Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber 10-K has operating lease payments in 2019 of $196M and in 2020 of $216M. That's not all data centers but a lot of it is data centers.
Why would you assume that? SF office space goes for way more than data center space.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
531–540 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cloud? Automatically updating operating systems. On-prem? Must be stuck on an old version.
Microservices? You can release to production in minutes. Monolith? Must take you weeks to get a release out.
Go? Simple self-contained deployables. Java? Must need a JDK and Tomcat installed on the server.
It always seem to come up when the leading term is something dubious (cloud, microservices, Go), but the following term is something unequivocally good. Or maybe that's just when i notice it.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting. Over time, buying things yourself will always win out on cloud architecture, or the cloud business would be bankrupt.
It would be theoretically possible for cloud providers, specializing in what they do, to gain from economies of scale of various sorts (having their own large purpose-built datacenters, needing less total redundant equipment to have the same replacement speed, having local servers in all parts of the world, being able to use nighttime idle cycles in servers in one part of the world for daytime customers on the other…
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting. Over time, buying things yourself will always win out on cloud architecture, or the cloud business would be bankrupt.
It would be theoretically possible for cloud providers, specializing in what they do, to gain from economies of scale of various sorts (having their own large purpose-built datacenters, needing less total redundant equipment to have the same replacement speed, having local servers in all parts of the world, being able to use nighttime idle cycles in servers in one part of the world for daytime customers on the other…
AWS's margin is 20-25% (eg [1]). Is AWS's cost of goods sold really 25% lower?
Admittedly this calculation is tricky, because it's not clear what to include. Does that figure for AWS's margin include R&D? Should it?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/10/17/ho...
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's not just CS. The computational chemistry and materials science crystallography folks can have jobs that run for days or weeks too.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost. If all you need is a lit…
That reads as fairly dismissive to me. Most people running serious gear have serious engineering payroll overhead. Sure, some folks are managing something fairly static like game servers, but many of us work for bigco with two dozen products and massive teams. Even with thousands of ec2 instances we continue to move our on-prem infrastructure to the cloud because developer productivity saves us big money in the long…
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
About 60 of those machines are custom L7 frontend load balancers, and an additional 40-50 are database and dev machines. As for the actual gameservers, that's about the numbers we expect on average (150/box), although it varies wildly by gametype. Simple games of Skywars or Murder Mystery with no AI and an ultra-slimmed-down world we can fit 300+ players per box and are CPU-bound. Housing or Skyblock servers with ful…
Thanks for the insightful comment. I saw you mentioned in another thread Minecraft performs better when the CPU has better single-threaded performance. I'm guessing, going forward into the future, you'd probably want to build machines with Zen 2 AMD Ryzen CPUs (or future Zen 3 Ryzens), like the Threadripper 3960X (which has a base clock of 3.8 GHz, 24 physical CPU cores, and costs ~$1200 — so $50 for each of those co…
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#539Why? Because our (German) clients don't thrust US cloud providers.