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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?

#231

Post by hexaga »

eyegor wrote: post #223
zozbot234 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. It's weird that these networking technologies are not used more in "plain" datacentre settings, since networking latency and throughput has to be a significant challenge to scaling up non-trivial workloads and achieving true datacentre-scale computing. We hear a lot about how to "scale out"…

Umm, most workloads aren't so compute intense that cpu interconnect speed would have a huge impact. The vast majority of rented computer tasks will be for things that need to communicate with external services (payments, region synchronizing, general api state comms, etc). In these cases, I doubt that your code is tuned tightly enough to reveal interconnect latency (as opposed to cache misses and swaps). Besides, hoo…

Infiniband and friends aren't cpu interconnects, they're alternatives to ethernet. Network latency is important and it's not that hard to write code whose performance is bounded by io latency/throughput.

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

#232

Post by kldavis4 »

AgentK20 wrote: post #226
MCthrowaway12 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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!

Great to hear! Lots of the people who learned how to code because of Minecraft have ended up all over the industry. It's where I got my start, as well as many of my coworkers. That's part of our passion for making Hytale, to empower the next generation of youth who want a game they can tinker with and use to learn. If you haven't seen it yet definitely go take a look, got lots of cool plans for moddability and custom…

Also offtopic, but my 12 year old is obsessed with Hytale.. Loves to read the blog updates and watch the videos and can't wait to eventually play it :)

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

#233

Post by opportune »

grantlmiller wrote: post #21

I always find it important to separate "cloud" into 2 categories: 1. IaaS - Which I mainly define as the raw programmable resources provided by "hypercloud" providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). Yes, it seems that using an IaaS provider with a VPC can provide many benefits over traditional on-prem data centers (racking & stacking, dual power supply, physical security, elasticity, programmability, locations etc). 2. SaaS - I l…

What about first-party SaaS? Those can also be big features that bring people to some cloud providers. Not all SaaS requires you to trust your data/availability to some random vendor. Of course those first-party SaaS aren't typically suitable for lift-and-shift by their very nature, and they can still have some rough edges, but IMO you can expect them to be almost as reliable as IaaS

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

#234

Post by jedberg »

AgentK20 wrote: post #229
jedberg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For models where static files need to be served efficiently, using cloud compute and aggressive CDNs works great. For any model where you've got volatile data that can't be cached (Gaming, VOIP, etc) you're tough out of luck.

For sure. There are absolutely use cases where the cloud doesn't make sense.

Most businesses out there aren't those kinds of businesses.

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

#235

Post by zozbot234 »

hexaga wrote: post #231
eyegor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, most workloads aren't so compute intense that cpu interconnect speed would have a huge impact. The vast majority of rented computer tasks will be for things that need to communicate with external services (payments, region synchronizing, general api state comms, etc). In these cases, I doubt that your code is tuned tightly enough to reveal interconnect latency (as opposed to cache misses and swaps). Besides, hoo…

Infiniband and friends aren't cpu interconnects, they're alternatives to ethernet. Network latency is important and it's not that hard to write code whose performance is bounded by io latency/throughput.

Well they can be both, so I can see how parent might have gotten confused.

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

#236

Post by birdyrooster »

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…

Does it run Fortran?

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

#237

Post by RhodesianHunter »

AgentK20 wrote: post #207

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 bandwid…

> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic

Or if you're just constantly iterating on a large product with many engineers. Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs and so making them productive is cost effective. Things like SNS/SQS/S3/VPC/ELB/etc. save you countless hours and often make up for the increased cloud costs with increased developer productivity.

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

#238

Post by winkeltripel »

bradhe wrote: post #191
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…

> because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies) Haha. This can't possibly be true.

Could a saturated network interface prioritize some other company's traffic over your own in AWS? Could the same happen in your own private network?

Consider that building fault-tolerance into their application may be very difficult, or impossible. Cloud would be incompatible with that.

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

#240

Post by enneff »

jedberg wrote: post #214
toomuchtodo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from disk to network

So... the core of their business?

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