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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?

#201

Post by XCSme »

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…

I agree, I remember when I learned to use Google Cloud for ML training, it took so much time to learn how to setup everything and to go around all their gotchas. I then tried getting started with AWS, but their poor interface and unfamiliar grounds made me stick to using plain VPSs.

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

#202

Post by mbreese »

reacharavindh wrote: post #5

University research group here. Simply, _cost_ Our compute servers crunch numbers and data at > 80% util. Our servers are optimized for the work we have. They run 24/7 picking jobs from queue. Cloud burst is often irrelevant here. They deal with Terabytes or even Petabytes of moving data. I’d cry paying for bandwidth costs if charged €/GB. Sysadmin(yours truly) would be needed even if it were to be run in the cloud.…

It’s extremely common for academic research groups to have their own hardware. Often, it doesn’t make sense from an overhead/maintenance point of view. If you’re a single lab large enough to need dedicated compute, you often don’t have the budget for a good admin. If you’re part of a larger group (like it sounds like you are) it is easier and you can afford some of the extra overhead.

But, I’ve found that there are two reasons why there is still a lot of on-premise academic compute: 1) legal, 2) cap-ex.

For the first, there are still many agreements for data sharing that require strict security compliance. It is certainly possible for this to work on the cloud, but it is more difficult than setting up a hardened cluster that’s not exposed to the internet. IT is normally better setup to audit and approve these on-premises systems than cloud systems.

For the second, it is difficult to estimate and write in all of the cloud costs for a grant budget. Trying to manage op-ex can be more of a hassle than just budgeting X amount for “servers” (as a cap-ex). Often, you just care about getting the job done, but less about how long it takes. So, a set capital expense has lower risk than underestimating your cloud needs and not being able to finish your project. (Also, as a bonus, once the equipment is paid for, you get to keep it to use on the next project, or unfunded research).

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

#203

Post by XCSme »

jackson1442 wrote: post #125
chickenpotpie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wholeheartedly agree. I think AWS is moving in the right direction with Lightsail[0], which is a service very similar to DO droplets and includes transfer. Nice if you want to use AWS for like one or two other services, but I tend to still go with DO for small things. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

That sounds interesting. By "moving in the right direction" do you mean that it's still in beta or not released yet? Or that it's just the first step of many to come?

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

#204

Post by graycat »

varenc wrote: post #78
centimeter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would need something like an X1 instance in terms of RAM, but it's hard to find something on AWS that has a well-tuned balance of RAM/CPU/disk for our needs. A lot of the big specialized instances are tuned for one particular limiting factor (RAM/GPU/storage/CPU/bandwidth/whatever) and I don't recall them having a good selection for "really big everything". Amazon is constantly expanding the selection, so it's pos…

Just curious, can you share general details on the types of services that need really big everything? For most every workload I can think of, as their load increases it's always one resource in particular that's the limiting factor. (RAM/CPU/Storage/etc). So it makes sense to me that AWS instances focus on optimizing one particular resource type. Would be interesting to hear about types of workloads that break this p…

> For most every workload I can think of, as their load increases it's always one resource in particular that's the limiting factor.

So this is a rediscovery, at least an example, of what could be called the bottleneck principle of system performance analysis and optimization! Sooo, just look for the bottleneck(s), work on those, and f'get about everything else until, say, everything is equally a bottleneck at which time have a well balanced, call it optimized, which can be appropriate, configuration!

At times, e.g., at IBM's Watson lab, there has been a lot of work on applying queueing theory, analysis, and simulation to analyzing and then optimizing such systems, but, more closely to fully true than one might guess, all that really mattered were the bottlenecks(s)!

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

#205

Post by jedberg »

shockinglytrue wrote: post #165

Try running any service with an average egress exceeding 10 Mbit/s then tell me cloud still makes sense. By the time you reach 1 Gbit/s the very idea of it is enough to elicit a primitive biological defensive response. We don't do on-prem but we do make heavy use of colo. The thought of cloud growth and DC space consolidation some day pushing out traditional flat rate providers absolutely terrifies me. At some point…

Netflix runs on the cloud and does 30% of all internet traffic.

That being said, 99% of that traffic is served from servers in colos now, but 10 years ago it was all served from CDN providers like Akamai, which is just a specialized cloud.

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

#207

Post by AgentK20 »

Like many others have pointed out: Cost.

I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwidth costs. Even if we bring our own ISPs and cross-connect to just use cloud's compute capacity, they still charge stupid high costs to egress to our carriers.

Even if bandwidth were completely free, at any timescale above 1-2 years purchasing your own hardware, LTO-ing, or even just renting will be cheaper.

Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic and you're unable to reasonably commit to year+ terms, or if your team is so small that you don't have the resources to manage infrastructure yourself, but at a team size of >10 your sysadmins running on bare metal will pay their own salaries in cloud savings.

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

#208

Post by toomuchtodo »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #80
centimeter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 amoun…

Seems you’re trying to bring your on-premise structure and concepts to the cloud, that won’t work. EC2 instances are cattle, not pets. I believe I saw a slide that average lifespan of an EC2 instance at Netflix is 14 minutes. I’m not necessarily saying cloud will work for your setup, but you can’t compare like that.

Most businesses are not Netflix, where most of the work is done by their OpenConnect CDN appliances serving video content outside of cloud providers.

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

#210

Post by XCSme »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #181
dathinab wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mentioned in another comment that I use VPS and not cloud services. I think of cloud as the auto-scaling infrastructure with dynamic pricing. I think of VPS as just sharing a dedicated machine with others, so each one gets a few cores and shares other resources. The implementation of VPSs nowdays is probably more similar to cloud services, where your own space might be moved around to another physical machine without any downtime.
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