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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?

#41

Post by chickenpotpie »

sdan wrote: post #38

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-pr…

At $35/month though GCP would only have to save you a half an hour of maintenance for it to be worth it though.

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

#43

Post by chickenpotpie »

XCSme wrote: post #34

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…

Whenever I need to host something small and I’m trying to decide between DO and AWS I always ask myself. Would I rather be surprised by the bill or my website crashing from too much traffic? I almost always pick DO because I don’t want to mess something up and lose a few hundred dollars.

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

#44

Post by kkielhofner »

Not a company but a personal project:

https://github.com/krisk84/retinanet_for_redaction_with_deep...

I haven't analyzed the TCO yet but the bandwidth costs alone from hosting my curated model of 100GB in the cloud (Azure blob) have greatly exceeded my total operation spend from downloading the entire dataset and running training. By an order of magnitude.

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

#45

Post by edoceo »

Cost. We're a small company, five person team and we need a development environment. All our stuff is built around VM and Docker. So scores of little test nodes that get run, or beta environment in the cloud was costly (>$300/mo base, sometimes 3x). For $1000 we put a box in the office we all VPN to that runs all the necessary VM and Docker. The variable, sometimes expensive cost for Test/Beta in cloud was replaced with low fixed cost.

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

#46

Post by toast0 »

aspyct wrote: post #13
2rsf wrote: post #8

Security (we're a bank)

How is the cloud less secure than your on-prem servers? I would argue that it's easier to keep track of all the threats with the tools available from big cloud providers.

The cloud provider has physical access to the machines. They may have software access to the machines.

I'm sure they're contracted not to do anything bad, but there is risk of an insider incident at the cloud provider leading to an incident the customer can't prevent.

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

#47

Post by altmind »

to control the costs. after the original purchase, the MRC is a fixed cost for hosting and for the network access. also, for the total control - the network, io, cpu performance does not change randomly. with better predictability our IT team can give more precise SLA.

we're not 100% on-prem, but aws, gcloud and azure are the worst examples of 3rd party hosting - unpredictable and with complicated billing. we're considering the alternatives to big 3 for the "cloud hosting"

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

#49

Post by ROFISH »

Network storage. MacBooks don't have a lot of space and artists like to make HUGE psd files.

Bonus points for small stuff like RADIUS for wifi and stuff. Groups charging $5/user for junk like that is absolutely awful with a high number of staff.

With a staff of 100, a single box with a bunch of hard drives is two months worth of cloud and SaaS.

TCO needs to come down by like at least 100x before I consider going server-less.

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

#50

Post by H8crilA »

centimeter wrote: post #36

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…

Hundreds of terabytes a day is really not that much, depends on what latency can you accept. I often run computations over datasets that are petabytes in size, just for my own needs. A big data move would be at least tens of petabytes or more like hundreds, or thousands.

Also surprised about latency, latency from what to what? Big cloud providers have excellent globally spanning networks. Long distance networking is crazy expensive, though, compared to the peanuts it costs to transfer data within a data center.

Reliability - again, not sure I buy it. Reliability is "solved" at low levels (such as data storage), most failures occur directly at service levels, regardless of whether you have the service in house or in the cloud.

The rest of your points make sense.

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