You've been managing servers for quite some time but you've never considered the security implications of hosting all of your sensitive data on someone else's computer? You say you're not trolling but I genuinely don't see how those two facts are compatible, except if you work in an industry where the data just doesn't matter. If that were the case though, you shouldn't feel compelled to judge what banking or medical institutions are doing.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
561–570 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Thanks, glad you like it. I use Mozilla's pdf.js. It's super simple to implement, just load it in an iframe with the path to the PDF file in an URL parameter. Et voilà, a PDF viewer.
Comparing with Filecoin is hard because there's not much information available about it. The rollout keeps getting delayed too. I know that the founder of Sia has criticized Filecoin's whitepaper a few times because it contains unsolved problems which could cause significant issues during the rollout of the network. Sia took a more conservative approach and worked out all the math before the development of the network started in 2015. Now, 5 years later, Sia has solved all the fundamental issues with the protocols and such and are working on upgrading the performance and building apps on top of Sia's core protocols. In terms of development Sia is about 3 years ahead of Filecoin.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do you need what they're cutting? They're cutting overhead and getting better deals on hardware than you could ever get. Their efficiency is their profit margin.
> Their efficiency is their profit margin. Last time I checked, AWS had a profit margin in the 40%-50% ballpark. Sorry, but the semiconductor industry doesn't operate with any kind of markup that would allow such profit margins from "getting better deals on hardware". The only one able to make that kind of profit used to be Intel on high-end server CPUs, and even they are now pressured by AMD and custom ARM silicon o…
> that would allow such profit margins
The percentages don't quite hit that amount of discount, but they are much much higher than (I at least) expected.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#564Earlier 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…
If one could come up with an estimate of how many hours per year it would cost to maintain (plus initially setup cost), and multiple that by $75/hr (a reasonable rate for a good engineer), then you could estimate how much it all costs. I'd wager a guess that a properly-configured server won't actually cost that much to maintain. Unless you're frequently updating the OS and other stuff - but that's a software issue. I…
In quarantine, I’m doing exactly that, fooling about at home with old enterprise gear you can buy seemingly by the pound on EBay now. It’s super fun and I somewhat enjoy getting all the power management right, all the networking setup, and ultimately running Proxmox and a bunch of small containers and VMs for things like Minecraft servers and file storage.
In my day job and my side projects, I’m 100% paying for AWS for 99% of our workloads. I choose to let Amazon deal with all the staff issues and all the other, to use their words, undifferentiated heavy lifting.
There’s some scale point at which you have to ask the question whether you ought to be in the cloud, but IMO if you think a cloud provider is only 50% more than you could DIY, you should probably be in the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#565Yes. Why? Cost, availability, flexibility, bandwidth. For a lot of companies, on-prem servers are the best solution for efficiency and cost. One great example. We were paying $45k/yr for a hosted MS Dynamics GP solution. For $26k we brought it in house with only a $4k/yr maintenance fee. We bought a rackmount Dell, put on VMWare, have an app VM and a DB VM. My team can handle basic maintenance. In the past 11 months…
> The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do you need what they're cutting? They're cutting overhead and getting better deals on hardware than you could ever get. Their efficiency is their profit margin.
> Their efficiency is their profit margin.
Then why does outbound bandwidth cost so much more with AWS than smaller providers?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#566I'm a solo founder who's bootstrapped a saas that's in one state. I'd started out with the cloud then moved to a private cloud in a colocated data center. Saved more than 80% in monthly costs. Got faster speeds, better reliability and a ton of extra compute and network capacity. I just bought used servers from eBay that are retired from big corps. Nothing significant has really changed in the last five years on compute so I'll happily take their depreciated assets :)
__Modern__ servers are really awesome and I totally recommend them. You can do a ton remotely.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#567Earlier 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.
How do you do kernel updates without a reboot?
I've looked several times and found different technologies over time (kexec, (Oracle's) ksplice, kGraft, kpatch, livepatch). They do appear to have some use-cases, e.g. delaying the need for a reboot by being able to install a critical vulnerability fix/workaround so that the reboot can be done at a more convenient time. Because many of the patch mechanisms are function-based, they don't appear to solve the general problem in such a way that reboots can be avoided all together for arbitrary large kernel changes. From my reading of the solutions none are at the level of unattended upgrades using apt/yum-cron or similar in a way that "most" can benefit from them without worrying too much about it (ksplice might do it, but not sure how much you need to pay for it for server use and therefore how accessible it is). kexec helps with skipping the bootloader/BIOS, but I'm not sure if it ends up restaring all the systemd services or going up/down the runlevels, some places suggest it reduces downtime but doesn't eliminate it. I've not experimented with any of these myself yet... so I'd be happy to be proven wrong and in any case learn more!
References:
- http://jensd.be/651/linux/linux-live-kernel-patching-with-kp...
- https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_live_patching
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kexec
EDIT: forgot to mention livepatch
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
We actually just get a datacenter blend, but I _believe_ they've got us cordoned off on our own dedicated 40gbps Level3 (now Centurylink) line to prevent us getting attacked from harming other customers. It's not so much about which provider you go to, it's more just about the economies of scale. Our entire fleet exists in one physical DC location due to the requirements of Minecraft's netcode, so rather than having…
What do you do about backups? I saw you only have one DC, are you worried about that DC being flooded etc and losing all your data?
Offsite AWS Glacier backups, as well as a warm redundancy in another DC.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#569Like 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…
Netflix does not push their videos streams out of AWS (because that would be stratospherically unaffordable for them). They run their apps and systems on the cloud (search and preferences), but the video bits come from Netflix racks distributed to a variety of DCs and ISPs.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#570We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS ha…
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.
Counterpoint: The OP is saying they spend 1 day a month managing servers. It's ridiculously little. The servers might as well be unmanaged.
That's not enough time to keep OS or software up to date, or to monitor hardware usage, or to replace failing hardware and deal with spare parts.