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

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

#201

Post by asalahli »

shuntress wrote: post #192
throwaway1777 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely need to consider spikes in demand too. A perfect example of this was covid 19 supply shocks. Supply chains got a lot better at just in time delivery and didn’t keep much back stock, but with covid this broke down when everyone went out shopping to stock up for lockdown and work from home. Edit: s/panic shopping/shopping/

It's not "panic shopping" if overnight I transition from eating half my meals at work to eating all my meals at home.

It was panic shopping when people were hoarding flour and yeast though, for instance

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

#202

Post by luhn »

hinkley wrote: post #175

I wonder how many billions of dollars worth of unsold cars are just 'lying around'. How many billions of dollars worth of fire trucks are parked right now doing nothing? Given redundancy and inventory logistics, once your industry gets to some number of billions of dollars of equipment, you're goddamn right there's going to be a billion dollars worth of equipment lying around. It's not the magnitude, it's the ratio t…

Your comment is correct, but not really related to the article. Author not talking about money wasted on underutilized resources, but money wasted on expensive VPS providers like AWS versus budget options like OVH. Honestly it's a pretty misleading title.

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

#203

Post by mattmanser »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #83
mattmanser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a real saving in my experience. The DevOps time for an app is so trivial. I actually just setup a .Net core app on Linux/mysql. My Linux experience is old and very limited. I have used AWS for years for other things (S3, cloudfront, transcribe, etc.). Initially I setup an elastic beanstalk app/separate mysql instance on my own AWS account just so I could quickly deploy (all new to me). Then I setup the ap…

To be fully honest, for personal work, I use Caprover for DevOps. Edit: The move from CapEx to OpEx is not about savings, it's often about shifting the costs in your books.

I guess I phrased that wrong. Explicitly, DevOps costs are tiny in a startup, even if you do it all yourself with a bare metal server, and moving 0.5% from pot A to pot B makes no difference.

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

#204

Post by ianhowson »

908B64B197 wrote: post #151
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 reg…

Allow me to educate you :-)

> I don't know how good OVH is with outage and availability.

I've personally observed failure rates similar to AWS EC2 and EBS. You need to plan for failure, like any cloud provider.

> the raw compute is cheaper

Dramatically so. 20% of the price.

> There's also storage

You can get local NVMe, cheaply, with literally 100x the perf you can get with the most expensive EBS volumes. AWS does not have a storage offering that comes close, not even their instance store NVMe.

> what happens to his disks

VM images can be backed up automatically without downtime (on a schedule, not live.) They offer an EBS equivalent.

> OVH doesn't have regions everywhere

They have enough. us-west, us-east, eu-west, APAC, others. I'll grant that the US regions are operated by a different corporate entity and a different web interface, and that is annoying.

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

#205

Post by smilliken »

api wrote: post #54

Bare metal destroys AWS and other big managed clouds and even smaller cloud companies like Digital Ocean if all you need is compute, storage, and bandwidth and want to manage it yourself. Bandwidth is even more extreme than CPU/RAM. There are high bandwidth bare metal vendors that basically sell like rack vendors by capacity, not quantity, and offer bandwidth at stupidly cheap rates compared to any cloud. ZeroTier us…

Aside: thank you for ZeroTier. Fantastic software that I've been recommending to everyone.

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

#206

Post by GordonS »

tw04 wrote: post #93
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…

>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.

And on bandwidth their markup tends towards infinity - same on Azure and GCP.

As a example, 20TB of egress bandwidth will cost you around $1,750 on Azure, almost $90/TB! Your typical server/VPS provider gives you that kind of bandwidth allowance for free, because it costs them close to nothing.

I have a feeling almost all complaints about cloud costs would disappear forever if they'd only stop gouging customers on bandwidth.

The likes of Hetzner and OVH are starting to offer more cloudy features, like load balancers and block storage. My hope is that eventually they become viable alternatives to the big 3, and they are finally forced to reduce their ludicrous bandwidth prices.

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

#207

Post by ttul »

I run a large infrastructure SaaS on AWS. Our bill is frightening and so we work diligently to find ways to cut it down. Yet, despite other cloud providers offering much lower prices on CPU, storage, and bandwidth, we stick with AWS for the following reason: If we were to switch to a cheaper provider, we would have to do a lot of building ourselves, which would require hiring talent and keeping that talent employed continuously.

Any time we look at the switch, it doesn’t make sense because of the up front costs of staffing that we would need to absorb.

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

#208

Post by mattmanser »

bobthepanda wrote: post #200
shuntress wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "panic shopping" if overnight I transition from eating half my meals at work to eating all my meals at home.

While this also happened, there was definitely some level of panic buying that happened in the initial stages, at least in the US. The toilet paper/paper towel shortage was pretty much driven by pure panic buying, and you had reports of crazy lines outside of big bulk supercenters like Costco.

I also disagree it was really panic buying.

We were all being warned we might need to self-isolate for two weeks if we caught covid.

So suddenly everyone needed 2 weeks of spare stuff, on top of their normal shop.

Hence the sudden shortages.

I found it quite insulting that the media decided to crow about panic buying, when we'd essentially been told to do it.

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

#209

Post by mattmanser »

asalahli wrote: post #201
shuntress wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "panic shopping" if overnight I transition from eating half my meals at work to eating all my meals at home.

It was panic shopping when people were hoarding flour and yeast though, for instance

No, people were bored, stuck at home and started trying home baking. It was doing the rounds on social media. So there was suddenly a massive demand for flour and yeast.

No panic, just a simple fad that they couldn't supply enough to meet demand.

I read that in the UK at least the actual problem was they had enough flour, but it was all in industrial bags and they did not have enough packaging to rebag it.

Actually another victim of just-in-time supply lines, rather than any 'panic'.

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

#210

Post by bobthepanda »

mattmanser wrote: post #208
bobthepanda wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this also happened, there was definitely some level of panic buying that happened in the initial stages, at least in the US. The toilet paper/paper towel shortage was pretty much driven by pure panic buying, and you had reports of crazy lines outside of big bulk supercenters like Costco.

I also disagree it was really panic buying. We were all being warned we might need to self-isolate for two weeks if we caught covid. So suddenly everyone needed 2 weeks of spare stuff, on top of their normal shop. Hence the sudden shortages. I found it quite insulting that the media decided to crow about panic buying, when we'd essentially been told to do it.

No, people really did go overboard. Unless you are running a small orphanage no one needs a Costco cart stocked double high with only toilet paper.

There were also a fair amount of people thinking they could be smart and hoarding to later price gouge, but this mostly fell apart and there were articles about how people were mad at Costco's policy of not allowing returns on toilet paper and paper towels.

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