Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#151

Post by 908B64B197 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #10

He kind of touches on this in point IV, but never mentioned specifically: the cost comparison is not AWS vs ovh. It's fragment-of-EC2 vs ovh. If you need a predefined small number of VMs and no other functionality, it would be silly to go with AWS. But on the other hand, if you want a set of servers of a given class spawning on demand, with traffic coming in via load balancers, with integrated certificate and DNS man…

Exactly.

That and the 9's. I don't know how good OVH is with outage and availability. Sure the raw compute is cheaper.

There's also storage. He's renting physical drives on OVH meaning he has to take care of replication and back-up himself. The disks in his AWS VMs should be persistent. If his OVH server goes down due to hardware failure, what happens to his disks? I genuinely don't know.

Lastly, OVH doesn't have regions everywhere. Then it's yet another different provider with slightly different product for every geographical region he wants to support.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#152

Post by 013a » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #58

As 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…

I think your core argument is in the right place, but: What Big Company enables typical developers personal provisioning on their cloud accounts?

I've never seen this before. Its always handled through an operations team. The cloud definitely simplifies the operations team's job, and you may be able to get something more specific faster than whatever gray box the IT Of Years Past has available, but I don't think you're getting around the Cloud Boilerplate of worrying about IAM, CloudFormation/IaC, repeatability, security, granting access, cleaning up...

I think this position is missing the bigger picture; it shouldn't matter where you've got something deployed. That's the Operations Team's problem. Instead, we need to talk about, lets call them, Functional Primitives. For example: If you want a docker image deployed w/ x vCPU y memory z replicas etc, behind a URL. That's a functional primitive. It shouldn't matter whether its in ECS or in Kubernetes in the closet or wherever. That's on the operations team, and its also on them to get that provisioned quickly for you.

In other words, you're still thinking that its the operations team's job to provide servers, so of course the quickest way to get a server is the Cloud. But that should not be their role; their role should be to provide capacity at a higher level of abstraction.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#153

Post by 908B64B197 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

duhast wrote: post #91

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

They launched in 2008, on a stack built around IIS because that was what their early devs were familiar with.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#154

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #74

bsenftner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month. And it is not hard, easy in many ways. Do not be fooled, the cloud companies are peddling is an expensive scam.

Cloud companies are useful as long as you want what their selling. The best case is needing say 2 TB of ram for some workload or test that only going to take a few hours. Or something like the Olympics where 95% of your demand comes in a predictable spike across a few days.

very true, the original selling point for Cloud was instant upgrade/downgrade as needed. That was the original amazing thing, dials that said RAM and CPU you could turn up or turn down.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#155

Post by drchiu » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #140

drchiu wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it's OVH for us as well as this point. We have about 8 or 9 dedicated servers at OVH right now. Things we've noticed: - Yes, UI sucks - No autobilling - Reboot times are slow (as the actual machines are reboooted, not a VPS) - You need to upgrade to higher bandwidths for great speeds - Some routing problems, very rarely - You really need to know what your server needs are 6-12 months in advance - Some product o…

Thanks a lot for the information! I was mostly looking to get some VPSs from them, the $10.58 2vCPU, 4GB RAM ones to replace the current DO $15/mo 2vCPU 2GB RAM I'm using, as I would get better specs for a cheaper price. It's a bit hard to tell without actual benchmarks if the performance will be better or worse than DO.

Yeah, I would avoid their VPS. I benchmarked their higher end VPS and they were still not great. Ran a few as well on Vultr, Linode, and DO and ended up going with none of them. Linode performed the best for VPS for me, but price-point wise, it was a better deal to head straight up to dedi's on OVH.

I still run small VPS instances for various workers and what-not, but straight up app and db servers go to OVH.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#156

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #144

drchopchop wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

Then you remember that for years, Stack Overflow ran out of a couple of well administered servers. YAGNI. KISS. People forget the basics because "infrastructure astronautics" is fun, and it probably helps make a beautiful resume, too.

I would guess SO had a relatively small number of employees and their servers were running a pretty straight-forward CRUD app and a database. Comparing that to the heterogeneous workloads that large organizations deal with is a bit silly. No doubt there's still a lot of fat to trim in those large organizations, but trimming that fat is rarely their largest opportunity (much to the chagrin of those of us who like simple, elegant systems).

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#157

Post by XCSme » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

drchiu wrote: post #155

XCSme wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for the information! I was mostly looking to get some VPSs from them, the $10.58 2vCPU, 4GB RAM ones to replace the current DO $15/mo 2vCPU 2GB RAM I'm using, as I would get better specs for a cheaper price. It's a bit hard to tell without actual benchmarks if the performance will be better or worse than DO.

Yeah, I would avoid their VPS. I benchmarked their higher end VPS and they were still not great. Ran a few as well on Vultr, Linode, and DO and ended up going with none of them. Linode performed the best for VPS for me, but price-point wise, it was a better deal to head straight up to dedi's on OVH. I still run small VPS instances for various workers and what-not, but straight up app and db servers go to OVH.

If I go for dedi, do you know any tool to simulate running multiple, independent VPSs on a dedicated server? I was thinking maybe something like creating Docker containers on the dedicated server, but I'm not sure how the management/provisioning/resource sharing would work, plus I assume it would still need extra IPs and stuff like that for each VPS.

It would be nice to have like a Control Panel where you can link dedicated servers, and then provision VPSs on them using an UI like the one on DigitalOcean. But I guess this would mean having a complete DO competitor (without the hardware part) :D

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#158

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #114

tw04 wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

> 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.

It's such a meme on this site to compare costs of AWS to hardware costs as though the hardware operates itself. I'm sure there are many cases in which onprem actually is a better value proposition than AWS, and I would find it much more interesting if we talked about when to go with AWS vs onprem, but instead we try to make these silly comparisons about the upfront cost of a server blade vs an EC2 instance.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#159

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #108

nixgeek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 100Mb…

> Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago.

The argument isn't that they are solved or not, but the cost of implementing and maintaining them vs AWS.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#160

Post by anticristi » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #36

anticristi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to write the same. One server in my basement never compares to a highly-available, compliant and secure infrastructure, surrounded by managed services. It's like complaining that taxis are more expensive than driving your own car.

Every infrastructure is as secure as you configure it to be without bugs. Not that AWS doesn't allow for secure infastructure and you're basement is secure by default, but as a consultant I see clients when I ask them about security saying "We're secure because we use AWS.".

One should definitely not default into "we're secure because we use AWS". But let's be honest, how many servers in the basement feature video surveillance? How many destroy their hard disks securely?

An honest statement would be "we reduced our burden of security by building on top of AWS".