Manufacturing plants across the world controlling production lines: no way to go in the cloud for that. We put the reporting data in the cloud, no problem there.
Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
651–660 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#652We 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.
Do you have any resources you could link that go through buying and setting up servers?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
what i have generally seen is that storage - blob (s3) or database - is the blocker. Even if you go to k8s, the hassle to manage storage is non-trivial. And because of this singular fact, startups cannot move to on-premise. You really dont want to manage snapshots, restores, backups. Anyone can manage application servers.
s3 (or similar) and managed database seem to be the most "commoditized" (and cheapest) pieces of the cloud services stack. So it seems reasonable to move everything else to cloud-agnostic/on prem while still leaving those pieces in the cloud.
how do you solve for egress traffic ? the traffic between the server and the database starts being the most expensive part of the stack
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#654Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#655Earlier 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.
The you co-locate to the first world. Or somewhere that can get a data center built with resources that you trust.
I ran data centers for a living in Northern VA and had all sorts of international clients. Egyptian schools who rented servers, Brazilian Protestant ministries who shipped servers to us, etc. There were some decent data centers in Mumbai we had to get VPNs built for, and we had a least one legit client in Lagos, Nigeria.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#656Like 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…
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…
Did your business get off the ground?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#657Earlier 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.
On factor for small companies that I have noticed at the places where I have been is that (as a dev consultant). The places that use the cloud often scale up to much. Since the cloud don't limit developers its very easy to just "spinn up a new xx" and not think about the long term costs. Unless you are really small, have variable workloads then the cloud is maybe not for you. Unless the cost is a small part of the to…
I see this a lot in my industry (health).
More often than not, my fellow devs are happy throwing extra servers at a problem instead of tackling the problem :(
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why does anyone use AWS, you can do this on your own way cheaper. Because they can calculate TCO correctly.
Is it just me or is Total Cost of Ownership being talked about way less often these days?
It's easy to game. Source: was a sales engineer for ISPs and Data Centers.
So assume you're doing a 3-year or 5-year TCO -- you build in credits, discounts, and bundled options. Execs are looking for a 3-year apples-to-apples spend, and you make your TCO look fucking amazing. They see the low price and decent technical options and they bite.
3 years later those credits vanish and they're paying full OpEx costs. And after 3 years they're now invested -- stuck -- in their space/circuit/whatever. You can start raising the price or negotiating new contracts.
Same thing with the cloud, for that matter. Cut a glorious bulk deal with Microsoft for Azure space, and then after you've moved everything to MS they can start nickle and diming you -- cuz the cost of moving that load to AWS or GCP isn't cheap, and you're not going out and buying more hardware and going back to CoLo are you?
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#659Cloud will continue to dominate, even if it's more expensive. Why? Because the best companies are able to focus on what makes them special, and outsource the rest.
Cost and security are important, but they may not be most important. In a business, the scarcest commodity is FOCUS. By outsourcing anything that isn't core to your product, you can excel at what differentiates you.
Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
#660My employer is a mid-sized university. Cost is the main issue.
Our environment is a mixture of in-house developed apps and COTS. Until recently, our major COTS vendors didn't have cloud solutions. Now they have cloud solutions but they're far too costly for us to afford. So we need to keep them in-house and continue to employ the staff to support it.
Our in-house apps integrate the COTS systems. Our newer apps are mostly in the cloud. But the older ones are in technologies that need to stay where the database server is, which is in our server room for the reason stated in the last paragraph. Rewriting the apps isn't on our radar due to new work coming in.
Historically, outsource vs. in-source seems to ebb and flow. The clear path is usually muddied when new technologies come out to reduce cost on one side or the other.