Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why? • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by shockinglytrue » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

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.

I'm having trouble understanding what point is being made. Netflix entire business is shipping bulk data, I imagine the cost of transcoding and media management to be a rounding error in that grand scheme.

Netflix appears to support what I was saying rather than negate it

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

#252

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

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…

Who are you getting your bandwidth from?

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

#253

Post by djrogers » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

kldavis4 wrote: post #232

AgentK20 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

As is my 11yr old daughter. Cannot wait to play it. Actually, she’s a budding designer, and all she wants to do is mod it!

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

#254

Post by philipkglass » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

ablekh wrote: post #168

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…

Sorry about a slightly off-topic comment. Working on a deep tech startup, with a significant segment of potential customers being national labs, I'm very interested in learning various aspects [beyond the basics] about the process(es) that national labs use to procure application software (not the system one [OS distributions, monitoring etc.], but rather domain-specific one, e.g., scientific data management, modelin…

I used to work at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Their flagship computational chemistry application. NWChem, is developed mostly by their own employees. They also collaborate with researchers from other national labs and academia. Development started in the 1990s. When I was at the lab, it was free-as-in-beer but required onerous licensing agreements to get a copy of the source code. It has been open source since 2007. It has started using github to coordinate development in the last few years.

http://www.nwchem-sw.org/index.php/Main_Page

https://github.com/nwchemgit/nwchem/

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

#255

Post by Wintereise » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:12 AM UTC

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.

Yep. Got bitten HARD by this recently, $1.5k inter-az transfer charges that we never saw coming.

Our fault, I suppose -- but multi-az is prohibitively expensive if you need to run anything data heavy distributed.

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

#256

Post by sbrother » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

erulabs wrote: post #249

We hear from our customers mostly what has been said here: cost and mental overhead. There is a bit of a paradox - companies that plan to grow aggressively are wary of AWS bills chopping their runway in half - they're very aware of _why_ cloud providers give out a year for free to most startups - they recoup that loss very fast once the cash faucet opens up. What really gets me is that most cloud providers promise sc…

I've found that Kubernetes mostly solves this problem. I say mostly because for AI/ML workloads that require GPUs, we still rely on running things on bare metal locally, and deploying with GKE's magic annotations and Deep Learning images. But for anything else, I haven't had an issue going all in on k8s at the beginning, even with very small teams.

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

#257

Post by tgamblin » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

birdyrooster wrote: post #236

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?

Some, but LLNL codes are mostly C++, especially now that they need to make effective use of GPUs.

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

#258

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #141

burnte wrote: post #117

Yes. Why? Cost, availability, flexibility, bandwidth. For a lot of companies, on-prem servers are the best solution for efficiency and cost. One great example. We were paying $45k/yr for a hosted MS Dynamics GP solution. For $26k we brought it in house with only a $4k/yr maintenance fee. We bought a rackmount Dell, put on VMWare, have an app VM and a DB VM. My team can handle basic maintenance. In the past 11 months…

> The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do you need what they're cutting? They're cutting overhead and getting better deals on hardware than you could ever get. Their efficiency is their profit margin.

This person is not payong overhead of developing and running 500'th AWS service with confusing name that they will never need. Just saying 'economies of scale' is a banality, everyone past schoolage knows about them.

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

#259

Post by jcrawfordor » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

tjbiddle wrote: post #241

horsawlarway wrote: post #217

I'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 in…

What's the time trade-off? I've been drawing out my plans lately for a hobby project, all 100% on AWS. Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all. I can't imagine buying hardware, ensuring my home is setup with proper Internet, configuring ev…

I'm not going to say that there aren't advantages, but when you start doing anything non-trivial with system configuration you'll find that the "infrastructure as code" approach also involves a large amount of work. Having done plenty of both in my career I don't think it's fair to say that IaC is at all less time consuming than traditional system administration. The advantages it comes with can also pretty easily come out to a wash if you don't plan around to some extent.

I guess what I'm saying is that, just like "cloud means cost savings" doesn't necessarily pan out, "cloud means time savings" also doesn't necessarily pan out. The best strategy continues to depend on your strengths, the application, etc.

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

#260

Post by apetersonBFI » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

I'm one of two IT persons at a food processor, in a small town. Despite living in an area where a majority of IT & Programmers work at the hospital or an insurance company, my boss has run our own networks and servers since the days of Novell, and we continue to run Windows servers on-premise, instead of the cloud. It does lead to interesting situations, like finding out a Dell server shrieking next to you is running max fan speed because the idrac is not connected.

Neither of us have any experience with the cloud, whereas we have a lot of Microsoft experience. We still rely on OEM licenses of Office, because Office 365 would be 3x or more expensive. We have a range of Office 2019, 2016, 2013 OEM, and we get audited by them nearly every year.

We use LastPass, Dropbox and Github, but only the basic features, and LastPass was an addition last year after someone got into our network through a weak username/password.

In our main location, we have three ESX boxes, running several virtual servers, and then we have a physical server for our domain controller, file sharing and DHCP, DNS in other locations. We also switched to a physical server for our new ERP application server, which hasn't yet been rolled out.

Projects like upgrading our ERP version can take months, but we have a local consulting team, with a specialist in our particular ERP solution, as well as a Server and Network specialist, and we also have a very close relationship with our ISP, who provides WAN troubleshooting.

Our IT budget is small relative to our company revenue, so most cloud proposals would raise our costs manyfold. We continue to use more services like Github and Lastpass, and we both have multiple hats.

I'm a developer, in-house app support, Email support, HR systems support, ERP support, PC setup, and I run our Data Synchronization operation and my boss runs EDI. I do a lot of PowerShell and Task Scheduler, but I've got familiar with bash through git bash.