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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?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

H8crilA wrote: post #50
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…

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

#52

Post by centimeter »

H8crilA wrote: post #50
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…

> Hundreds of terabytes a day is really not that much

How much would it cost to move this across boxes in EC2? I actually don't know, that's not a rhetorical question. A lot of our servers have 10-40gbit links that we saturate for minutes/hours at a time, which I suspect would be expensive without the kind of topology optimization we do in our datacenters.

> Also surprised about latency

We've spent a surprising amount of money reducing latency :) We're not a high frequency trading firm or anything, but an extra 1ms (say) between datacenters is generally bad for us and measurably reduces performance of some systems.

> Reliability is "solved" at low levels

To whatever extent this may be true, it's certainly not true for cloud providers. One obvious example is that EC2 has "scheduled maintenance events" where they force you to reboot your box. This would cost us a lot of money (mostly in dev time, to work around it).

Also, multi-second network dropouts in big cloud datacenters are not uncommon (in my limited experience), but that would be really bad for us. We have millisecond-scale failover with 2x or 3x redundancy on important systems.

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

#54

Post by michaelt »

On-prem makes your cost control proactive, rather than reactive. Nobody gets a new server without first having a purchase order approved - and the burden to get that approval falls on the person who wants the server.

In the cloud, at least the way it's generally used, cost control is reactive: You get a bill from AWS every month, and if you're lucky you'll be able to attribute the costs to different projects.

This is both a strength and a weakness: on-premise assets will end up at much higher utilisation, because people will be keen to share servers and dodge the bureaucracy and costs of adding more. But if you consider isolation a virtue, you might prefer having 100 CPUs spread across 100 SQL DBs instead of 50 CPUs across two mega-databases.

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

#55

Post by vikramkr »

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 server is in someone else's building. They have hippa compliant stuff for healthcare, but at a point there is just that risk that you have to take with the servers and data not physically being entirely under your control and having to trust the providers

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

#56

Post by sneak »

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…

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

What specs are those? I was under the impression AWS has everything from extremely tiny to giant terabytes-of-ram-for-SAP instance types.

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

#58

Post by vikramkr »

starpilot wrote: post #35

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 th…

What industry? It's good practice to not share information like that in any context, since attackers that have a bank if email addresses that are trying to figure out which if a few reused passwords might be used for a given website would have a harder time if they dont even know if the email has an account with a given website, or if an alternate email is used instead etc.

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

#59

Post by sdan »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #41
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.

Well, given that I am using Docker it doesn't really matter much... but the bigger issue is: GCP in the past has completely blocked access from accounts when they detect random things.

Unless I meet their demands, my entire infra is gone/down for days, which I can't deal with.

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