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Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#31

Post by aspyct »

shortlived wrote: post #23

Small company here (30 total people, 8 in IT/software). - unwillingness to seed control of the critical parts of our software infrastructure to a third party. - given our small team size and our technical debt load we are not currently able to re-architect to make our software cloud-ready/resilient. - true cost estimates feel daunting to calculate, whereas on-prem costs are fairly easy to calculate.

I agree with the last 2 points. Estimates are hard to get right, and rearchitecting an existing app is probably not worth it.

What about your first point though? Do you not trust a 3rd party to maintain infrastructure properly? In what way?

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#32

Post by reacharavindh »

aspyct wrote: post #27
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you disagree, give us your example TCO estimates for all of that vs cloud. I'm sure HN readers would be happy to dissect it.

Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers, having never been responsible for the budget of those. This is only an estimation considering the pricing I see from the cloud providers, and the rates I know from my fellow contractors. Besides, I'm not exactly trying to win a war here. Simply trying to know under which circumstances it is better to go for on-prem vs public cloud.

I too think there is no one winner here. There are some cases where going with an IAAS makes a ton of sense. From the top of my mind,

1. Scale up/down - you can say turn off servers off season/nights and spin up only when needed.

2. Your business is not big enough to hire a person for Ops.

3. You don’t have the space for a server room/ unwilling to take the burden of dealing with a co-location provider and are willing to pay through the nose for that choice.

4. Your devs are okay with doing Ops (managing server resources on AWS is still Ops. You still need sense of firewalls, DNS, backups, updates, change management etc)

5. Ownership vs Operation : if a business is not sure they will sustain that amount of resource needs long enough to buy hardware. Buying reserved instances on Amazon comes to mind as opportunities that could have been better as a co located servers.

6. Geography - At times you need geographical spread (CDN, or multiple office/customer locations)

IMO, unless you can find yourself one such justification for the extra costs, you should consider self hosted or atleast collocated servers. At least this is what I tell my friends in the business who seek advice on infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#33

Post by TedLePoireau »

Not exactly on-premise but we rent 2 big dedicated server (ovh) + install VMWare ESXi on them. Going to the cloud would cost more, the price would be unpredictable, only to solve a scale problem we won't have. And customers love to know their data are hosted in France by a French company, not by Google or Amazon :)

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#34

Post by XCSme »

I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS droplet instead of AWS or other "cloud" service. I only have to host an analytics dashboard ( https://usertrack.net/ ), I don't need scaling and this way I know exactly how much I will pay. The resources are more than enough for my needs and I don't think it could be much cheaper even on the most optimized pay-per-minute of use cloud platforms.

I also have some other APIs hosted in the same way (eg. website thumbnail generation API), for the very low traffic I have and no chance of getting burst traffic I think the use case of a VPS or dedicated server is perfect.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#35

Post by starpilot »

PII and draconian security policies. We are not a tech company, so we can't fine-tune or have nuanced policies, we just have to build a wall around everything . In our web password recovery process, we can't tell people if their login was correct or not, because that might help a brute force attacker infer they got that right. Even though we have that rate limited anyway. I don't know why we can't just tell people the login was found or not found like banks etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#36

Post by centimeter »

We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2/3rds of that every year on power/maintenance/rent/upgrades/etc.

We don't generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for:

* uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we're willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies)

* latency (this is a big one)

* security, to some degree

* if something crazy is happening, that's when we need hardware, and that's when hardware is hard to get. Consider how Azure was running out of space during the last few months. It would have cost us an insane amount of money if we couldn't grow our data centers during Corona! We probably have at least 20-30% free hot capacity in our datacenters, so we can grow quickly.

We also have a number of machines with specs that would be hard to get e.g. on AWS.

We have some machines on external cloud services, but probably less than 1% of our deployed boxes.

We move a lot of bandwidth internally (tens of terabytes a day at least, hundreds some days), and I'm not sure we could do that cheaply on AWS (maybe you could).

We do use for backup, but that's the only thing we've thought it was economical to really use them for.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#37

Post by throwaway6845 »

Mostly, headspace. If I run my own server, I just need to apply my existing Ubuntu sysadmin knowledge. If I use AWS, I have to learn a whole load of AWS-specific domain knowledge, starting with their utterly baffling product names. My time is more valuable than that.

Also, sheer cost. Literally everyone I know in my particular part of the industry uses Hetzner boxes. For what I do, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#38

Post by sdan »

Founder of a growing startup:

Started with a cluster of Raspberry Pis and expanded onto an old desktop. Primarily did this for cost (raspberry pis alone were more powerful than a GCP $35/mo instance). Everything was fine until I needed GPUs/handling more traffic than those Raspberrys could handle. So I expanded by including cloud instances in my Docker Swarm cluster (tidbit: Using Traefik and WireGuard)

So half on-prem half in the cloud. Honestly just scared GCP might one day cancel my account and I'll lose all my data unless I meet their demands (has happened in the past) so that half on-prem stores most of the data.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#40

Post by p1necone »

Jugurtha wrote: post #14

Many organizations do have private clouds. If by cloud you mean a public cloud like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, then forget about it; not with these companies piping data directly to U.S intelligence.

What's the difference between private cloud and on prem?

Does it just mean you let everyone spin up VMs etc rather than requiring them to go through IT?

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