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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?

#301

Post by bartvk »

lossolo wrote: post #283
mwcampbell wrote: post #250

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

Why would you leave a server running that long? Is that best practice? I'm by no means a sysadmin but I do monthly scheduled reboots, because on monthly reboots you test that reboot gets you a running server that correctly comes back, and you get a more thorough fsck.

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

#302

Post by hddherman »

bartvk wrote: post #301
lossolo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# 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

Why would you leave a server running that long? Is that best practice? I'm by no means a sysadmin but I do monthly scheduled reboots, because on monthly reboots you test that reboot gets you a running server that correctly comes back, and you get a more thorough fsck.

Also not a sysadmin, but regular reboots are a must-have. Not only does it test that the machine comes back up, but it will also ensure that your kernel and other services are patched. Of course, the services can also be restarted separately after an update, but swapping the running kernel with a new one is still very uncommon.

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

#303

Post by HelloNurse »

renewiltord wrote: post #120
hw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right? Where I work we've started non-AWS and have continued non-AWS. We don't have a team of devops engineers, but rather a team where there are a engineers who _…

Yeah but that's what capex based stuff (like buying and colocating) is: planning for scale. With AWS you think you need a robust DB and shit and you've made a decision that can be undone in minutes. You think you want Elasticache? It's a fifteen minute operation. In that time your devops guy isn't going to have even downloaded the binary and figured out the docs.

> With AWS you think you need a robust DB and shit and you've made a decision that can be undone in minutes.

If it can be undone in minutes, it isn't much of a decision. A service that can be enabled or canceled on a whim is unnecessary.

Realistically, analyzing the guarantees offered by a cloud platform, your corresponding requirements, and how everything is supposed to work is going to take days, and actually developing and testing disaster recovery procedures is going to take even longer.

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

#304

Post by necovek »

bsenftner wrote: post #123
ti_ranger wrote: post #87

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. Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper? Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you a…

> Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem... It was far better to invest a little up front, and maintain at $600 my operations than the same for $96K a month, that's why. I never "lifted and shifted", I built and deployed, with physical servers, a 3-way duplicated environment that flew like a hot rod. At a fraction of cloud's expense.

I think the point GP was making is that you could have likely started off much cheaper, eg. with 2k/month of AWS costs before needing to "simply" scale at eg. 12 months, especially so if using managed services and not just bare ec2 instances.

I personally think there's room for both, and I think hybrids between on-prem and cloud are the ideal for long running apps: you size your on-prem infrastructure to handle 99% of the load, and scale to the cloud for that one-off peak.

That's still pretty complicated due to different types of vendor lock in (or lock out in some cases). Google has invested in k8s to get people some value for moving away from AWS.

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

#306

Post by jwr »

ti_ranger wrote: post #85
jwr wrote: post #21

When determining what to use for development of my SaaS, I did a comparison of what you actually get from providers. The full article is at https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-... My takeaways were that many cloud provider offerings make no sense whatsoever, and that Xeon processors are mostly great if you are a cloud provider and want to offer overbooked "vCPUs". I haven't tested those specif…

> When determining what to use for development of my SaaS, I did a comparison of what you actually get from providers. The full article is at https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance- ... Your results (e.g. that z1d.xlarge with 4 vCPUs is only 10% slower than z1d.2xlarge with 8 vCPUs) shows that the "performance" you were testing was disk IO throughput (probably dominated by disk latency), not vCPU…

> the "performance" you were testing was disk IO throughput

In part, yes, but not entirely. I was very clear that my load isn't embarrassingly parallel, so it is not expected to scale linearly with the number of processors.

> You seem to be implying that AWS/EC2 does CPU over-provisioning on all instance types; this is incorrect, only T-family instance types use CPU over-provisioning.

If you think you are getting a Xeon core when paying for a "vCPU" at AWS, I have a bridge to sell you.

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

#307

Post by dx034 »

thu2111 wrote: post #242
giantrobot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, it's an interactive database backed web site. That describes like maybe 90% of the things running on AWS. StackOverflow is useful because it reminds people that machines are fast, and you probably don't need that many of them to scale to large sizes. StackOverflow is used by the entire global population of developers more or less and it runs off of one large MS SQL Server + some web servers. No auto scaling (no…

Autoscaling is overused anyway. It's cheaper and much less complex to have 200-300% of average capacity running 24/7 on dedicated servers (OVH/Hetzner, whatever) than trying to scale up and down according to demand.

Changing capacity automatically always has the potential to backfire. And as AWS & Co need to keep those servers running during times of less demand there's no way it's cheaper unless you have really unusual traffic patterns (even then it's probably not).

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

#308

Post by dx034 »

tester756 wrote: post #289
monoideism wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I guess that without a lot of optimizations, .NET will be much more performant. The lower the performance, the more servers you need and that will make it harder to manage your fleet.

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

#309

Post by dx034 »

bluedino wrote: post #270
wazoox wrote: 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...

That's the nice thing about Hetzner, OVH and Co. You don't need Colocation but can instead rent servers monthly. That way you never have to bother with physical hardware, the knowledge needed is purely on the software side.

I also think colocation or own datacenters are a poor fit for most. But dedicated servers are underrated. They can be offered much cheaper as it's simply renting standard hardware and you don't need any of the expertise or size you'd need for colocation.

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

#310

Post by dx034 »

renewiltord wrote: post #120
hw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right? Where I work we've started non-AWS and have continued non-AWS. We don't have a team of devops engineers, but rather a team where there are a engineers who _…

Yeah but that's what capex based stuff (like buying and colocating) is: planning for scale. With AWS you think you need a robust DB and shit and you've made a decision that can be undone in minutes. You think you want Elasticache? It's a fifteen minute operation. In that time your devops guy isn't going to have even downloaded the binary and figured out the docs.

As I wrote further up, there's not just colocation and AWS. Dedicated servers are a great fit for many start ups and need no capex. You just rent hardware monthly like you lease most of your office equipment. Much cheaper than AWS, no hardware expertise needed and even (manual) scaling over time works quite well, it's easy to add servers within a day or so.

Sure, you'll always have idle capacity, but this way you could use it. With AWS, Amazon runs that idle capacity and charges you for it.

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