"Server" is such a broad term. In our case, aside from cost as others already mentioned, the distance and latency is very important. The servers must be located as close to client devices as possible and reasonable, and they are synced with clients using PTP to microseconds (depends on the actual distance and topology). Cloud is a no go, and we a using bare metal K8S for graceful handling of failures and updates.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
581–590 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also another answer... I work for a CDN, so we can't really use the cloud when in many ways we ARE the cloud. Although we do often make jokes about "what if we just move the CDN to AWS?"
It is a pity East Dakota won’t make jokes like these. Can you imagine cloudflare running on aws? What happens when someone tries to denial of service them while on aws? On a different note, Netflix still runs “on the cloud”, right? I mean what does it really mean? Dropbox can still have most of its stuff on aws and do the expensive part on premises if cost is a concern? The truly bizarre stuff happens at hybrid cloud…
Netflix runs it's own bandwidth/cdn. Sometimes it actually has a pop/box INSIDE your ISP https://openconnect.netflix.com/.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#583Becuse we don't trust a foreign cloud provider with our client's data. Why is that so hard to understand? All the best cloud providers are from the US and as a european company with clients in european government and healthcare we are often not morally or legally allowed to use a foreign provider. The sad thing is that this is an ongoing battle between people on a municipal level who believe they can save money in cl…
What about the existing/upcoming technologies of let you use the cloud without trusting it?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 42U rack might be only $1400 per month but the servers to put inside are $5000 upfront per U.
42U times $5000 divided by 3 years is still only $5833 per month per rack. Add the $1400 and we have a total amortized rack cost of $7233 per month. (naively assuming you could fill every spot in the rack with servers). But servers can't be included in a "Uber spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters" figure anyway.
The rack is $2800 per month, not $1400. The lowest advertised pricing does not include enough power to supply half of what's in the rack.
Add $200 per server per month to have a gigabit uplink.
Add $4000 per server per lifetime for VmWare licenses.
These are reasonable estimates of course. Could be multiple of that depending on what hardware is used and what colo. Physical hardware easily gets as expensive as any cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you forgot to include cost of engineers in this calculation.
Engineers cost $130,000/month? Thats a fulltime salary for 14 network engineers (salary from Indeed). There is no way you need that many for maintaining a fleet of 50 CPUs (chance is that in OPs case they got duel socket servers as well).
On the other hand, you also need to pay engineers, and rather senior ones, to monitor and upgrade cloud solutions.
They are just less visible: typically an extra duty for "devops" programmers and project managers rather than dedicated server farm staff.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and…
I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but…
You wouldn't run your own datacenter, you would colocate. Even if that's not possible, you can still rent servers for significantly cheaper than cloud offerings.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#587CEO of an AI startup & former AWS employee here. The cloud sucks for training AI models. It's just insanely overpriced in a way that no "Total Cost of Ownership" analysis is going make look good. Every decent AI startup––including OpenAI––has made significant investments in on-premise GPU clusters for training models. You can buy consumer-grade NVIDIA hardware for a fraction of the price that AWS pays for data center…
Are TPUs too application specific to replace GPUs? It seems cloud TPUs could be competitive with GPUs in terms of $ per number of target epochs, provided you can do data parallelism for your workloads.
Also, IBM offers bare metal pricing which is somewhat cheaper than virtualized instances attached to GPUs (and faster too).
I think GPU virtualization is not quite there yet because Nvidia does not give access to core GPU functionality needed for efficient virtualization - you're stuck with using their closed-source libraries and drivers.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#588A job or two ago:
Everything on-site for a couple reasons (50 servers). Mainly because as a manufacturing company, machines on the shop floor need to talk to the servers. This brings up issues of security (do you really wan to put a 15 year old CNC machine 'on the internet'?). Also, if our internet connection has issues, we still need to build parts.
The other big part of it is the mindset of management and the existing system, which was built to run locally, does Amazon offer cloud hosted Access and Visual Basic workers?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#589You'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…
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Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#590You'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…
We use a public cloud, and believe me: we do consider the security implications. We veeery much do.