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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?

#731

Post by chillfox »

erulabs wrote: post #298
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s might eventually get there, technically it fits the bipl,but it's got many moving parts thats its rarely worthwhile in a domestica setup

I don't disagree with you (certainly I'm bullish on Kubernetes, hence the startup) but I have to say many people felt similarly about running web-servers in general back in the day. Init script management, maintaining RAID arrays, etc was a project for nerds, not a mainstream activity. Today though, we have replicating databases, we have cloud storage available for backups, we have intelligent disk-replication system…

My main problem with docker/Kubernetes for small projects is automated patching.

With Ubuntu, I can set up automated upgrades/restarts pretty easily but with docker/k8s I end up having to write my own script to handle it, or at least that was the case last time I looked.

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

#733

Post by whatsmyusername »

Cloud falls over if you have a lot of data egress. I don't work on those types of workloads (mainly in PCI and a little bit of HIPAA) so I stick to cloud for the sheer convenience factor (it's easier to fix a security group than having to drive to the office and plug in somewhere like I had to earlier today). Dealing with hardware has become a very specific skill set. I have it, but I don't enjoy it, so I don't look for it.

I still have to build physical networks occasionally (ex: we are building a small manufacturing facility in a very specific niche that's required to be onsite for compliance reasons) but the scale is so small that I can get away with a lot of open source components (pfsense netgates are great) and not have to use things that are obnoxious to deal with (if I never have to deploy cisco anything ever again I won't be upset).

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

#734

Post by whatsmyusername »

reilly3000 wrote: post #330

I’ve been studying like a fiend to get AWS certs and thoroughly understand the cloud value proposition, especially for ephemeral workloads and compliance needs. I’m all for cloud solutions that make sense and love when serverless/usage-only systems can’t be deployed. That said, I recently started work on a friend’s system that he has had running in colo for a long time. It’s absolutely insane how long his systems hav…

If he has processes that have been up since 2015 how is he patching? That's one of my biggest gripes with on-prem, it's easy to leave something that works alone... until it gets popped by a 5 year old vuln.

In cloud I'm constantly looking at what we have because I have good billing tools in place to see what we're paying for.

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

#735

Post by whatsmyusername »

dijit wrote: post #228

I work for a large video games publisher, as you might expect we use a lot of windows. Windows server licenses on AWS and GCP are hundreds of times more expensive at our scale. Incidentally we actually do have some cloud infra and we like it, but the licensing cost is half the total price of the instance itself. In fact, you might not know this but games are relatively low margin, and we have accidentally risked the…

TBF windows licensing in general is a shit show, to the point where just handling that is a specialized ability potentially warranting a full time position.

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

#736

Post by whatsmyusername »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #116

Manufacturing. The cost to a factory if the internet is down is too great. Each facility has its own highly redundant virtualization infrastructure hosting 50 to 100 VMs.

Manufacturing is the one place I still use on-prem, mostly because I work in a field that has compliance reasons for doing so and the, 'internets out, we can't print' problem.

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

#737

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rumanator wrote: post #722
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, but at Dropbox's size it should be pretty obvious. I mean, their whole business model is essentially acting as a cloud storage provider. Once they got big enough, of course it made sense for them to optimize their infrastructure instead of letting another company take x% off the top.

> Once they got big enough, of course it made sense for them to optimize their infrastructure Isn't that true in all cases? There is no doubt that rolling and maintaining your own infrastructure can be and is better than dumping cash on the AWSs of this world. The only question is what size marks the breakeven point.

I think it is actually only very true in a small number of cases. First, you need to be big enough where the cost of the people needed to support your infrastructure can be amortized over a (very) large number of machines. Second, Amazon, Microsoft and Google pay some of the best salaries around, so they have some of the best infrastructure people working for them.

Looking at the comments here, I think it's clear that there are a relatively small number of use cases where roll your own is a better idea, primarily where you have a huge number of servers basically all doing the same thing with lots of data transfer (which is comparatively expensive in the cloud). This may be cheaper to manage when a small team of people if you're essentially cloning similar setups.

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

#738

Post by Hnrobert42 »

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 support your comment.

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

#739

Post by fulafel »

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…

That may be the case for a startup. But in the average corporate IT environment the on-prem server infrastructure and procedural/political jungle is so terrible that you just have to get away from it. Before "cloud" became fashionable it was politically hard or impossible to host your project somewhere outside the bad corporate infrastructure, but now there's a way to present the choice in a palatable way.

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

#740

Post by JanisL »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #658
JanisL wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for this perspective, I guess the gameability of the metrics explains a lot.
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