If your customers still want the system to run air-gapped from the internet, cloud is basically off the table.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
591–600 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#592There's a renewed interest in on-prem bare metal recently with a lot of different offerings helping to make various parts of the stack easier to manage.
Awesome bare metal is a new repo created by Alex Ellis that tracks a lot of the projects: https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal
Also we (Packet) just open sourced Tinkerbell, our bare metal provisioning engine: https://www.packet.com/blog/open-sourcing-tinkerbell/
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I wonder about Second Life, which is doing a "cloud uplift" to AWS. The parts of the system that are variable-load and web-like are already on AWS. But the region servers (one CPU for each 256m^2) are owned outright, and in a colo in Phoenix. They're obsolete machines. But they are compute bound, with a constant load 24/7. Even when no user is in a region, the simulated world continues to run. Uses a bit less CP…
>> Leaves fall from the trees, plants grow, animals graze, trains run, whether or not any human is watching. Well that solves the age old question about trees falling in forests :-)
That's a poorly implemented universe. Unless information propagates, it didn't happen ;-)
You could always fast forward the current state when the first external observer arrives. But I get there are time constraints - you can't just stop the real universe until it converges to a consensual state.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#594Like 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…
Thank you for all of the great times playing Sky Wars!
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
awesome. thanks for your generous replies!!
will spread the word about Sia and Pixeldrain when the topic comes up :)
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#596There is no cloud solution that lets you ship and forget a system.
Come in 15 years ? It still works. Is that possible with cloud even in short periods, like 2 years ? No.
Will it ever be possible? No.
Thats primary reason for me. I can use cloud only for stuff that are nice but not mandatory to have for service to work, like status page.
Plus, work is more enjoyable then using somebodies else stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.
There are three things that make sense to me. Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem. (It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirem…
I'm not super familiar with Heroku and similar platforms, but if I don't rent EC2s (which I take to mean what you meant by "VMs"), how do I host and serve bespoke backend components?
Even if all it does is suck data in, perform some computation, and send it off somewhere else - are you saying there are SAAS providers that are better equipped for this?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#598Yes just moved from 4 servers in AWS costing 700 usd/month to a single dedicated one that costs 40.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#599Most of my equipment has physical interfaces, video and audio in and out
Some equipment is very latency sensitive -- I'm talking microseconds, not milliseconds.
More generic tasks need easy access to that specialist equipment (much of which doesn't quite grasp the concept of security)
Given that we therefore have to run a secure network across hundreds of sites on multiple continents, adding a couple of machines running xen adds very little to the overhead.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#600Earlier 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.
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.
This is just not true. A properly set up system requires very little manual work. Updated, monitoring, and alerting are all automated.
I help manage ~50 on prem servers plus NAS, switches, etc. Over the past three years, I have had to replace one hard drive and one power supply. And neither of those brought anything down because of redundancy. We get alerts when something goes wrong, but that is a rare occurrence.
This is my original point: servers won't just explode the minute you look away. It is not a full time job to "manage" them, unless you are at a real datacenter scale where a 1/1000 event happens twice a day. You set them up and then they continue to do what they do for a very long time.