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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?

#131

Post by PaulWaldman »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #97

Yes. Three major reasons: - Cost. It's vastly cheaper to run your own infra (like, 10-100x -- really!). The reason to run in cloud is not to save money, it's to shift from capex to opex and artificially couple client acquisition to expenditure in a way that juices your sheets for VCs. - Principle. You can't do business in the cloud without paying people who also work to assemble lists of citizens to hand over to fasc…

Regarding the shift in CapEx to OpEx, on-prem servers can also be leased, keeping their costs in OpEx.

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

#132

Post by jedberg »

tgamblin wrote: post #104

I work in Livermore Computing at LLNL. We manage upwards of 30 different compute clusters (many listed here: https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms ). You can read about the machine slated to hit the floor in 2022/2023 here: https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-capita... . All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. F…

> it's our job to stay on the bleeding edge, and I'm not sure how we would do that without working with vendors through these procurements and running our own systems.

I think this is key. Also the fact that you guys have a land grant so your datacenter costs are cheaper than most. :)

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

#134

Post by elliekelly »

kondro wrote: post #84
2rsf wrote: post #8

Security (we're a bank)

But there are literally 100's (or more) of banks around the world that use AWS for compute. They meet all the security requirements you could want (27001, SOC2, and many others) around how they secure and limit access to servers by staff and have a variety of WORM audit tools and a very comprehensive IAM to help you satisfy these requirements are being met.

I think this is changing. Rapidly. A few years ago no one batted an eye at a financial institution using AWS but now banks seem eager to keep as much data as possible in-house. I’ve recently had two prospective clients (I now work in compliance SaaS) ask whether I use a cloud service provider as part of their vendor due diligence.

Many banks seem to be aiming for the minimum viable external data processing.

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

#135

Post by AnonC »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #112
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…

Honestly just scared GCP might one day cancel my account and I'll lose all my data unless I meet their demands This hasn't been emphasized enough in these discussions. Once you're in the cloud, you're dealing with computers as a "utility". Or are you? When you buy electricity from your local utility, you don't just lose it in the middle of some afternoon for some unknown reason. There's a clear and established proced…

> You aren't forced to resort to sending emails and receiving some idiotic canned response from a bot. "Sorry we have reviewed your case and our decision is final. By the way, we don't tell you what you did wrong. Fuck you. Ha. Ha. Ha."

Incidentally, this is exactly what happened to me on my very first attempt with Digital Ocean this year. Just an autoresponder that kept sending the same email with no way to reach a human. And this was just after creating an account and going through an payment authorization process. No money was lost, but I’m not touching a system where humans refuse to get involved.

Edit: To add a comparison on this aspect, Hetzner wanted some verification for a new account and handled it quite well with humans involved (and responsive).

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

#136

Post by downerending »

tgamblin wrote: post #104

I work in Livermore Computing at LLNL. We manage upwards of 30 different compute clusters (many listed here: https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms ). You can read about the machine slated to hit the floor in 2022/2023 here: https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-capita... . All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. F…

In many similar contexts, buying hardware is different than buying services (e.g., AWS time), in terms of how you interact with funding agencies. Because of those realities, you might sometimes be unable to "go cloud" even if it's actually cheaper.

Also, licensing can be a big problem. Some software packages understand licensing for a "real" cluster, but have no concept of how to license for the cloud.

Finally, think about all of your interactions over the last ten years with companies behind the major cloud services. Which of them would you really trust, if it's your money/job/reputation on the line?

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

#137

Post by Guest42 »

derision wrote: post #120
Guest42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working at a medium-sized bank the data center costs were very significant.

How many employees do medium sized banks have?

This one had 600 on-site employees serving 12 million customers. Not sure how many were off-site.

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

#138

Post by tstrimple »

iampims wrote: post #127
tstrimple wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much would it cost to move this across boxes in EC2? Nothing. You generally only pay for data going out of cloud providers. Not data going in or data being transferred within the same region. > 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). You're not going to have a successful…

You pay for cross-AZ Traffic in AWS, and that adds up really fast.

Yes. You've got to be aware of where those boundaries are when adopting the cloud and the cost information around these cases are inadequate at best. Too many people get surprise bills.

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

#139

Post by lykr0n »

dahfizz wrote: post #126
bcrosby95 wrote: post #101

We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS ha…

I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.

Yep. A lot of issues come from legacy products and configurations. You can do a greenfield infrastructure with OpenStack, VMware, or oVirt/RHEV and it's a pleasure to work with.

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

#140

Post by ggm »

We operate an X509 PKI with a Trust anchor and CA. Its not impossible to run the Hardware Security Module (HSM) in the cloud but its off the main path. Its more plausible to run it in a D.C. but it invites security threats you don't have, if you run it inside your own perimiter. Of course you also then invite other risks, but its a balancing act and it has to be formally declared in your Certification Practice Statement (CPS)

We also run some registry data which we consider mission critical as a repository. We could run the live state off-prem, but we'd always have to be multi-site to ensure data integrity. We're not a bank, but like a bank or a land and titles administration office, registry implies stewardship in trust. That imposes constraints on "where" and "why".

Take central registry and the HSM/related out of the equation, if I was building from scratch I'd build to pub/sub, event-sourcing, async and in-the-cloud for everything I could.

private cloud. If you don't control your own data and logic, why are you in the loop?

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