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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?

#741

Post by wheelerwj »

bsenftner wrote: post #623
wheelerwj wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 servers, interesting. That seems like a small enough setup that I would definitely have left it in the cloud. Much more than that and i think it makes sense to start moving to physical servers. But 24 I would have guessed would be cheaper to maintain in EC2. Are you setup with one or two racks in each location and maybe one full time IT/Sys admin at each location?

At my own startup we ran 17 colocated servers, each a high compute resource, at an monthly expense of $600, using purchased hardware that cost $55K. That is versus $96K per month that would be the same infrastructure at AWS.

wow, that is substantial.

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

#742

Post by wheelerwj »

t0mas88 wrote: post #478
wheelerwj wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 servers, interesting. That seems like a small enough setup that I would definitely have left it in the cloud. Much more than that and i think it makes sense to start moving to physical servers. But 24 I would have guessed would be cheaper to maintain in EC2. Are you setup with one or two racks in each location and maybe one full time IT/Sys admin at each location?

24 dedicated dual Xeon boxes can easily be comparable to 100 to 200 m5.2xlarge EC2 instances. So it's relatively small but not tiny, you're going to be paying at least 25k / month for that (inc reserved instance discounts) So if you use a lot of bandwidth on top of it (can be another 25-50k at AWS) this could reach into to levels where it's worth it to hire two devops guys to run your own in combination with some SLA…

I might need to re-look at this. That's much more efficient at an earlier stage than I was expecting. Thanks!

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

#743

Post by jesterson »

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…

Exactly that. A lot of people do not understand that and get into trap of those credits "thousands of dollars worth" just to be scalped by their vendor-locked costs after those credits vanish.

After all people who make decision on customer side are in same trap - in 3-5 years if not earlier they won't be at the company anymore and it won't be their problem.

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

#744

Post by Gravyness »

tarasmatsyk wrote: post #404
tjbiddle wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's exactly the reason I gave up on AWS, I need an accountant to do the math every month :D Now I rent a 4GB Linux box for 5$/m with no Dockers or whatsoever and happy that it just works

I also hate this complexity with a passion. I love cloud, but pricing can be a real nightmare.

I don't use AWS specifically but when I needed to know the price of some cloud service or group of services I spin up the service (or services) in a brand new project and let it run for 24 hours under similar working environment to see the impact, then after checking the results (the breakdown of each service's price in that day) I just close the project entirely, no left overs.

So I tend to successfully avoid these strange, terribly organized, cloud-specific, service-specific calculator where I can easily forget one aspect of the service that might cost a lot of money absolutely randomly.

Obviously it is a bad strategy if things are expected to reach $200/month and/or you do 'price evaluation' frequently, but otherwise it is stupid easy. I barely spent $50 each year doing this (small company and sporadic system changes)

But the best part is that the final daily price of your system is as precise as it can possibly be and that is worth something.

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

#745

Post by krab »

tjbiddle wrote: post #376
dmlittle wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing

Thanks! Aware of Lightsail - But I'm experienced with AWS so have no trouble with, and prefer, the full feature set. I would've gone with Digital Ocean, otherwise.

Out of curiosity, what you're missing at Digital Ocean? It seems it has all the basics (VMs, managed DBs, storage, load balancers) and for a better price than the bigger clouds.

I find it quite easy to mix services from multiple providers. For example add SQS or S3 from Amazon and Elasticsearch from elastic.co if your cloud doesn't have the products. The latency kills mostly just the connection from a web app to its database.

The biggest drawback is multiple invoices, but I think it's manageable.

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

#746

Post by mister_hn »

There's a fake believe in my company that all the data must be on premise because of privacy concerns.

We've never used cloud services and we do not want to use it.

Some are saying it's a matter of costs, but you know? For a dual node server (hot standby) we were asked 120K € + 50K € only for configuration fees.

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

#747

Post by mister_hn »

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…

What about cost of personal (operations/administration) and the cost of maintaining+electricity bill?

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

#748

Post by tekknik »

mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE wrote: post #723
WilliamEdward wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency…

If web site caters to EU customers, just rent it from the EU datacenter, no need for a cloud. A Hetzner server costs $100/month, an equivalent amount of cloud resources will run you into thousands.

And how much does Hetzners nosql/relational db, emr solution, faas, etc cost? Solutions aren’t built the traditional way anymore. You don’t go get some cots server and write everything yourself. So while you’re futzing around getting a database installed, tuned and setup the engineer using a more complete cloud platform has already moved onto business logic.

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

#749

Post by tekknik »

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…

What about the other services? You’re running a Minecraft cluster so you’re fairly detached from what running a traditional service is like these days. Will those same sysadmins make API gateway for me? Or SNS? If you look at AWS and see only it’s EC2 offering then that’s part of the problem. I just moved a customer from onprem to AWS and they were flabbergasted at the performance difference (their processors being 3-4 yrs old at this point) and changed some of their processes from running for hours to a few minutes for zero capex. Then theres adding capacity. Need a new server to spin up your app? Brb while I go call dell, ETA 2 months....

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

#750

Post by krab »

wpietri wrote: post #230
sergiotapia wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accurate in my experience. Also keeping things up and being there in case shit hits the fan is a full-time job. You can't write features and also manage servers equally well. Unless you have no life I guess.

Totally. I've had personal colo'd servers for 20 years at this point. But I'm tired of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up and haul my ass down to San Jose to swear at some piece of failing gear. I'm excitedly moving it all into the cloud.

There is a middle ground. There are smaller companies where you can rent a bare metal server, usually with unmetered connection (priced by bandwidth). There is an on-call support 24x7 to replace any failing part when you call them. They can build custom servers and also give long term or bulk discounts.

I have a good experience with [1] (a smaller local company) and Hetzner [2], a bigger provider. Compare the prices with cloud. Especially if you need something RAM intensive.

[1]: https://www.superhosting.net/dedicated-servers

[2]: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver

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