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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?

#431

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Animats wrote: post #343
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 CP…

>> Leaves fall from the trees, plants grow, animals graze, trains run, whether or not any human is watching.

Well that solves the age old question about trees falling in forests :-)

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

#432

Post by objclxt »

nemothekid wrote: post #305
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…

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 wo…

400M/yr was just Snap’s Google Cloud spend, they also signed a 1B deal with AWS for redundancy.

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

#433

Post by toyg »

kevindong wrote: post #306
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.

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.

The last point is something that “we”, as an industry, can often be blind to.

If your business is something that is fundamentally not “pushing bytes”, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, all the way to this week’s JS framework. All of that is a big annoyance, and paying AWS to “take care of it” makes sense, even if it comes at a higher price: more often than not, the difference wouldn’t be offset by the time, effort, and risk exposure that you would have to allocate when building your own.

This calculation is different if your business is primarily digital. The gentleman upthread making a game, for example, is perfectly right: his company naturally developed a culture that can evaluate and manage every aspect of its digital operations, because it’s part of its core business, so it makes sense to put that knowledge to good use and save money.

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

#434

Post by doctor_eval »

Lots of great insights here, which fully accord with my experience, even in the small end of town.

About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS. We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind of customers.

My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote came to $100K; the CEO freaked out. I asked him how much he spent on AWS?

The answer was that they spent $30K per month on AWS.

The kicker is that we managed 10x as many customers as they did, our devops team was half the size, and we were rolling out continuous deployment while they were still struggling to automated upgrades. Our deployment environment is also far less complicated than theirs because there isn't a complex infrastructure stack sitting in front of our deployment stack.

There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem deployment, and as far as I was able to tell before I quit, the only reason they used AWS was because everyone else was doing it.

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

#436

Post by llarsson »

dfsegoat wrote: post #372
llarsson wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Oh, sure, but when they think they have written something to S3 and got a successful HTTP response back from the API, perhaps they want to be able to tell clients to go fetch the new data from the bucket. But those clients may not get the new data then, due to eventual consistency.

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

#437

Post by adev_ »

I worked in Switzerland and a reason to use on premise here is Security

Many detail banks, asset management company or high security company refuse to use any public Cloud.

They want to have a strict and traceable list of people who have physical access to their hardware.

This in order to control any risk of dataleak [1].

In practice they use generally on-premise installation. They ren space in a computer center and own there a private cage monitored with multiple cameras. Meaning they know exactly anyone touching their hardware and enforce security clearance for them.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Leaks

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

#438

Post by smolder »

abathur wrote: post #385
cwojno wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a boss that pretty much demanded that we move to the cloud. I showed them the costs for the then 2 providers (GCP/AWS) and arrived at the exact same conclusion on server hosting alone, as bandwidth wasn't the main driver of our application. The rationale was that we'd save so much money by not having to manage the servers ourselves, but we honestly spent much, much more time in software deployments than…

To be clear, it took much more time to deploy your own software to the cloud relative to on-prem?

I interpreted it as: prior to moving to the cloud, server maintenance was not a very significant cost, so the justification for moving to the cloud was weak.

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

#439

Post by hinkley »

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 reduced costs by nearly 90% by throwing several of my old personal machines at the problem and hosting things myself.

This is what's pulling me back toward semi-static websites. Do most of the write traffic on premises and push the results to the cloud.

Only part of your application that needs to be always-on. If you treat the entire thing that way, it'll cost you. I've seen a couple of read-mostly applications that are so divorced from this fact that the paths that should be the cheapest are some of the most expensive, and the ones that happen at the speed of human interaction (eg, editing things) are fast. They are in effect backward and inside-out.

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

#440

Post by dragonwriter »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #333
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…

It sounds like you've got a good setup going with colo, but just as a way of illustrating some of the small providers lower bandwidth costs: DigitalOcean gives 3TB bandwidth on a $15 2CPU/2GBMEM/60GBSSD instance. If you ran 1350 of them it'd cost you ~$20k/month and get you your 4PB egress within bandwidth allowance.

> DigitalOcean gives 3TB bandwidth on a $15 2CPU/2GBMEM/60GBSSD instance.

DigitalOcean is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider, and that's pretty similar to pricing on the nearest comparable AWS service (Amazon LightSail), not something showing DO as notably better (1Core/2GBRAM/60GBSSD/3TB transfer @ $10/mo or 2Core/4GBRAM/80GBSSD/4TB transfer @ $20/mo.)

Though if you are optimizing price per TB of transfer quota, LightSail does best with the 1Core/1GB/40GBSSD/2TB transfer @ $5 instance size.

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