Capex + Opex = $32,000 in AWS https://archive.is/rav98
Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
101–110 of 338 posts
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
From AWS' own marketing propaganda: How much would said clients have to invest in people and hardware otherwise? What if their application becomes an overnight success and needs to scale up fast? Sure, if it's an established company then using their own hardware (and people to set up and manage it) might make sense; iirc Dropbox is a fairly recent big player that made that move. But otherwise it's a big upfront inves…
StackOverflow is famous for running on-prem on bare metal Dell hardware: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha... Last time I checked, GitHub was also mostly on bare metal and cloud-free.
StackOverflow does predate the AWS world takeover.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs. There's a natural path from small instances -> bigger instances -> load balancers/ELB -> reserved instances (or spot if it fits your workload). For a smaller company, any savings you'd get from owned servers would be offset by much higher dev ops costs. Plus, as mentioned, you get a vast menu of services to choose from, all of which are m…
>can afford a modest markup. I'm with you until that statement. AWS is nothing approaching "modest" in their markup. 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive.
But again, is that comparable? Seems like apples versus oranges.
What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home?
What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed?
I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#104A pet peeve of mine is also the "bullshit cloud". For example OnShape is basically running a CAD software on a virtual machine. Fusion 360 is saving files on the networks or launching batch jobs on a farm, 1990 banking style.
The cloudiness provides very little value to the user. Whereas computing the fillets concurrently on a bunch of server and the client and accepting the fastest answer would be useful, instead of locking the UI for 2 minutes, same for toolpath generation.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#105What if there were Airbnb for servers, where you could rent your spare computing resources in a marketplace? Many non-confidental processes could run on some other people's computers.
AWS spot pricing meets SETI@home?
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#106Has anyone tried the Scaleway Elements? Looks pretty feature-complete (hosted DB, Kubernetes, object storage). Just wondering if there's a reason it's not talked about, i.e. is it too good to be true?
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#107As a developer at a big company, if I try to buy a server, then I have to deal with my IT department. I don’t get to buy what I want, have to deal with particular overpriced vendors, and the process slows to a crawl. If I want to use AWS, however, I get instant gratification. And of course I can experiment with different models and then refine into cheaper service mixes as scale increases. As base load emerges, I can…
This is probably the real reason for bundled cloud provider popularity. It’s way easier for competent engineers to cut out the brigade of uninformed and cheap managers of the IT budget when you distill your specs into an AWS credit card charge. For a small startup of competent people this is unneeded, but those companies typically succeed or fail into mediocrity eventually.
It's only 80% of the reason. The other 80% is all the time wasted dealing in the physical world, moving and plugging servers.
You could have the most competent engineer fully backed by the company, it's still going to take weeks to procure a goddamn server because it takes time to fight DELL and ship to the colo and have remote hands put it in place and set it up and a thousand more things.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>can afford a modest markup. I'm with you until that statement. AWS is nothing approaching "modest" in their markup. 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive.
But again, is that comparable? Seems like apples versus oranges. What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed? I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have co…
>What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home?
10Gbe ethernet was standard in 2013/2014. Space power and cooling is company dependent. If they're tiny, a closet in the building or a colocation facility, if they're larger, a room. If they're huge, a datacenter.
>What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed?
I can't recall the last time a customer got hit by a "volumetric DDoS". End-user facing systems sit behind cloudflare. Internal apps are... internal. Who cares if the WAN connection is getting hit by DDoS when your users are on campus? In post-covid world, they've got multiple tunnels with SD-WAN.
That's ignoring that fact that Centurylink or Comcast or Telia are pretty good at mitigating DDoS in 2020. Just because they don't post about the attacks they endure on a blog doesn't mean they're inept.
https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/ethernet/comca...
https://assets.centurylink.com/is/content/centurylink/centur...
>I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities.
Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
StackOverflow is famous for running on-prem on bare metal Dell hardware: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha... Last time I checked, GitHub was also mostly on bare metal and cloud-free.
StackOverflow does predate the AWS world takeover.
How is this relevant? Amazon.com also predates AWS.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#110As a developer at a big company, if I try to buy a server, then I have to deal with my IT department. I don’t get to buy what I want, have to deal with particular overpriced vendors, and the process slows to a crawl. If I want to use AWS, however, I get instant gratification. And of course I can experiment with different models and then refine into cheaper service mixes as scale increases. As base load emerges, I can…
> As a developer at a big company, if I try to buy a server, then I have to deal with my IT department. This. AWS is a way to put control back into the hands of developers and work around the internal IT mafia. People are quick to forget how that was like. For startups, AWS is either a really dumb idea or a valuable tool to go faster than the competition, depending on funding and growth rate.
>>> People are quick to forget how that was like.
I would postulate that the author of the article has no idea what's it like. The stories are happening in small companies that are too small to have an IT mafia or any sort of procurement process.