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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?

#301

Post by stevage »

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…

>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.

Interesting. For me, that equation is the opposite. Learning cloud technologies takes a long time. It depends a lot on what skillset you already have.

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

#302

Post by redis_mlc »

aspyct wrote: post #12
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS EC2 m5d.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB / 300GB nVME SSD) for a 3 year term is $4,466. That's enough for 3 HP ML10s equivalently configured plus the power to run them for their entire lifetime, which is well over 3 years. You are paying out the nose for the fancy-pants deployment and administrative features that the cloud gives you, and for a lot of use cases, that isn't needed.

You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well.

> You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well.

I'm not sure where to even to start with this. It's not even wrong ...

For hosted and colo servers, you can have "remote hands" unbox, rack and cable your servers. My colo facility, he.net in Calif., does that for free, including IPMI configuration.

AWS does not secure your servers. They have a "shared security responsibility" cutout in all their contractual language. So they have private networks, but you're responsible for iptables, application security, etc.

Their AMIs aren't even encrypted, ffs. That's right, 99% of AWS customers don't do disk encryption, even if they're required to do so for compliance reasons, because you have to do an extra step yourself to encrypt it with your KMS. (GCP does encrypt.)

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

#304

Post by axaxs »

My company moved from all on prem, to all in AWS. Having used both, I'd much rather go back to on prem. I did architecture, capacity planning, system tuning, deployments, etc. I knew everything about all of them, and treated them as sacred. The next generation came in, deciding not to learn anything about systems and brought in the 'systems as cattle' attitude and everything that comes with it.

I try to remain objective, there are some pros to AWS, but I still much prefer my on prem setup. It was way cheaper, and deployments were way faster.

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

#305

Post by nemothekid »

mmmBacon wrote: post #292
mayank wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you’re paying for a ton of stuff there that you probably don’t use and then are susceptible to bugs that have nothing to do with your use case. At $5B it would not cost anywhere near that much to replicate. Your infra would be better tailored to your workloads and your sw teams which would further drive costs down. The upsides are that you only drive features you need and keep things simple. The downside is that…

Snap was spending 2B over 5 years - so 400M/yr. By comparison, Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters. Who knows how much they are paying in engineering salaries so manage those datacenters.

Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is worth it. However, I agree, for most teams the default should be cloud.

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

#306

Post by kevindong »

mayank wrote: post #282
mmmBacon wrote: post #276

Earlier 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.

IMO, the cloud providers' main advantage is that they will professionally manage all of the underlying hardware. Optionally, they can also manage the low level pieces of software also (e.g. databases, file store, etc.). It's a safe bet that GCP, AWS, Azure et al. can manage/architect their data center much better than the vast majority of companies.

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

#307

Post by jread »

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…

I’d be interested in your take on AWS Outposts - do you see potential in this type of offering?

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

#308

Post by busterarm »

chime wrote: post #76

1. 500TB of storage for 3-6mo of CCTV footage. 2. Bought a hanful of $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago for 24/7 data crunching. Equivalent cloud cost was over $3000/mo. On-Prem paid off within a month! 3. Nutanix is nice. Awesome performance for the price and almost no maintenance. Got 300+ VDI desktops and 50+ VMs with 1ms latency.

Nutanix is a nightmare when it's over-utilized or you have random node failures. We have 12 nodes and I think lost about 4 man-weeks last year to supporting it.

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

#309

Post by RockIslandLine »

dathinab wrote: post #129
reacharavindh wrote: post #5

University research group here. Simply, _cost_ Our compute servers crunch numbers and data at > 80% util. Our servers are optimized for the work we have. They run 24/7 picking jobs from queue. Cloud burst is often irrelevant here. They deal with Terabytes or even Petabytes of moving data. I’d cry paying for bandwidth costs if charged €/GB. Sysadmin(yours truly) would be needed even if it were to be run in the cloud.…

In germany it's a pretty common think for universities to have some servers for themself. 1. Their use case is kinda different. The servers mostly run heavy CS research related stuff. E.g. they might have heavy CPU load and heavy traffic between they servers but they have less often heavy traffic to the "normal internet" (if they have heavy traffic to the outside it's normally to other research institutes which not s…

It's not just CS. The computational chemistry and materials science crystallography folks can have jobs that run for days or weeks too.

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

#310

Post by kevindong »

mmmBacon wrote: post #292
mayank wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you’re paying for a ton of stuff there that you probably don’t use and then are susceptible to bugs that have nothing to do with your use case. At $5B it would not cost anywhere near that much to replicate. Your infra would be better tailored to your workloads and your sw teams which would further drive costs down. The upsides are that you only drive features you need and keep things simple. The downside is that…

@nemothekid Can you provide a source for your claim on Uber's real estate costs for their data centers? I couldn't find anything on Google that corroborates your assertion.
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