Like many said, cost.
But also - legalities. Most cloud providers have very unclear rules and what exactly happen should you be in breach. For this reason, our business prefers to have most of the control.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
481–490 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
S3 is immediately consistent for new objects unless the service received a GET on the object before it was created. It's easy to use this to make an immediately consistent system.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#483Earlier 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 cloud providers' main advantage when you're unicorn scale is their engineering team acts as an extension of yours. We regularly hop on calls with AWS to scope out features for them to build for us. Our parent org can pretty much snap their fingers and Google will dispatch their engineers to fix/build whatever they wanted.
That and very preferential pricing.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#484Cloud costs way way more compared to on-prem solution for my company.
We need random access to about 50TB of files, and quite a decent number of VMs.
For storage on-perm vs cloud: buy was cheaper to have after 3(!) months.
For VMs(some of them could be containerized though): 1 year
It was cheaper to buy second-hand decent server, slap SSDs and just install a decent hypervisor. Those costs also include: server room, power usage, admins etc.
We do use cloud backups for the most important stuff.
Cloud is cheaper if your business is a something that is user-based - as in you might need to scale it, hard.
If you aren't doing anything like that it is absurdly expensive.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#485Like 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…
Sorry, but what is LTO in this context? Google turns up Link Time Optimization and Legal Tribune Online and both seem not quite right....
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#486Like 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…
> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic I would say also, the cloud is cheap if you can shut down or scale-down services when you need it. IMHO if you ow your software stack, you can use the cloud to rationalize your spending (for instance, Netflix changed their default codec some weeks ago which made them save a lot of monet in egress bandwith)... but nobody can do this. If your company runs prepac…
> Some vendors are even offering hardware as Opex in a pay-as-you-go seting to compete against the cloud.
Isn't that how IBM ran their mainframe business 50 years ago? The more things change...
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#487University research group here. Simply, _cost_ Our compute servers crunch numbers and data at > 80% util. Our servers are optimized for the work we have. They run 24/7 picking jobs from queue. Cloud burst is often irrelevant here. They deal with Terabytes or even Petabytes of moving data. I’d cry paying for bandwidth costs if charged €/GB. Sysadmin(yours truly) would be needed even if it were to be run in the cloud.…
In germany it's a pretty common think for universities to have some servers for themself. 1. Their use case is kinda different. The servers mostly run heavy CS research related stuff. E.g. they might have heavy CPU load and heavy traffic between they servers but they have less often heavy traffic to the "normal internet" (if they have heavy traffic to the outside it's normally to other research institutes which not s…
UCSD here. The CS department building has a large room off in the back filled with cages where we rack up our own machines. There's an internal process by which you can request VM allocations, which ultimately also run on top of a set of on-prem servers. So we have both bare metal and a kind of mini managed cloud to work with, without having to go through purchasing approval just to run a fuzzer or do a web crawl.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#488I notice all the banks I'm working for are moving to the cloud. A few years ago they all had their own data centers, sometimes really big, well-designed custom data centers. But they're all moving to the cloud now.
I've personally been wondering whether that's wise, because financial data and the handling of many banking processes are a bank's core business. It makes sense that a bank should be in control of that. And it needs to obey tons of strict banking data regulations. But apparently modern cloud services are able to provide all of that.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.
There has also been an incredible propaganda campaign by the cloud providers to make this seem incredibly hard.
Agreed, it's just become part of the group think of our times.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.
There has also been an incredible propaganda campaign by the cloud providers to make this seem incredibly hard.
The only hard part is finding a provider who won't screw you over. But then again this is the same as if you are to buy a car.
You buy rack space, they give you a network cable and IP details. You configure the OS with that IP and your online.