Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 782 posts

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

#601

Post by debian3 »

AgentK20 wrote: post #538
winter_blue wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's definitely something we're keeping our eye on. The challenge with that is that because Threadripper is so new, it's only just now beginning to be supported on server motherboards. In a few years we're hoping that there'll be enough competition in the AMD Ryzen motherboard market that we can get comparable pricing to what we're getting now for cheap Intel boards.

You should check Hetzner AX series. Even their cheap (39 euro with ecc) ryzen 5 3600 give us 4 times the performance than our E3 1245 cpu.

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

#602

Post by Accujack »

ATsch wrote: post #586
adim86 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow... really a first world perspective here.

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

#603

Post by hn_check »

mnky9800n wrote: post #550
localhost wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is remarkable.

The "YouTube algorithm" is responsible for Donald Trump's ascension, Pizzagate, the belief that 5G towers cause Coronavirus, anti-vaccers, and on and on. It has been the most destructive force in the modern era.

Personally I find it unbelievably stupid -- the videos it presents to me are just a terrible collection of trash, and if I happen to watch one video about someone shooting arrows, suddenly YouTube thinks I am an extreme bow and arrow aficionado.

This post will be auto-flagged given that dang prefers to run an AGW-denial website that spends far too much time apologizing and appeasing the US president.

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

#605

Post by koheripbal »

saltking112 wrote: post #399
koheripbal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - CTO of medium sized company. Our IT infra costs are 1/10th the cost of cloud, simply because I happen to be comfortable having on-premise machine and working on them (sometime myself). We have two dozen servers in two locations. It's more time to setup, but maintenance is actually quite low.

Is this the all in cost? Including lease on land/building, staff, electricity etc...

Yes. Electricity is cheap and it's housed in an existing office(s).

The real cost is IT talent and time. I happen to have homelab experience with HP servers, so (for us) those costs are extremely low.

It's honestly not as complex or costly as cloud providers make it sound.

Replication offsite is easy via s2s vpn and veeam - as is spinning up new VMs for dev or testing. Building already has good a/c and backup power, and hardware/drive failures are rare.

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

#606

Post by woofcat »

saltking112 wrote: post #399
koheripbal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - CTO of medium sized company. Our IT infra costs are 1/10th the cost of cloud, simply because I happen to be comfortable having on-premise machine and working on them (sometime myself). We have two dozen servers in two locations. It's more time to setup, but maintenance is actually quite low.

Is this the all in cost? Including lease on land/building, staff, electricity etc...

It's likely colocation, getting to the physically building data-centers size is another size up.

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

#607

Post by neeraga »

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…

Which dedicated infra host did you use?

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

#608

Post by marvinblum »

As most have mentioned already: cost

We started out with Emvi [1] on Kubernetes at Google Cloud as it was the "fancy thing to use". I like Kubernetes, but we paid about 250€/month just to run some web servers and two REST APIs. Which is way too much considering that we're still working on the product and pivoting right now, so we don't have a lot of traffic.

We then moved on to use a different cloud provider (Hetzner) and host Kubernetes on VMs. Our costs went down to about 50€ just because of that. And after I got tired managing Kubernetes and all the complexity that comes along with it, we now just use a docker-compose on a single (more powerful) VM, which reduced our cost even futher to about 20€/month and _increased_ performance, as we have less networking overhead.

My recommendation is to start out as simple as possible. Probably just a single server, but keep scaling in mind while developing the system. We can still easily scale Emvi on different hardware and move it around as we like. We still use Google Cloud for backups (together with Hetzners own backup system).

[1] https://emvi.com/

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

#609

Post by neeraga »

fxtentacle wrote: post #425
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…

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.

Do you use any external dedicated host?

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

#610

Post by PreciousCarrot »

twic wrote: post #528
kortilla wrote: post #514

Earlier 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…

> 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's interesting that competent engineers is only a question about cost to you. Where I am at (north of Europe) it's really hard to find good engineers. Even though it doesn't mean much about competence it's not mandatory for people in the IT industry to have a CS degree even if they're managing infrastructure in the cloud for millions every year.

I've been working in the industry at different companies for a bit over 10 years and I would say that a huge majority is just an average person who knows basic concepts about infrastructure but wouldn't be able to design and implement any of it by their own. This includes network infrastructure for the biggest ISPs in the country.

I work as a system engineer and the teams I've been working with the last 5 years, independent of company, have been looking for engineers constantly. The pay well and have great benefits but it's just not enough people out there to take these jobs and manage a full on-prem infrastructure.

So a part of the money you're talking about that should be used to hire all these really competent people are instead used to pay for cloud services where we know that professional people with far more hardware (and software) knowledge is managing the infrastructure. And this is really convenient for a lot of companies.

Post reply on HN