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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?

#541

Post by twic »

eb0la wrote: post #421
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…

> 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…

> 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.

Netflix's content serving is done from physical hardware they own and place in datacentres. I don't understand your point.

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

#542

Post by Conan_Kudo »

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.

This is totally possible on CentOS. Up to CentOS 7, yum-cron lets you do this. With CentOS 8, this has been replaced with dnf-automatic, which offers a lot more flexibility on how to configure automatic updates.

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

#543

Post by jhrmnn »

shaklee3 wrote: post #394
zozbot234 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. It's weird that these networking technologies are not used more in "plain" datacentre settings, since networking latency and throughput has to be a significant challenge to scaling up non-trivial workloads and achieving true datacentre-scale computing. We hear a lot about how to "scale out"…

Those technologies, or mostly IB, were more important when Ethernet speeds lagged behind. IB was first to 100G. Now that Ethernet has caught up, IB has almost no advantage besides a tiny latency decrease. Even mellanox makes more Ethernet than IB products now.

I thought process-to-process, Ethernet has still several times larger latency than IB?

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

#544

Post by twic »

hexaga wrote: post #231
eyegor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, most workloads aren't so compute intense that cpu interconnect speed would have a huge impact. The vast majority of rented computer tasks will be for things that need to communicate with external services (payments, region synchronizing, general api state comms, etc). In these cases, I doubt that your code is tuned tightly enough to reveal interconnect latency (as opposed to cache misses and swaps). Besides, hoo…

Infiniband and friends aren't cpu interconnects, they're alternatives to ethernet. Network latency is important and it's not that hard to write code whose performance is bounded by io latency/throughput.

> it's not that hard to write code whose performance is bounded by io latency/throughput

I suspect that most people don't, though. How many applications are built in Ruby, Python, or PHP, using some very productive but inefficient framework? Those are all very fine tools in their own way, and are the right tool for the job in many contexts. But they're unlikely to saturate IO.

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

#545

Post by alkonaut »

What do you mean by "servers"? Anything that isn't a client machine, or just customer-facing infra?

We have a pool of 15 build servers for our CI. They run basically 100% cpu during office hours and tranffer terabytes of data every day. They have no real requirements for backup, reliability etc, but they need to be fast. If I run a pricing calculator for hosting those in the cloud it's ridiculous. We are moving source and CI to cloud, but we'll probably keep all the build machines on-prem for the foreseeable future.

For customer facing servers the calculation is completely different. More traffic means more business. Reliability, Scalability and backup is important and so on.

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

#546

Post by pmlnr »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #237
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…

> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic Or if you're just constantly iterating on a large product with many engineers. Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs and so making them productive is cost effective. Things like SNS/SQS/S3/VPC/ELB/etc. save you countless hours and often make up for the increased cloud costs with increased developer productivity.

Riiight, because you don't need people to keep the cloud stuff configured and working /s

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

#547

Post by pmlnr »

wooly_bully wrote: post #172
dahfizz wrote: post #126

Earlier 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.

In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.

Learn it. Just like a new framework.

It's really not that hard.

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

#548

Post by swyx »

Fornax96 wrote: post #507
swyx wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

awesome :) i was able to upload a big file and immediately share it and view it in browser! very nice! what pdf viewer component did you use? i also like the pastebin functionality.

im sure you hear this a lot but... has anyone done a heads up comparison with filecoin?

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

#550

Post by mnky9800n »

localhost wrote: post #332
MCthrowaway12 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[offtopic] Awesome seeing you here! I used to be super active on Hypixel when I was in high school (I was actually #1 on the leaderboards for one of the games for over a year). One of my first large scale programming projects ever was creating a Hypixel mod for my guild. Years later I am now a software engineer working at Google on the YouTube algorithm!

Since we're OT anyway, thank you for all the work you do on the YouTube algorithm. It has brought a tremendous amount of value into my life!

people like the youtube algorithm?
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