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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?

#211

Post by jonstewart »

013a wrote: post #152
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'…

Mine?

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

#212

Post by 908B64B197 »

ianhowson wrote: post #204
908B64B197 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

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

But if you need to persist transactions you still need to replicate and persist state yourself. Or can I mount an OVH virtual drive that I know will survive across VM migrations?

> I'll grant that the US regions are operated by a different corporate entity and a different web interface, and that is annoying.

Why? Do they at least support the same API? Can OVH actually scale on demand?

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

#213

Post by krob »

what you're paying for is the capability of scalable architecture, on-demand launch, and heavy redundancy. this very easily acts as a multiplying cost factor and building out your own infrastructure as opposed to leveraging one that can dynamically scale as your needs require. Yes you can get away with paying for your own infrastructure at a third the cost, but then when you compute the cost of all the individual requirements. colocation ISP prices, space, people to manage all of these machines, the software to then scale yourself in equivalence, you eventually end up at w similar cost apples to apples, oranges to oranges if you replicate for yourself exactly what you get through AWS.

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

#214

Post by jldugger »

ksec wrote: post #164
throwaway894345 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simp…

It is the World top 50 site by Alexa. Comparatively speaking even compare them to the same CRUD app and DB, most are using 5 to 10x more servers with 1/2 to 1/5 of the traffic.

And you can probably cache all the data you need for the next 24h in a few terrabytes of RAM, _if_ you knew what that data was.

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

#215

Post by thomaslord »

drchopchop wrote: post #78
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…

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…

> If your team is filled with devops engineers, then, sure, go with the non-AWS route.

This seems backwards to me - running a simple VPS on something like OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode is a matter of creating the instance, setting the size, and setting up your server software. Super simple, and likely about the same complexity as setting up a dev environment.

Setting the same thing up on AWS requires slogging through the documentation of their many services, deciding what makes the most sense for you (EC2? ECS? EKS? Lambda? Fargate?), and then configuring more options with less-friendly UI than any other provider I've seen. If you can fully wrap your head around all those services, create a stack that makes sense, and maintain it long-term, you're probably well on your way to being qualified for a DevOps engineer job. I can spin up a quick DigitalOcean droplet for a new project in less than half the time it'd take me to set up an EC2 instance, configure the exact amount of storage I need, and pull up 2 additional browser windows to determine the specs and pricing of different instance sizes in different regions.

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

#217

Post by whatsmyusername »

I can think of one reason why OVH is that much cheaper. OVH doesn't bother policing their network. At all. You don't even need to take my word for it, Cisco Umbrella has written numerous papers on the subject.

They're one of three hosting companies I instantly blacklist across the board when I take custodianship of a network. We don't want their customers business.

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

#218

Post by mattmanser »

bobthepanda wrote: post #210
mattmanser wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still disagree with you, there was a legitimate demand spike for more supermarket toilet paper.

Working from home = more poos and wees at home. Less consumption of industrial deliveries of toilet paper to companies, much higher home consumption from super markets.

So again, not a panic, but a legitimate, overnight, shift in toilet paper consumption habits that resulted in a long lasting shortage of toilet paper in the supermarket JIT supply system. They were not prepared for a jump of 50-100% more home toilet paper consumption.

No panic, but a simple explanation of the shift in consumption from industrial, bulk deliveries of toilet paper to your company office, to buying more of your own at the supermarket.

Yes, there were some opportunists and crazies with a shopping cart full, but they don't explain why it took months for shelves to finally get fully stocked.

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

#219

Post by ianhowson »

908B64B197 wrote: post #212
ianhowson wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

> VM images can be backed up automatically without downtime (on a schedule, not live.) They offer an EBS equivalent. But if you need to persist transactions you still need to replicate and persist state yourself. Or can I mount an OVH virtual drive that I know will survive across VM migrations? > I'll grant that the US regions are operated by a different corporate entity and a different web interface, and that is ann…

> Or can I mount an OVH virtual drive that I know will survive across VM migrations?

Yes, Block Storage: https://us.ovhcloud.com/public-cloud/block-storage/

> Do they at least support the same API?

Yes

> Can OVH actually scale on demand?

Not as big as AWS, but yes.

Remember that you're getting 5x the compute resources for the same money. You don't need to autoscale as much. You're not fighting crappy EBS performance. You're not architecting around remote-network RDS databases with milliseconds of RTT. I firmly believe that for most applications you're going to be better off just massively overprovisioning your hardware and keeping the software stack simple.

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

#220

Post by 013a »

jonstewart wrote: post #211
013a wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Mine?

The correct answer to "What company would provide developers direct access to raw compute resources in the cloud" is "one that is deeply misguided."

At the most simple level, it seems like progress. Now every developer can get their own server and push their code, test it, do whatever, think of the agility. But, realistically, all that's happened is the creation of hundreds of silos, each configured differently, possibly being abused, possibly containing restricted data, mis-configurations leading to breach, denial of service, running up the company card, all sorts of bad things.

In other words, it doesn't matter whether those raw compute resources are available in the cloud or in a company data center. The cloud enables developers broader access to provisioning, but there's substantial evidence that may not be a good thing. A company data center is a 1780s-era musket; the cloud is a M249 machine gun.

That's why we need to talk in abstract functional primitives. Developers shouldn't worry about which TLS algorithms are accepted, or that the storage bucket they want has proper read/write access; not just because a ton of this stuff is very arcane and domain specific, but also because humans will ALWAYS get it wrong unless its managed at a higher, centralized, and totally automated level.

And at that point, raw access to AWS doesn't make sense. Developers don't actually want an EC2 instance; they want their app running on a server. Let Operations (or Heroku, or whoever) handle that for you.

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