Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why? • Hacker News Board

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

#681

Post by Taek » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

thotypous wrote: post #614

Fornax96 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sia founder here. The hashing algorithm we use is blake2b. Definitely secure.

We do probabilistic proofs, so we have the host provide us a small random sampling of actual data (so the host can't rely on precomputing), plus a proof that this actual data is what the contract says the host should be storing.

See chapter 5: https://sia.tech/sia.pdf

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

#682

Post by unethical_ban » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #286

bradhe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies) Haha. This can't possibly be true.

Just to give a few examples, we are typically much more aggressive with RAID, ECC, redundant network links, redundant time sources, redundant cooling, redundant power supplies, etc. than cloud providers.

Cost notwithstanding (heh) and as a relative novice to the cloud world, it looks to me like there is no bounds to the level of redundancy in the big three clouds. The trick is to use cloud-native tooling vs. EC2.

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

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Post by mwcampbell » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #635

mwcampbell wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs. I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only need…

If you're small, you can get that redundancy on a PaaS. If you're big enough to move off a PaaS, you can rent physical machines in multiple datacentres.

Size is not the only thing that dictates whether one should use a PaaS. It's entirely possible for a tiny generalist team, or even a single developer, to develop an application whose requirements prevent it from running on a PaaS. But that doesn't mean the team or solo developer should have to handle all the hassles of operating physical servers. (Source: I was that solo developer for many years.)

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

#684

Post by aripickar » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

I work for AWS, so (in the most pedantic way possible) technically yes

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

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Post by mcny » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

ddorian43 wrote: post #582

mcny wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ .

My understanding is the website, the user services such as authentication, heart beat (not sure what is the proper technical term but the thing that says where I am in a particular episode). That and internal apps like project tracker not to mention dev/test.

At least in my imagination. At my work, I'm not even worth throwing an SSD at my work computer. My manager is powerless to help as the company has some kind of deal to only buy from HP? No idea what kind of glue procurement is sniffing at this company...

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

#686

Post by iamgopal » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

When cloud computing started, alternative software deployment was complicated, after a decade, much has been improved. So ease of management is also one of the factor. Not all need state of the art data and AI.

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

#687

Post by jolmg » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

acwan93 wrote: post #351

I agree with you OP. Our company provides on-premise ERP systems to small (we’re talking at most 20 person companies) wholesale distributors. Pre-COVID, I was pushing for a cloud solution to our product and pivoting our company towards that model. We’re at a hybrid approach when COVID hit. What ends up happening with an on-premise/hybrid cloud model is we end up doing a lot of the sysadmin/IT support work for our cus…

Deja vu. I think you totally hit the nail on the head with that last paragraph. On-premise ERP systems probably only make real sense for (non-small) companies that wish to avoid relying on the internet (because e.g. their business strategy requires that freedom) and can hire long-term sysadmins/programmers that can provide support to those systems.

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

#688

Post by blaser-waffle » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

nikisweeting wrote: post #320

Quebec power and internet pricing is really competitive. For residential services I pay $0.06/kw + $80/mo for 1Gbps fiber with 1ms ping to 8.8.8.8 (USD). As a result, I run a power-hungry Dell r610 with 24 cores and 48GB of ram with 20+ services on it for many different aspects of my company. All the critical stuff runs on DigitalOcean / Vultr, but the 20+ non-critical services like demo apps, CI/CD, cron workers, ar…

This is also why there are a lot of data centers in the Greater Montreal area, FWIW.

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

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Post by greedo » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

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.

Sure, because EC2 instances don't need any admin work. Unless you're doing serverless architectures, you'll still need sysadmins.

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

#690

Post by lmeyerov » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

ablekh wrote: post #346

lmeyerov wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do visual GPU graph tech close to core national lab missions (sec, fraud, misinfo, genetics, social, ...) so are in a similar boat. While I love the folks doing related work at PNNL (and am inspired!), I also recognize, done wrong, we can be existentially threatening to internal groups building related things. Instead of aggressively persuing contracts and spending effort getting into nasty politics, we let the us…

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. If I understood you correctly (the text's meaning appears somewhat fuzzy), your go-to-market strategy is to first collaborate (and/or consult?) - perhaps, through your "PoCs and Rapid Prototyping" services - and then allow users to "pull" your capabilities and core service into their labs. Right? Having said that, I haven't seen any science-focused channels, resources or offers on…

I do not advocate a go to market that prioritizes these markets. We started more with enterprise/federal data architects, which involved a different go to market - not self serve on a website.

We (and our broader market) are now at point where it is easier for us to launch self-serve and help adjacent roles. Stay tuned :) This fits better with national labs market too afaict. We already quite heavily discount on-prem for edu etc, and I expect we will see that carry through here: bottom-up early cloud use -> discounted on-prem. As budgets are mostly hw or small, and follow slow grant/annual cycles, hard to see going another way.

Two market trends relevant: -- Federal: without quite special circumstances, can easily take 3+ years for a new fed sales team to pay for itself -- Edu: small budgets to begin with Better to target fast happy-to-spend teams and as tech/sales/product gets easy, easier to help adjacent markets. Got burned whenever we didn't :)