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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?

#461

Post by [deleted] »

wheelerwj wrote: post #352
koheripbal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

24 servers, interesting. That seems like a small enough setup that I would definitely have left it in the cloud. Much more than that and i think it makes sense to start moving to physical servers. But 24 I would have guessed would be cheaper to maintain in EC2. Are you setup with one or two racks in each location and maybe one full time IT/Sys admin at each location?

[deleted]

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

#462

Post by awill88 »

tgamblin wrote: post #104

I work in Livermore Computing at LLNL. We manage upwards of 30 different compute clusters (many listed here: https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms ). You can read about the machine slated to hit the floor in 2022/2023 here: https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-capita... . All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. F…

I grew up across the street from the the Lab on (Cheryl Dr.). Now early 30s, I’m a AWS architect and software engineer at a finance company in Bozeman, Montana, but I would kill to be an engineer for pursuit of knowledge ya know? I dream of working there some day.. and I miss home

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

#463

Post by ayush--s »

llarsson wrote: post #349
RachelF wrote: post #340

Earlier 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.

They might have implemented a metadata store 1 layer before S3 to guarantee read after write consistency since write to a new object is consistent in S3. Only updates are eventually consistent.

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

#464

Post by tebbers »

mmmBacon wrote: post #276
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…

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…

> I remember saying to my cofounder why does anyone use AWS, you can do this on your own way cheaper.

I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable. Along the lines of buying an expensive sports car but never driving it fast, you're just paying for the kudos it brings you in the eyes of other people.

Having said that, we are happily using the cloud for our small app because it makes no sense to build out our own infrastructure for a single VPS and database.

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

#465

Post by throwaway6845 »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #82
throwaway6845 wrote: post #37

Mostly, headspace. If I run my own server, I just need to apply my existing Ubuntu sysadmin knowledge. If I use AWS, I have to learn a whole load of AWS-specific domain knowledge, starting with their utterly baffling product names. My time is more valuable than that. Also, sheer cost. Literally everyone I know in my particular part of the industry uses Hetzner boxes. For what I do, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper th…

That’s how you get old, when your time is more valuable than a massive shift in technology.

It's a common HN fallacy that everyone here is a developer whose main life aim is to remain employable as a developer.

Lots of us are here to ship stuff; to provide viable products that customers will like.

Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not help me ship stuff. Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not result in a better product.

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

wheelerwj wrote: post #352
koheripbal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

24 servers, interesting. That seems like a small enough setup that I would definitely have left it in the cloud. Much more than that and i think it makes sense to start moving to physical servers. But 24 I would have guessed would be cheaper to maintain in EC2. Are you setup with one or two racks in each location and maybe one full time IT/Sys admin at each location?

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by adreamingsoul »

Personally, I'd rather have capex than opex.

My observations from working with, and in the "cloud":

The "cloud" does benefit from it's scale in many ways. It has more engineers to improve, fix, watch, and page. It has more resources to handle spikes, whales, and demand. Almost everything is scale tested and the actual physical limits are known. It is damn right impressive to see what kind of traffic the cloud can handle.

Everything in the "cloud" is abstracted which increases complexity. Knowledgeable engineers are few and far between. As an engineer you assume something will break, and with every deployment you hope that you have the right metrics in place and alarms on the right metrics.

The "cloud" is best suited for whales. From special pricing to resource provisioning, they get the best. The rest is trickled down.

Most services are cost-centers. Very few can actually pay for the team and the cost of its dependencies.

It's insane how much VC money is spent building whatever the latest trend of application architecture is. Very few actually hit their utilization projections.

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

#468

Post by mrweasel »

mr_toad wrote: post #400
biztos wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so too, but it's not like a fleet of fine-tuned EC2 instances running CentOS 6.5 is going to be patched and rebooted regularly without a similar amount of sysadmin attention. (Not picking on CentOS, just using it as a placeholder for $REQUIRED_OS_BECAUSE_OF_CUSTOM_SOFTWARE.)

Automatic unattended updates are totally possible (I haven’t tried it in CentOS but it works fine on Ubuntu). Even kernel updates can now be done without a reboot. And with the proper setup even reboots can be automated.

But that's not limited to cloud, you can do that for on-premise stuff.

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

#469

Post by speleding »

wpietri wrote: post #377
mcny wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there's no colo that will move the gear along with me when I go on vacation

This is actually the main one for me. I've managed our own servers for a decade with almost zero downtime, and very little time spent at the colo. But you cannot safely go out of town without having someone else around who is familiar enough with your setup to deal with an outage.

So moving stuff to AWS now almost entirely for that reason.

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

#470

Post by drej »

Many of the stories here are from large companies, where the costs are quite a different beast. I want to offer an opposite view - from a small company (20-30 people), which is usually the kind of company best suited for the cloud.

We ran a number of modelling jobs, basically CPU intensive tasks that would run for minutes to hours. Investing in on-prem computers (mostly workstations, some servers), we got very solid performance, very predictable costs and no ops issues. Renting beefy machines in the cloud is very expensive and unless you get crafty (spot and/or intelligent deployment), it will be prohibitive for many. Looking at AMD's offering these days, you can get sustained on-prem perf for a few dollars.

Three details of note: 1) We didn't need bursty perf (very infrequently) - had this been a need, the cloud would make a lot more sense, at least in a hybrid deployment. 2) we didn't do much networking (I'm in a different company now and we work with a lot of storage on S3 and on-prem wouldn't be feasible for us), 3) we didn't need to work remotely much, it was all at the office.

Obviously, it was a very specific scenario, but given how small the company was, we couldn't afford people to manage the whole cloud deployment/security/scaling etc. and beefy workstations was a much simpler and more affordable endeavour.

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