Live data from Hacker News

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

cerebralab.com

281–290 of 338 posts

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

#281
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you look at something like how Stack Exchange moved physical servers to a new datacenter, you can see where AWS benefits you. Not all startups have the server and networking know-how to pull that kind of stuff off, or even set it up in the first place. https://blog.serverfault.com/2015/03/05/how-we-upgrade-a-liv...

Fedora just did it for all the infrastructure servers this summer:

https://hackmd.io/@fedorainfra2020/Sybp76XvL

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

#282
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Alright then, right now, off the top of your head: What are the set of TLS ciphers which are generally regarded by the security community to represent the highest security standards? I have no clue. The AWS ALB 2016-08 security policy allows for ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA ECDHE-ECDSA-AE…

I agree that developers make mistakes and humans are fallible. Why then do you want me to list permissible cipher systems off the top of my head? Of course I would look that up. (I’ve got a JIRA issue from a couple of years ago about this topic.)

By saying that I want developers to worry about TLS algorithms, I mean that I want developers to worry about everything and understand that they have shared ownership of the production system.

I lead a small dev team working in a reasonably sized division of a large company. We’re accountable for both operations and development, and we’re security-sensitive (I have domain expertise in DFIR). It’s my ass if we screw up any of the ways you cite. We mitigate that risk in a lot of different ways, and I try to seek out new things we can do to ratchet up the quality of our build products.

Again, I think your insistence that things be a certain way doesn’t fit my situation. Have a good evening.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> 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. Until that server goes down.

# uptime 01:43:36 up 666 days, 11:42, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.01

From OVH VPS. Funny thing it's 666 today. YMMV

# uptime 01:47:03 up 640 days, 6:53, 2 users, load average: 2.39, 2.62, 2.73

From hetzner dedicated server. YMMV

# uptime 01:48:11 up 482 days, 20 min, 2 users, load average: 1.53, 2.10, 2.78

From leaseweb dedicated server. YMMV

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

#284
post #271
post #207

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 c…

Also if you build it yourself it carries risk -- each project could fail, or take extra time. Where as buying AWS, has low risk.

Yes. And risk here means my business fails potentially. AWS has never once had an outage in the region we operate in.

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

#285
post #271
post #207

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 c…

Also if you build it yourself it carries risk -- each project could fail, or take extra time. Where as buying AWS, has low risk.

Servers go down in AWS too, they are a colo shop with an open source services arm to implement multi tenant services of which you are one tenant yet paying for that multi tenancy service.

You may not notice it having 1 but have a few thousand. Everything goes down in AWS just like it does on normal servers, no one likes to mention that though so often its blamed on something else like software that is running on the cloud that just went down hah.

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

#286
post #275

How fast can you reset an instance on OVH? I personally wouldn't want a server to live longer than 48 hours :) (Unless it's a managed service)

Can you please tell us why? What are you afraid of? I have seen servers up much longer than 2 days, still humming along no memory leaks no whatever you can think of that "rots" on a server that doesn't change. Maybe your app has a lot of memory leaks or is not well coded where it has to be restarted every few days, or as you say completely brought up on a new server why?

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

#287

Like I said on another site: ... people know AWS and know how to be productive with the services and frameworks for AWS. that alone is a figure hard to quantify. Sure I could save money bringing all the servers back internally or using cheaper datacenters, but I worked at a company that worked that way. You end up doing a lot of busy work chucking bad drives, making tickets to the infrastructure group and waiting for…

I had this mindset for a long time that we would save money running our own infrastructure. I remember talking days with our CTO about getting dedicated servers and spinning up one of the Citrix or VMWare offerings. I was sure that we could run our backend on one dedicated server for a fraction of the equivalent on AWS. I based my assumptions on running my own infrastructure for years without issues. However, once we…

You just didn't have anyone skilled enough to automate those things, or you couldn't manage that. If you are colo you aren't swapping disks/network your colo provider is. Im not advocating for doing it ALL yourself, making network cables does save money, but its impractical. Just because you couldn't manage the whole thing while having the ear of the CTO, just means you failed it doesn't mean it doesn't work for lots of other companies that make lots of money.

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

#288
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if you build it yourself it carries risk -- each project could fail, or take extra time. Where as buying AWS, has low risk.

Servers go down in AWS too, they are a colo shop with an open source services arm to implement multi tenant services of which you are one tenant yet paying for that multi tenancy service. You may not notice it having 1 but have a few thousand. Everything goes down in AWS just like it does on normal servers, no one likes to mention that though so often its blamed on something else like software that is running on the…

Okay fair comment. But in terms of the entire data center being unreachable, that has never happened - not in ten years.

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

#289
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SO also ran on .net, which is a far cry from the typical startup server load running on Python, Ruby, or PHP.

What do you mean?

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Until that server goes down.

# uptime 01:43:36 up 666 days, 11:42, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.01 From OVH VPS. Funny thing it's 666 today. YMMV # uptime 01:47:03 up 640 days, 6:53, 2 users, load average: 2.39, 2.62, 2.73 From hetzner dedicated server. YMMV # uptime 01:48:11 up 482 days, 20 min, 2 users, load average: 1.53, 2.10, 2.78 From leaseweb dedicated server. YMMV

Please patch your systems.
Post reply on HN