an infrastructure team, but that's at an opportunity cost of their software team. The cloud offers convenience that all the `original internet companies` wish they had when they were starting out. There may be value in switching when…

> Sure, they could hire up an infrastructure team

Their original proposal on bare metal was for 64 servers. They need an ops team regardless of whether they control the hardware or not.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#188

Post by skuhn »

extrovert wrote: post #177
dasil003 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in how you guys went about this. Your other points and experience are well taken, but this is definitely too harsh. Think about the nature of GitLab as an open company building dev tools and paying below-market salaries. They have a huge amount of developer mindshare relative to their internal head count. They are not very competitive for hirin…

> They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset. There is plenty of ops talent willing to work at a high-profile startup. I have experience building and running PB-scale Ceph clusters, private and public clouds, HA infrastructure covering everything from DB failover to BGP, and interviewed at Gitlab when they announced going on-prem. I asked for half the market rate (because I was more…

It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise and interest in building outside of cloudland is important to find, but there's also a challenge in finding the right operational mindset as well.

It seems more common with more mature "startups" that have done the cost / benefit analysis and realized that the only way to achieve economies of scale for their business is to exit AWS. Dropbox, GitHub, Uber and so forth. Or businesses that simply must operate their own hardware, like CDNs.

There are some smaller places that see value in building a low-cloud service from the beginning. One of those companies is where I work, e-mail in profile.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#189

Post by Heliosmaster »

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.…

It really really depends how you structure your application. Depending on your architecture having a few huge boxes is very much worth it, and that scales a lot better with bare metal.
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