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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?

#691

Post by takeda »

bradhe wrote: post #191
centimeter wrote: post #36

We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2/3rds of that every year on power/maintenance/rent/upgrades/etc. We don't generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for: * uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we're willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots…

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

I actually am surprised you would say something like that. Public cloud is infamous for their VMs being unreliable. The idea is that you should assume that VM disappears at any time, and you need to design your applications in a way to successfully handle it. It's kind of how Internet Protocol (IP) is unreliable, doesn't guarantee packet delivery or even that packets arrive in order, but TCP protocol can provide a reliable service.

I've seen on-premises, where reliability wasn't even objective machines that easily run for 5+ or more years without any interruption. Now parent said that they actually need reliability and you can achieve it using many technologies. Starting with RAID, dual PSU, or even hot swappable RAM or CPU (I remember SPARC machines allowed this). With full control of networking you can also make a standby node take over nearly instantaneous, when in AWS it might take couple minutes. You can achieve nearly any availability as long as you have enough money. In AWS you don't have any control and your only way is through designing your application in specific ways and that still has limitation. Just take look at RDS when everyone would want to have it instantaneous, but it usually will take few minutes.

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

#692

Post by pickle-wizard »

dahfizz wrote: post #126
bcrosby95 wrote: post #101

We 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.

We have about 170 servers in a colo about 30 minutes from my home. I can go months without going to the colo. Usually when I go out there it is to replace a disk.

We have a bunch of hardware coming up on end of life. I looked at moving us to cloud. The new hardware will cost about what 3 years of AWS would cost. Considering that the hardware I am replacing is over 6 years old, we are better off sticking with on-prem.

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

#693

Post by fxtentacle »

neeraga wrote: post #609
fxtentacle wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hetzner.de

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

#694

Post by fxtentacle »

igrekel wrote: post #617
twic wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use Amazon RDS. It's still 10x the price of bare metal, but that is acceptable and it's fast enough for most things. Plus they have automated backups and certified encryption.

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

#695

Post by tigerstripe »

tjbiddle wrote: post #375
tigerstripe wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo

Certainly nothing powerful :-) I can get away with t3.nano and t3.micro for what I'm doing at the moment. But the beauty of cloud, is that I can scale up when I eventually need it. 5x t3.nano will be ~$25/mo 5x t3.micro will be ~$50/mo All of my AMIs are EBS optimized and require a minimum of 8GB for the root drive (Although they only use ~1.6GB. Not bothering to hack around this to save a buck.) So that'll be 40GB E…

Cool - I should give the micro instances another shot - I wonder how big of a Postgres database they will be able to handle.

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

#696

Post by StreamBright »

nemothekid wrote: post #305
mmmBacon wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you’re paying for a ton of stuff there that you probably don’t use and then are susceptible to bugs that have nothing to do with your use case. At $5B it would not cost anywhere near that much to replicate. Your infra would be better tailored to your workloads and your sw teams which would further drive costs down. The upsides are that you only drive features you need and keep things simple. The downside is that…

Snap was spending 2B over 5 years - so 400M/yr. By comparison, Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters. Who knows how much they are paying in engineering salaries so manage those datacenters. Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is wo…

Exactly. Calculating TCO for on-prem vs cloud is tricky. Any time we have done it cloud came out the winner. I also found exceptions: predictable static workloads requiring a huge amount of bandwidth, mostly outgoing. An average company that needs some CPU and storage for various unpredictable workloads benefits from cloud services greatly.

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

#697

Post by fulafel »

igrekel wrote: post #617
twic wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RDS and the like still need about the same amount of DBA'ing, no?

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

#698

Post by StreamBright »

JanisL wrote: post #624
StreamBright wrote: post #621

Earlier 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?

Yes and also there is a ton of hand-wavy, without any merit bullcrap floating on HN. Without any in-depth analysis, numbers, apple-to-apple comparisons. AWS and Azure would not exist if moving to the cloud was a bad move. There are so many companies whose primary business is not to build data centers, yet they require some computational resources. These are the companies that are the primary users of cloud computing. Based on my experience, most of the financial companies fall into this category, including banks. Other industries that I have experience with include, travel, gaming, pharmaceutical, logistics, and a few more. Microsoft is doing a great job to get the most enterprise customers, while AWS has stronger offerings. The biggest winners with cloud migrations are the companies who can start to auto-scale while previously was impossible because the on-prem datacenter had no such features, even if they had, they could not sell the extra capacity to other companies like AWS. Other great cost optimization opportunities include the option to try to run the workload on different node types and find the best fit. Also not an option with most on-prem DCs. S3 itself can solve problems that are very hard to solve. For example, you have different security zones and you need to copy data around in your DC. This becomes not necessary anymore with S3, just give different users different access level and you do not need to copy the data around anymore. This was one of the big selling points for one of your customers. I could go on and on. In the last 5 years, we have saved several millions of EURs for our clients and made businesses possible that was impossible using on-prem resources. But some HN knows better and they argue that all of these companies which are rolling on AWS are morons and they should have built they own DCs because it is cheaper while AWS became a ~10 billion income business unit. There is some irony in this, I guess.

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

#699

Post by avifreedman »

user5994461 wrote: post #513
avifreedman wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless that's capex for building, or includes server capex that they depreciate, that seems way high given Uber's scale. A pretty dense cabinet should only cost ~$1400/mo at wholesale (1MW+ rooms) rates, and $200M is 143,000 cabinets. And it's public that Uber uses multiple clouds as well. Disclaimer: I haven't reviewed public Uber filings, would be very interested if there's any data that indicates they're really sp…

The 42U rack might be only $1400 per month but the servers to put inside are $5000 upfront per U.

As the others say in the comments, understand completely re: servers. And network. And some management overhead. I will write a blog post laying out our COGS at Kentik including all these factors, hope it'll wind up helpful.

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

#700

Post by igrekel »

fulafel wrote: post #697
igrekel wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RDS and the like still need about the same amount of DBA'ing, no?

I'm assuming it takes care of monitoring and managing space, disks, backups etc. I mean the true administration tasks, not helping with designing the database and queries.

As I said, we are considering but the analysis hasn't been done yet. If you have insight, please.

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