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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?

#221

Post by ZWoz »

XCSme wrote: post #157
drchiu wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Do be clarify: you want virtualisation environment, hypervisor? If yes, then you can go with VMWare ESXi or Proxmox. Both have web based consoles to add and manage virtual machines. Like you mentioned, you need additional IP-s, Hetzner has 6 (/29) for €6.72 per month [0], OVH has one time fee €2.00 per additional IP[1].

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[0] - https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/ip/ip-addres...

[1] - https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/bare-metal/rise/options/

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

#223

Post by ozim »

luhn wrote: post #202
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.

I got the same feeling after reading the comment.

It is more like "why everyone is driving ferraris, when they could buy toyota yaris", maintenance on ferrari is super expensive so if you have to drive to work and back it is not a smart expense.

Same with AWS vs OVH vps, where with AWS you have a lot of power under the hood but you use it mostly like you would use single OVH vps that is also not smart use of money.

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

#224

Post by hinkley »

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.

And half of your bathroom breaks...

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

#225

Post by hinkley »

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

I understood why the rice sold out. I understood why the flour sold out. I understood why the beans sold out.

What I don't understand is why the instant ramen sold out at the same time as the rice.

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

#226

Post by SPBS »

luhn wrote: post #202
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.

I'm in awe that the comment was written entirely based off reading the title

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

#227

Post by jonstewart »

013a wrote: post #220
jonstewart wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, poss…

Perhaps this is the right model for a particular scenario with which you’re familiar, but it doesn’t match my scenario and is kind of patronizing.

Also, developers should absolutely worry about which TLS algorithms are accepted.

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

#228

Post by giantrobot »

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.

While infrastructure astronauts are typically money wasters and padding their resumes, I don't think SO is the best counter example.

SO's read to write ratio is enormous. While they talk about a handful of different bare metal servers a vast majority of their hits are handled by their caching layer which is not one of their bare metal machines.

Their write loads are not explicitly time sensitive either, if there's a delay between a successful post and cache invalidation it's not a big deal for a majority of their traffic.

Not every model is quite so forgiving. But even then there's a lot of stupid wasteful "infrastructure" made by people who think they're going to be Google, or at least tell their investors they'll be Google.

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

#229

Post by 908B64B197 »

ianhowson wrote: post #219
908B64B197 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

That's really interesting. I never used OVH, you could probably tell!

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

#230

Post by Radim »

ckdarby wrote: post #57
oriesdan wrote: post #7

I think the main reason they can afford pricing their services that high is because of peer pressure - probably itself the result of clever marketing, or that would be a really happy coincidence. I've worked in many startups now, several of them where I was the first (and for a while, only) developer and had to decide on the infrastructure. Each time I was going with OVH, and each time the CEO was trying to push for…

Being on AWS, Azure or GPC isn't about the costs being pressured from another department at all. The cost reflects the premium for integration into the other services. It is after first employees bounce or the company outgrows that hustle hack everything together mentally that consultants like myself get hired and want to sob that some employee decided to board to OVH as a small startup especially if it is growing. E…

Your lack of punctuation and odd syntax makes me wonder, but if I understood your post correctly, you claim that building with AWS is somehow safer / more robust / more future proof than building with OVH? A technical judgement?

If so, I vehemently disagree. I've been a consultant for 10+ years too and seen 50+ companies from the inside, from startups to behemoths – including AWS itself.

Companies running a tight ship around resources were generally technically superior to those using AWS. "Hanging together by a thread" indeed, playing the AWS bingo of "use a flaky soup of 3-letter-acronym-services to cover technical inaptitude".

AFAIR the AWS versions of Spark and Elasticsearch were abysmal to the point of being unworkable. At least two years ago, maybe it's better now.

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