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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?

#321

Post by kjsthree »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #252
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?

This! I very much want to hear about how you get your bandwidth.

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

#322

Post by mmmBacon »

mayank wrote: post #311
mmmBacon wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes, you’re paying for a ton of stuff there that you probably don’t use This is the antithesis of any cloud. You only pay for what you use. > At $5B it would not cost anywhere near that much to replicate. If you can recreate GCP for $5B in capex, there are likely some VCs lurking here who would like a word with you.

Sorry but that’s not correct. Have you ever looked at the economics of cloud compute at that scale? You absolutely are paying for a lot of tooling that’s irrelevant to your use case. This is because GCP has to be a general provider. They have to offer the broadest possible solution to capture as much share as possible. This means there are money losing services (also low margin) that are offered to provide a complete end-to-end solution. However, the fact that those services exist means that the cost has to be made up for elsewhere. These economics are not some complicated rocket science and exist in many other types of businesses.

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

#323

Post by legionof7 »

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…

Ooh completely unrelated to the thread but thanks for offering my friends and I countless hours of fun during our middle school years!

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

#324

Post by kelnos »

dahfizz wrote: post #274
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost. If all you need is a lit…

Not sure that's universally true. We have probably tens of thousands of EC2 instances in our infra right now. Just the cost alone to build out on-prem infra and migrate things over would likely wipe out a half-decade or more of cost savings. And in the meantime our shift in focus would hurt our market position.

If we'd started in the beginning (11 or 12 years ago) with our own infra, I imagine our recurring infra costs would be lower right now, but I also suspect that our 3-person founding team would have failed to produce an MVP before their initial time and money ran out.

If I were starting a company now, I'd probably do things in a more "platform agnostic" way such that a cloud->on-prem migration might be easier. But I still never expect it'd be easy.

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

#325

Post by sidibe »

jedberg wrote: post #289
enneff wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not at all. It was so “not core” that it was outsourced. The core of their business is recommendations, encoding, and authentication. All of those are done 100% on the cloud.

Sure but probably 99% of the

> 30% of all internet traffic.

is outside of the cloud.

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

#329

Post by jaboutboul »

There is not one clear cut answer on this. It depends on what your company values, i.e. cost vs. agility. If you are using the cloud for what it was meant for availability, scalability, elasticity--and those are the things that your org values--its the right fit for you. If on the other hand you value cost then it clearly isn't the right fit.

One other point I'll make, the true value of cloud isn't in IaaS, renting VMs from anyone is relatively expensive compared to the costs of buying a server and maintaining it yourself for a number of years. The true value of the cloud is when can architect your solution to utilize the various services the cloud providers offer, RDS/DynamoDB, CDN, Lambda, API Gateway, etc. so that you can scale quickly when you need to.

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

#330

Post by reilly3000 »

I’ve been studying like a fiend to get AWS certs and thoroughly understand the cloud value proposition, especially for ephemeral workloads and compliance needs. I’m all for cloud solutions that make sense and love when serverless/usage-only systems can’t be deployed. That said, I recently started work on a friend’s system that he has had running in colo for a long time. It’s absolutely insane how long his systems have been up. There are processes that have been alive since 2015, with some hosts having uptime linger than that. He’s got a nice HA configuration but hasn’t had any incidents that have triggered failover. He recently built a rack for his home with 384gb ram and gobs of cpu across 3 nodes, with rack, nice switch and UPS for just shy of $2500 ( he is quite the bargain hunter... ). I did some quick math and found a similarly equipped cluster (of just VMs, not dedicated hosts) has a 1.1 month break-even with on-demand costs, no bandwidth considered. Sure, maybe a 1 year reservation could make it a 2-3 month break even instead, but why? Those machines can easily give him 3-5 years of performance without paying another dime.

If you can feasibly run workloads onpremise or colo and have a warm failover to AWS you could probably have the best of all worlds.

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