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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?

#611

Post by karatestomp »

tebbers wrote: post #464
mmmBacon wrote: post #276

Earlier 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 remember saying to my cofounder why does anyone use AWS, you can do this on your own way cheaper. I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable. Along the lines of buying an expensive sports car but never drivin…

> I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable.

It's a sane choice given incentives, too. Cloud bullshit features prominently on an awful lot of technical job postings these days.

But yeah I've definitely seen some heavy, expensive cloud setups that could have run on a toaster. Smaller-scale B2B stuff seems especially prone to this—like, what's your max reasonable traffic? If you took off like crazy? What's the size of your market? Come on. Throw in really half-assed and inconsistent use of automation tools and lots of relying on shitty cloud web dashboards and hope, and often the toaster (or a couple low-end co-located servers, more seriously) would be easier and safer to manage, too.

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

#612

Post by pachico »

It depends on what you have to do. If your stack includes a series of microservices/monoliths connected to the typical OLTP DB then you might very well sit entirely on cloud. Things change when you need heavy lifting like having big ElasticSearch or ClickHouse clusters, or any other operation that requires heavy CPU and high RAM capacity. In that case using providers like Hetzner can cost you 1/10 of the bill compared to AWS.

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

#613

Post by shaklee3 »

jhrmnn wrote: post #543
shaklee3 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We're talking about a few hundred nanoseconds usually. If that matters, then IB is still better.

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

#614

Post by thotypous »

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…

This is really interesting!

How does Sia prevent hosts from precomputing the checksums to fake they are behaving but erasing the data itself? Does it checksum over random ranges of data?

Which source does it use for entropy so that the network remains distributed but nodes can't predict the ranges? Does it use the last block nonce?

Which checksum algorithm does it use? Is care taken as to not be vulnerable to prepend or append attacks from hosts who intend to host data partially whilst pretending they are hosting full data?

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

#615

Post by Scaevus »

For our case, the need is very specific as we are working with mobile apps.

Building iOS apps require macOS and even though there are some well-known "Mac hosting" services, none of them are actual cloud services similar DigitalOcean, Azure, AWS, etc.

So it is much less expensive and actually easier to scale and configure to host the Macs onprem.

(Off the record: If it is for internal use only, you can even stick in a few hackintoshes for high performance.)

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

#616

Post by troupe »

Accujack wrote: post #602
ATsch wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe you are saying that some countries don't have data centers where you can co-locate. Most of the places where AWS has a datacenter have other datacenter companies that offer co-location.

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

#617

Post by igrekel »

twic wrote: post #534
machiaweliczny wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you forgot to include cost of engineers in this calculation.

An iron rule of these discussions is that when someone objects to non-cloud solutions on the grounds of staff costs, they have not actually calculated the staff costs.

I know currently our problem is finding proper staff and that is why we are considering moving to a cloud provider. Especially for database hosting, using a database as a service becomes very attractive from a staffing perspective just because we can't seem to find good candidates and we've been training younger people into being DBAs but they ultimately want to do something else after a while.

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

#618

Post by kuschku »

Accujack wrote: post #602
ATsch wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can rent an AWS server, you can also rent a Hetzner server, or put some servers in a Hetzner DC.

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

#620

Post by StreamBright »

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…

This is one of the valid use cases of on-prem, predictable high network bandwidth workload. This is the exception though. An average company has the exact opposite. Non-predictable, low bandwidth workloads that are different (like data warehouse vs. website).
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