Yes. Cost of GPUs if you want them on regularly and reliably, and you don't need 2000 of them. We run small/mid-sized operations on-demand and the latency of spinning up instances is not competitive and the cost is outrageous to have them on standby.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
371–380 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't mean to sound daft, just clarifying my own understanding, but isn't Dropbox eventually consistent (as a system)?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is accurate in my experience. Also keeping things up and being there in case shit hits the fan is a full-time job. You can't write features and also manage servers equally well. Unless you have no life I guess.
Totally. I've had personal colo'd servers for 20 years at this point. But I'm tired of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up and haul my ass down to San Jose to swear at some piece of failing gear. I'm excitedly moving it all into the cloud.
How far are you from you collocation? Is moving that closer an option?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Like cable TV.
That's not a perfect analogy but it's easy enough for laymen to understand so I'm stealing it.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo
Certainly nothing powerful :-) I can get away with t3.nano and t3.micro for what I'm doing at the moment. But the beauty of cloud, is that I can scale up when I eventually need it.
5x t3.nano will be ~$25/mo 5x t3.micro will be ~$50/mo
All of my AMIs are EBS optimized and require a minimum of 8GB for the root drive (Although they only use ~1.6GB. Not bothering to hack around this to save a buck.) So that'll be 40GB EBS block storage. Plus I want ~20GB spread across 3 of the machines.
So EBS should be ~$6/mo.
I only need the volumes of those last 3, the others are good to go with their base AMI or user-data init script. So I only need snapshot backups of ~20GB. Being priced incrementally and having minimal changes, I'll only be charged ~$1/mo for that + off-site another $1/mo
So, currently experimenting with the t3.nano - Cost is ~$36/mo. One of these servers will be used as a personal VPN, and I expect ~75GB/mo coming from my laptop. So bandwidth charges at $9/mo.
Total $45/mo - For what I have planned now, at least.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo
If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing
Thanks! Aware of Lightsail - But I'm experienced with AWS so have no trouble with, and prefer, the full feature set. I would've gone with Digital Ocean, otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally. I've had personal colo'd servers for 20 years at this point. But I'm tired of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up and haul my ass down to San Jose to swear at some piece of failing gear. I'm excitedly moving it all into the cloud.
How far are you from you collocation? Is moving that closer an option?
Colocation in SF proper is very spendy, which is how we ended up in San Jose. But waking up to go anywhere at 3 am to swear at gear is no longer on my list of fun activities. And there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#378on-premises not on-premise
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#379Many organizations do have private clouds. If by cloud you mean a public cloud like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, then forget about it; not with these companies piping data directly to U.S intelligence.
What's the difference between private cloud and on prem? Does it just mean you let everyone spin up VMs etc rather than requiring them to go through IT?
> What's the difference between private cloud and on prem?
Cloud and on-premises are not mutually exclusive, as many "bits I push to the cloud" get on-premises of a ponytailed guy named John. We focus on what people mean[^1], not what they say. Some even make a living saying "chemical-free"[^2] or "digital marketing" publicly.
> Does it just mean you let everyone spin up VMs etc rather than requiring them to go through IT?
This is the on-demand, self-service aspect. What the users get as a result of their demand depends on the need you're trying to fulfill and defines (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.). Do you want them to be able to interact with an application, deploy/run applications, or get a VM? Here's a resource that summarizes it[^3] and the Wikipedia page gives an overview[^4].
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_free
[^3]: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/cloud-computing/iaas-vs-paa...
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#380Like 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…
[offtopic] Awesome seeing you here! I used to be super active on Hypixel when I was in high school (I was actually #1 on the leaderboards for one of the games for over a year). One of my first large scale programming projects ever was creating a Hypixel mod for my guild. Years later I am now a software engineer working at Google on the YouTube algorithm!
I'll chime in and say hello as well! Great seeing Hypixel staying on top after all these years!