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?

#261

Post by sl1ck731 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:16 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…

> This is a tooling problem that I'm convinced can be solved. We need a ubiquitous, open-source, cloud-like platform that developers can use to get started on day 1, hosting from home if desired. That software platform should not have to change when the company needs increased reliability or better air conditioning for their servers. If its a Wordpress blog or a minecraft server or a petabyte SQL database - the Vendor should be a secondary choice to making things.

This is the intent of Kubernetes. Not that I particularly like it.

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

#262

Post by throwaway028374 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

I worked for a famous large tech company that makes both hardware and software. On stuff that runs on customer datacenters.

There are plenty of companies that run their infrastructure to keep their data secure and accessible.

It's not the type of companies that blog about their infra or are popular on HN. Banks and financial institutions, telcos, airlines, energy production, civil infrastructure.

Critical infrastructure need to survive events larger than a datacenter outage. FAANGs don't protect customers from legal threats, large political changes, terrorist attacks, war.

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

#263

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:18 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…

K8s might eventually get there, technically it fits the bipl,but it's got many moving parts thats its rarely worthwhile in a domestica setup

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

#264

Post by ablekh » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #254

ablekh wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I appreciate your comment and links (BTW, I'm slightly familiar with NWChem and similar software :-). Having said that, I'm not sure how your comment addresses my question. You are talking about internally-developed software transfer from the lab to external users, whereas my use case is delivering externally-developed commercial software to national labs' users, a value transfer in the opposite direction. Care to comment on this aspect, if you're familiar with relevant procurement processes?

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

#265

Post by koheripbal » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:20 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…

Same here - CTO of medium sized company.

Our IT infra costs are 1/10th the cost of cloud, simply because I happen to be comfortable having on-premise machine and working on them (sometime myself).

We have two dozen servers in two locations. It's more time to setup, but maintenance is actually quite low.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:20 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…

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by cpascal » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

My company cannot run our infrastructure in the cloud because we do performance/availability monitoring from ~700 PoP’s around the world.

Not running our infrastructure in the cloud is part of our value proposition.

Our customers depend on us to detect and alert them when their services go down. We _have_ to be operational when the cloud providers are not, otherwise we aren’t providing our customer with a valuable service.

Another reason we don’t run in the cloud is because we store a substantial amount of data that is ever increasing. It’s cheaper to run our own SAN in a data center than to store and query it in the cloud.

The final reason is our workloads aren’t elastic. Our CPU’s are never idle. In that type of use case, it’s cheaper to own the hardware.

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

#268

Post by Strum355 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:21 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…

You can do IaC for bare metal home servers as well. And thats coming from a 90s kid. We run a few physical servers for a college society with proxmox on top, and all of our VMs are codified in Ansible

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

#269

Post by YarickR2 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #237

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.

No they don't . Things you mentioned are very easy to deploy on-premises, and they won't take more than one man month to deploy and maintain.

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

#270

Post by eitally » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

PaulWaldman wrote: post #116

Manufacturing. The cost to a factory if the internet is down is too great. Each facility has its own highly redundant virtualization infrastructure hosting 50 to 100 VMs.

I was in manufacturing IT before moving to big tech. Our big campuses in the US & Europe had 40-80mbps internet circuits. The remote facilities in developing countries often only had 10mbps MPLS connections to a regional hub. To be 100% honest, we had 10x the outages caused by crappy local infrastructure than anything having to do with a SaaS service or IaaS/PaaS provider. Seriously, things like bad storms, a snake (cobra!) sneaking into the server room and frying itself and a machine it was snuggling against, utility workers accidentally severing cables, generators failing during power outages, labor strikes, and so much more. Moving to the cloud -- or even just hosting everything centrally -- was much more stable than maintaining a fleet of distributed machines.