Anything with massive storage and massive compute that doesn't need low latency is a great fit. I still host ~300TiB and ~250 cores at home because the cloud cost would be astronomical. Edit: This is for personal stuff related to internet-wide scan data and domain tracking. See https://github.com/hdm/inetdata
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
211–220 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#212Try 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.
This is kind of a big caveat (“Netflix is in the cloud but almost none of the work is done there”), and something I have to mention to non tech decision makers when they say “but Netflix!”. I even have a slide for presentations just for this (“You Are Not Netflix”).
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#213Security... not against hacker but against provider's government.
I worked for some french or european companies, with IPs and sensitive informations, and US business competitors. By the US law, US companies may have to let the US gov spy on their customers (even non US, even on non US location), so this may be a problem for strategic sectors, like defense for example.
In that case, sensitive informations is required to be hosted in country by a company of the country, under the country law.
Of course, it's not against "cloud" in general... only against US cloud providers (and chinese, and...)
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is kind of a big caveat (“Netflix is in the cloud but almost none of the work is done there”), and something I have to mention to non tech decision makers when they say “but Netflix!”. I even have a slide for presentations just for this (“You Are Not Netflix”).
99% of the work is done on the cloud. What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from disk to network. There is no transformation or anything. No authentication, no user accounts, no database. Nothing.
Just static files served efficiently.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#215[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#216Meta-comment:
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098576
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097812
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098658
abilities / guarantees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097213
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090325
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097737
threat model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098612
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097896
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098297
cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097215
That's just the in-order top comments I'm seeing right now. (please do read and upvote them / others too, they're widely varying in their details and are interesting)
The answer's the same as it has always been. Cloud is more expensive, unless you're small enough to not pay for a sysadmin, or need to swing between truly extreme scale differences. And a few exceptions for other reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#217I'm slowly coming to the complete opposite opinion you seem to have.
I've worked almost entirely for companies that run services in various cloud infrastructures - Azure/Heroku/Aws/GCP/Other.
I recently started a tiny 1 man dev shop in my spare time. Given my experience with cloud services it seemed like a no brainer to throw something up in the cloud and run with it.
Except after a few months I realized I'm in an industry that's not going to see drastic and unplanned demand (I'm not selling ads, and I don't need to drive eyeballs to my site to generate revenue).
So while in theory the scaling aspect of the cloud sounds nice, the reality was simple - I was overpaying for EVERYTHING.
I reduced costs by nearly 90% by throwing several of my old personal machines at the problem and hosting things myself.
So long story short - Cost. I'm happy to exchange some scaling and some uptime in favor of cutting costs. Backups are still offsite, so if my place burns I'm just out on uptime. The product supports offline, so while no one is thrilled if I lose power, my customers can still use the product.
Basically - cost, Cost, COST. I have sunk costs in old hardware, it's dumb to rent an asset I already own.
There might well be a point when I scale into a point where the cloud makes sense. That day is not today.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#218Like 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 bandwid…
[offtopic]
Awesome seeing you here! I used to be super active on Hypixel when I was in high school (I was actually #1 on the leaderboards for one of the games for over a year). One of my first large scale programming projects ever was creating a Hypixel mod for my guild. Years later I am now a software engineer working at Google on the YouTube algorithm!
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#219University 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.…
In germany it's a pretty common think for universities to have some servers for themself. 1. Their use case is kinda different. The servers mostly run heavy CS research related stuff. E.g. they might have heavy CPU load and heavy traffic between they servers but they have less often heavy traffic to the "normal internet" (if they have heavy traffic to the outside it's normally to other research institutes which not s…
AWS has systems with up to 24TiB of RAM (u-24tb1.metal) [0], but the pricing is "call us". For almost 4TiB of RAM (x1e.32xlarge), it's about $28/hr [1]
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/now-avail... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#220I 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…
I like DigitalOcean... but they are a cloud service too.