Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mentioned in another comment that I use VPS and not cloud services. I think of cloud as the auto-scaling infrastructure with dynamic pricing. I think of VPS as just sharing a dedicated machine with others, so each one gets a few cores and shares other resources. The implementation of VPSs nowdays is probably more similar to cloud services, where your own space might be moved around to another physical machine witho…
So you consider cloud servers to be what most people call serverless (S3/serverless functions/etc)?
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
291–300 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and…
You’re not paying Google $5B for raw infra, you’re paying for cloud services like top-tier horizontally scalable databases, global availability, CDNs, datastores of different flavors, and transparently managed monitoring and hardware fault resolution.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.
In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.
This is purely my opinion, but I think that 1) there is a strange shortage of IT professionals (people who are not software engineers but instead understand systems) in much of the industry today, and 2) a lot of tech companies, even those that are currently well functioning, might be able to save a lot of money if they hired someone with a conventional IT background. This is a little self-serving of course, but it really does astound me when I see the bills that some companies are paying cloud services to do something that is traditionally done in-house by an IT department. And not everything can readily be outsourced to some "aaS" provider, so on top of that you end up with things like software companies with multi-million budgets running an office network that consists of a consumer WiFi router someone picked up at Fry's - not realizing that they are losing a lot of time to dealing with how poorly that ends up working.
I think part of the problem rests in academia - at least in my area a lot of universities seem to have really backed off on IT programs in favor of CS. I went through an undergraduate program that involved project management, decision analysis, and finance courses because these were considered by the college (I would say accurately) critical skills for the IT field. But that program had an incredible two students and was widely considered inferior to the CS program with hundreds.
Another part of the problem though seems to rest in industry. The salary differential between "DevOps Engineer" and "IT Analyst" is incredible when in practice they end up doing mostly the same thing in a lot of small orgs. So I end up walking sort of an odd line of "I have a long background in IaC but I also know about conference room equipment." And I'm not saying that everything with a Cisco/Tandberg badge isn't overpriced, but Zoom rooms can end up costing just as much and seem to be less reliable - not surprising for a platform which, by practical necessity of the lack of IT support in many orgs, is built on the Silicon Valley time-tested architecture of "five apple consumer products taped together."
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#294We spend ~$50k/mo on serverless infrastructure on AWS. It hurts sometimes, given we were fully colocated about 4 years back, and I know how much hardware that could buy us every month. However, with serverless infra we can pivot quickly. Since we're still in the beta stage, with a few large, early access partnerships, and an unfinished roadmap, we don't know where the bottlenecks will be. For example, we depended hea…
That would mean the incoming rate of users who are just starting off and find Cloud worthwhile is more exit rate of mature users who are finding on-prem more worthwhile than cloud
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I misunderstood your original question. When you asked how they procure domain specific application software I thought you meant "how do they get it?," which includes writing it themselves. (Not just procure as in "procurement" processes.)
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hundreds of terabytes a day is really not that much How much would it cost to move this across boxes in EC2? I actually don't know, that's not a rhetorical question. A lot of our servers have 10-40gbit links that we saturate for minutes/hours at a time, which I suspect would be expensive without the kind of topology optimization we do in our datacenters. > Also surprised about latency We've spent a surprising amoun…
> 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…
Right, we have not done this. We basically decided it was cheaper to keep doing the “old school” thing and not spend a bunch of dev time trying to do it in a way that supports arbitrary failure of N boxes. We just spent the money to make it unlikely our boxes or networks will fail, and if they do fail we may be sad (but it rarely happens, and has not yet happened in a catastrophic way).
> Are these inter-region network dropouts or between the internet and the cloud data center?
I’ve seen multi-second dropouts within a DC (cloud, not my current company), and multi-hour single-path failures between DCs (usually something like a fire or construction cutting a line). But all of our DCs have at least 2 physically independent routes to the internet, so it’s never taken us fully offline.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#297We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS ha…
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#298We 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?
#299I have a 3 smallish VM for build server + managed SQL. It cost 500$/mo. It doesn't make sense. Having my own VMs on ESXi makes everything very different - most of the time this VMs do nothing, but you want to make them performant from time to time, so there are a plenty of resources because all other vms are too mostly IDLE.
In cloud they are billed as if they are 100% loaded all the time.
I am not really satisfied with latencies and insane price for egress traffic. I just can't do backups daily since it could cost whooping 500$/mo just for the traffic. This is just insane, i can't see how it could scale anywhere for B2C market. For B2B it might work really well though since revenue per customer is much higher.
We are not moving to our own DC, but just keep realtime stuff in the cloud, but anything that is not essential is being moved somewhere else. Bonus is that you need off-site backups anyway in the case if cloud vendor will just ban you and delete all your data.
Startups might move fast and iterate, but if you don't have your own servers you always reduce your usage because it could grow fast effectively reducing your delivery capacity.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#300Meta-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://ne…
Although we do often make jokes about "what if we just move the CDN to AWS?"