Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 782 posts

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

#181

Post by Polylactic_acid »

dathinab wrote: post #146
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud servers tend to be more reliable as well if you don't run your own datacenters. We have lost our internet connection or power 3 times in the last year in the office. Its not the end of the world since we can go to 4g for our own usage but if our servers were hosted locally this would be a huge issue.

Don't forget that between cloud and servers in the company there are still VPS and rented dedicated hardware in a data center. So you: 1. Don't manage hardware. 2. But manage a server (OS+software stack). 3. Have reliable internet, power and physical security from the data center you are renting your hardware from (if you trust them fully!). 4. Have fixed cost but also fixed resources. Tends to be cheaper for many ta…

I consider VPSs to be cloud servers. Is this not common?

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

#182

Post by catlas3r »

Why stay on premise?

Cost. On-prem is roughly on-par in an average case, in my experience, but we've got many cases where we've optimized against hardware configurations that are significantly cheaper to create on-prem. And sunk costs are real. It's much easier to get approval for instances that don't add to the bottom line. But for that matter, we try to get our on-prem at close to 100% utilization, which keeps costs well below cloud. If I've got bursty loads, those can go to the cloud.

Lock-in. I don't trust any of the big cloud providers not to jack my rates up. I don't trust my engineers not to make use of proprietary APIs that get me stuck there.

Related to cost, but also its own issue, data transfer. Both latency and throughput. Yeah, it's buzzwordy, but the edge is a thing. I have many clients where getting processing in the same location where the data is being generated saves ungodly amounts of money in bandwidth, or where it wouldn't even been feasible to transfer the data off-site. Financial sector clients also tend to appreciate shaving off milliseconds.

Also, regulatory compliance. And, let's be honest, corporate and actual politics.

Inertia.

Trust.

Risk.

Interoperability with existing systems.

Few decisions about where to stick your compute and storage are trivial; few times is one answer always right. But there are many, many factors to consider, and they may not be the obvious ones that make the decision for you.

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

#184

Post by dathinab »

p1necone wrote: post #40
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?

A private cloud is potentially on prem.

But besides that it's a about how the infrastructure is manages, in the classical way. Or with somethings which allows easy setup of new "containers" and similar like Kubernets. This doesn't necessarily means VMs. It can be more lightweight containers, e.g. based on Linux namespaces. Nor does it means you can sidestep the IT ;=) But normally it mans you can much easier spin up new services or change scaling between them.

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

#185

Post by MattGaiser »

I work on two projects, neither of which use cloud.

For my day job, it is privacy and legal constraints. I work for the government and all manner of things need to be signed off on to move to cloud. We could probably make it work, but in government, the hassle of doing so is so large that it is not going to happen for a long time.

In my contract project, it is a massive competitive advantage. I won't go into too many details, but customers in this particular area are very pleased that we do not use a cloud provider and instead host it somewhat on-premise. I don't see a large privacy advantage over using the cloud, but the people buying the service do simply because they are paranoid about the data and every single one of them could personally get in a lot of trouble for losing the data.

Not my project, but intensive computing requirements can be much more cheaply filled by on-premise equipment (especially if you don't pay for electricity), so my university does most of its AI and crypto research on-premise.

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

#186

Post by MattGaiser »

sixothree wrote: post #156
throwaway6845 wrote: post #37

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 th…

We're a small business and hosting costs are killing us. Spending $300+ on a small VM that I can only describe as measly really hurts.

What the heck are you running? Ouch.

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

#187

Post by Blackadderz »

I work in R&D for a telecomms/optics company.

All servers are on premises. Not allowed to have a laptop. No access to emails/data outside of the office. No USB drives, printing documents, etc.

Reason? Protect IP. From who? Mostly Huawei.

Good and bad: When I walk out the door... I switch off. The bad is that working from home isn't realy an option. Although they have accommodated somewhat for this pandemic.

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

#188

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

A half-hour a month seems like a lot of maintenance for a server.

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

#190

Post by PeterisP »

aspyct wrote: post #12
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS EC2 m5d.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB / 300GB nVME SSD) for a 3 year term is $4,466. That's enough for 3 HP ML10s equivalently configured plus the power to run them for their entire lifetime, which is well over 3 years. You are paying out the nose for the fancy-pants deployment and administrative features that the cloud gives you, and for a lot of use cases, that isn't needed.

You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well.

Your admins need to known and maintain the systems anyway, no matter if they're in AWS or on premise. Sure, with AWS they might have a bit less work, but that would not necessarily reduce costs, a smallish company still need the same number of admins to cover the shifts and replacements so a switch to cloud would not allow to reduce any employees.
Post reply on HN