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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?

#501

Post by cmckn »

wbillingsley wrote: post #354
jmalicki wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has systems with up to 24TiB of RAM (u-24tb1.metal) [0], but the pricing is "call us". For almost 4TiB of RAM (x1e.32xlarge), it's about $28/hr [1] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/now-avail... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

For a researcher, that means running an experiment changes from "running the experiment" to six months of meetings with higher management establishing business cases, budget justifications, getting competitive quotes from different providers, etc. (in other words it just doesn't happen). The choice is not between "on premises" and "cloud", it's between "on premises" and "our glossy faculty brochure says you can do th…

This struck a nerve with me. I was a SWE at a company that moved to the cloud last year, after having a couple racks at a local colo previously. I was able to experiment and iterate so much faster when we owned hardware, despite all the cloud's elasticity. After we migrated, everything was request, wait, explain, request, wait...

I know some organizations handle this really well, but when mine didn't, it sucked to be a developer there.

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

#502

Post by [deleted] »

swyx wrote: post #494
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…

thanks for all the detailed info! i find this hard to square with the evidence that the Netflixes of the world still find it worthwhile to pay AWS then. theres no way that they dont have the same problems you do. care to speculate on why they prefer to pay a vendor? (it seems the Dropbox story is the exception that proves the rule)

[deleted]

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

#504

Post by machiaweliczny »

fxtentacle wrote: post #425
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…

Cost. We currently pay less than €5000 monthly for 500TB/month in traffic and 50 Ryzen CPUs. Amazon would be $30,000 traffic + $100,000 compute.

I think you forgot to include cost of engineers in this calculation.

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

#505

Post by llarsson »

tjbiddle wrote: post #375
tigerstripe wrote: post #334

Earlier 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

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 E…

And if you went with reserved instances, what does it come out to? I guess that it is fair to assume that you will need at least this level of compute power for at least a year, right?

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

#506

Post by ldng »

jedberg wrote: post #205
shockinglytrue wrote: post #165

Try running any service with an average egress exceeding 10 Mbit/s then tell me cloud still makes sense. By the time you reach 1 Gbit/s the very idea of it is enough to elicit a primitive biological defensive response. We don't do on-prem but we do make heavy use of colo. The thought of cloud growth and DC space consolidation some day pushing out traditional flat rate providers absolutely terrifies me. At some point…

Netflix runs on the cloud and does 30% of all internet traffic. That being said, 99% of that traffic is served from servers in colos now, but 10 years ago it was all served from CDN providers like Akamai, which is just a specialized cloud.

Do you really think Netflix get the standard billing prices ? I very much doubt so.

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

#507

Post by Fornax96 »

swyx wrote: post #495
Fornax96 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees This is exactly what Sia.tech is building for storage. A competitive marketplace for storage providers where anyone can set up a host and start selling their spare storage space. It's not completely finished yet, but it's pretty close. A bunc…

how much replication do you need to make this kind of thing reliable? since anyone can pull storage at any time. does that then make transactions super slow? any numbers you can put on this would be helpful. also, whats your product? (just curious)

Sia uses reed-solomon encoding to spread files over 30 hosts with a redundancy of 3x. So Any 20 hosts can fail at the same time and the files would still be available. This does mean that you need to upload all your data 3 times. Sia also needs to monitor your uploaded files all the time to make sure the hosts behave. This means hosts periodically run checksums on the stored data to prove to the client that the data is still there.

The team is currently working hard on performance upgrades. On regular consumer hardware you can currently upload / download data at a rate of about 500 Mbps. The next release is expected to improve this significantly.

Here's an introduction article which explains how Sia works with a bit more depth: https://support.sia.tech/article/dk91b0eibc-welcome-to-sia

My own product is a file sharing website: https://pixeldrain.com. It uses Sia to store large files because it's cheaper than conventional cloud storage. I plan to make it possible to download directly from Sia hosts as well so I can save on bandwidth costs too.

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

#510

Post by llarsson »

lozenge wrote: post #482
llarsson wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. HTTP POST (new objects) is immediate, HTTP PUT (updates to objects) is eventually consistent.

If you want to use this to create new objects all the time, rather than update ones you already have, you now have to keep track of which objects in your bucket are "old" and should no longer be there. But yes, totally doable.

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