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

Post by Polylactic_acid » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #250

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud servers tend to be more reliable as well if you don't run your own datacenters. We have lost our internet connection or power 3 times in the last year in the office. Its not the end of the world since we can go to 4g for our own usage but if our servers were hosted locally this would be a huge issue.

Disagree; your still at the mercy of whatever last mile is __between__ the cloud and the office. Also any bandwidth limitations; in the US that's still a big deal. Public facing stuff should probably be colo or rented server.

Post by sseagull » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

ablekh wrote: post #264

philipkglass wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Post by foobiekr » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:35 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.

Post by erulabs » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:39 AM UTC

sbrother wrote: post #256

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.

Post by jedberg » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

enneff wrote: post #240

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.

> What comes off of those colo servers is literally just bits streaming from disk to network So... the core of their business?