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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?

#341

Post by gscott »

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…

I pay for one virtual private server instance. I used to colocate several machines but vps is just as good for smaller setups.

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

#342

Post by gen220 »

My SO’s brother works in the studio video recording industry, and is a very IT-savvy guy. We had a long discussion last holiday season about the state of cloud adoption in that industry. He told me (this is obviously secondhand) that most of the movie industry is not only off the cloud, but exclusively working in the realm of colocating humans and data (footage).

This is for many reasons. The one that comes back to me now is that the file sizes are HUGE, because resolution is very high, so bandwidth is a major concern. Editors and colorists need rapid feedback on their work, which demands beefy workstations connected directly with high bandwidth connections to the source files. Doing something like this over a long distance network (even if the storage was free) would be prohibitively expensive, and sometimes literally impossible.

So the write loads are basically the antithesis of what cloud optimized for: “random sequential reads of typical short length, big append only writes”. The big production houses (lucasarts famously) are also incredibly secretive about their source material, and like to use physical access as a proxy for digital access.

It leads to some seemingly strange (to me as a cloud SWE guy) decisions. He pretty much exclusively purchases top of the line equipment (hard drives/ssds), and keeps minimal if any backups for most projects because there simply isn’t any room. It’s a recipe for disastrous data loss, and apparently it’s something that happens quite often to this day. It’s just extremely prohibitively expensive to do version control for movie development.

I don’t know to what extent cloud technologies can solve for this domain. I asked him if Netflix was innovating in this area, since they’re so famously invested in AWS, but he said that they mostly contracted out the production stuff, and only managed the distribution, which makes sense. The contractors don’t touch the cloud at all, for the most part.

Again most of this is secondhand, I’d be curious to hear more details or reports from other people in the movie industry.

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

#343

Post by Animats »

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…

Yes. I wonder about Second Life, which is doing a "cloud uplift" to AWS. The parts of the system that are variable-load and web-like are already on AWS. But the region servers (one CPU for each 256m^2) are owned outright, and in a colo in Phoenix. They're obsolete machines. But they are compute bound, with a constant load 24/7. Even when no user is in a region, the simulated world continues to run. Uses a bit less CPU, but the physics engine is still doing 45 cycles every second, and all scripted objects are still running. Leaves fall from the trees, plants grow, animals graze, trains run, whether or not any human is watching.

They think AWS will be cheaper. I hope they are right, but have doubts. Fortunately, they're doing this slowly and carefully, and if it turns out that AWS is too expensive, they should be able to move back or to elsewhere. Since what they're doing isn't even close to what AWS normally does, they're not that tied to AWS features.

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

#344

Post by frogbox12 »

After a big cloud-first initiative, several managers left; leaving implantation to Linux sysadmins now in charge of cloud. Treated cloud as some colo facility, dump all apps in one big project/account, cloud costs spun quickly out-of-control and lots of problems with apps not being segregated from each other. Cloud declared 'too expensive' and 'too insecure', things migrated back on-prem, team now actively seeks to build and staff colo facilities with less than 10ms latency somewhere outside coastal California (Reno, Vegas, PHX) which just isn't gonna happen because physics.

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

#345

Post by _bxg1 »

mappu wrote: post #336
_bxg1 wrote: post #317

One of my favorite things (at least for personal projects) about using the cloud is so-called "platform as a service" systems like Heroku, where I don't have to get down in the weeds, I just push code and the process starts (or restarts). Is there something like that I could use on my own hardware? I just want to do a fresh Linux install, install this one package, and start pushing code from elsewhere, no other confi…

You're looking for Dokku Same git push deploys, heroku-compatible buildpacks or Dockerfiles, all on your own hardware, MIT license.

This looks perfect, thank you! I knew there was no way I could've been the first person to think of this

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

#346

Post by ablekh »

lmeyerov wrote: post #337
ablekh wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your feedback. My question above is not about the mechanics of deploying commercial scientific software (it certainly somewhat varies between fields and organizations, though common themes and methods are pretty standard). It is about the procurement processes within national labs ecosystem. That is, about governmental gating / filters "in front of" vendors' go-to-market strategy and processes (RFPs, pil…

We do visual GPU graph tech close to core national lab missions (sec, fraud, misinfo, genetics, social, ...) so are in a similar boat. While I love the folks doing related work at PNNL (and am inspired!), I also recognize, done wrong, we can be existentially threatening to internal groups building related things. Instead of aggressively persuing contracts and spending effort getting into nasty politics, we let the us…

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. If I understood you correctly (the text's meaning appears somewhat fuzzy), your go-to-market strategy is to first collaborate (and/or consult?) - perhaps, through your "PoCs and Rapid Prototyping" services - and then allow users to "pull" your capabilities and core service into their labs. Right?

Having said that, I haven't seen any science-focused channels, resources or offers on your website ...

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

#347

Post by jiggawatts »

snarfy wrote: post #83

The idea of the cloud is to only pay for what you use. Your on-premise server is idle 99% of the time so why are you paying for a full server? If that's not true, it turns out it's quite expensive to run things in the cloud. If your workload is crunching numbers 24/7 at 100% cpu, it's better to buy the cpu than to rent it.

> Your on-premise server is idle 99%

That's almost never true for any organisation big enough to start using virtualisation. Typical cluster utilisation levels that I have seen are 20-60%.

It starts to make sense to buy a small 5-node VMware cluster for orgs as small as 100 users, at which point the cloud becomes questionable.

I mean, sure, if you have less than 100 staff and it doesn't make sense to buy a cluster, use the cloud.

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

#348

Post by ocdtrekkie »

There are very few niches where the cloud makes sense: Namely, where you are either too small to benefit from a single server and a single entry-level IT guy (think three or four person companies with low need for technical competency), or where you are expecting rapid growth and can't really rationally size out your own hardware for the job (in this case, the cloud is useful initially, leave it later once your scale is more stable).

In every other case, you are paying for the same hardware you could buy yourself, plus the cloud provider's IT staff, plus your own IT staff which you likely need anyways to figure out how to deal with the cloud provider, and then the cloud provider's profit margin, which is sizeable.

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

#349

Post by llarsson »

RachelF wrote: post #340
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…

Dropbox did the same thing a few years back - moved everything from Amazon S3 to their own storage. My guess is they did it for cost reasons.

That S3 is eventually consistent with object updates (HTTP PUT) might also screw up things for a company whose core value is synchronized storage.

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

#350

Post by dkdk8283 »

koheripbal wrote: post #265
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.

> maintenance is actually quite low.

I do hope you regularly patch and reboot your systems.

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