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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?

#311

Post by dx034 »

Agathos wrote: post #178
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 _…

> 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? Especially when the alternative is to hear a lot of, "What? You don't expect to scale? I thought you took this seriously."

OVH and Hetzner could probably provide you with at least 100 top of the line servers within 24h (just guessed that, it's probably more). With a reasonable setup, that's much more than any start up will need to scale.

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

#312

Post by sgt »

kuon wrote: post #137
sgt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea, but remember that the SLA with your fiber provider doesn't mean your fiber magically will come back within a few hours when someone in the street cuts through the cable by accident. Your clients will still experience downtime unless you have two fiber lines going in different directions - completely redundant. If you don't have that, I would recommend some kind of a licensed microwave link on your ro…

We have a fallback coax connection going another way, it's only 500Mb/100Mb/s but it does the job if the fiber is cut. We are also working on having a 5G fallback just in case, as 5G bandwidth can be quite high on short range.

Sounds like you have a pretty decent set up then. With all the redundancies in place (and hopefully power redundancy too, batteries, generator) you can run mission critical software from there.

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

#313

Post by thu2111 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #253
thu2111 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If the primary benefit you're getting from the cloud is VMs, it's valid to compare to hardware. The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing.

VMs are certainly not the primary benefit of the cloud; cloud providers offer many services in addition to VM orchestration, but that hardly matters because your own example is illustrative of your error: > The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing. This implies human beings to handle raid and set up load balancing, which suggests that you need to…

Yes, you need to know how to use Linux. And as the article astutely points out, there is an undiscussed problem with UNIX skills loss across the industry. AWS provides GUIs and Linux doesn't - accepted.

However for the many, many people who do already have those skills, and for the many pieces of software that are basically web servers + databases, the overhead of bare metal vs cloud VMs or services is basically a bit of Linux sysadmin work. People are acting like you have to hire a full time wizard to even consider using anything other than high cost AWS services but that is wrong: AWS requires learning too, people who understand UNIX are plentiful even if apparently not as plentiful as they once were, and a well run setup will not require constant sysadmin work. A well rounded developer will often be able to do the ops work as well.

Also "bare metal" doesn't mean running your own datacenter. You can buy hardware, send it to a colo and they'll rack it and run the network for you. That's why I say it's mostly a matter of understanding RAID: when the hardware fails (almost always disk or less commonly, RAM units), you file a ticket, blink the HDD LED and some remote hands go and swap out the part for you. Those "hands as a service" come cheap compared to AWS.

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

#314

Post by dclusin »

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

Digital ocean droplet:

03:48:56 up 238 days, 15:04, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

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

#315

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

NoOneNew wrote: post #163
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've assumed this for a while, because so many companies appear to be doing this - do you have any links to the tax savings as I'd like to understand this in more detail?

A good base search would be "lease vs buy equipment tax benefits" for your country/state/city, just to get your feet wet. There are different incentives for different areas. From there, you should be able to google fu around for more information/tips/tricks. It's slightly not-straightforward stuff, but it's not terribly complicated after a little bit of reading. However, there's a reason why tax code books are so den…

Thank you!

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

#316

Post by jopsen »

crisper78 wrote: post #286
jopsen wrote: 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?

2 days isn't a strict limit :)

But I wouldn't want to maintain instances that aren't regularly cycled.

Then you have to install security updates and things like that.

I think many people today, only want to own the inside of their container, and only have the container exposed through a load balancer that has some sanity check on incoming traffic..

Most LBs won't forward non-HTTP requests, etc..

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

#317

Post by Aeolun »

crisper78 wrote: post #265
Aeolun wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, my company spends several millions a year on AWS, and they do it mostly so they don’t have to think too much about the hardware every team uses to implement their solutions. I’d say the strategy is an unmitigated success, even if it costs them 3 times more than a similar on-premise (or dedicated) solution would cost. My last company went the dedicated route, and they were perpetually in need of more serv…

My last company, went the dedicated route, had management that understood how much of a ripoff AWS/Azure/GCP was and hired people who know how a lot of apps are built and run, and didn't need to redevelop them to fit the architecture which costs a metric ton more with little benefit. Press releases are almost always complete BS from companies when it comes to tech, again not all but most, we saved x using some dubiou…

I wonder, what do you do if you want multi-region failover in your home setup?

I’m fully in agreement that owning your own hardware is cheaper. But if you want extreme redundancy as a company now and be mostly certain it works, you move to AWS instead of trying to build a team that will set that all up for you.

Also, when doing tensorflow things on AWS I can just temporarily rent that monster server with 12? GPU’s to train my model in a few hours, instead of waiting for my home server to do the same thing in days (even though that’s cheaper).

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

#318

Post by bsenftner »

necovek wrote: post #304
bsenftner wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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% o…

My application had (still would have) very high CPU requirements, and 2k/month would have got me spending more money than necessary. When I started I bought 1 server with the capacity I needed and put that in co-lo for $75 a month. That little puppie was equal to $10K a month at AWS, so why would I want to use AWS again? Just do the math, even 1 server out performs and is exponentially less expensive. The cloud has the majority of engineers looking like morons from a financial literacy perspective.

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

#319

Post by please-reread »

Znafon wrote: post #65
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS allows you to shift your costs from CapEx to OpEx. Companies with low CapEx are valued higher since "theoretically" you could remove that bill by moving to another provider. Financial Engineering is just another part of software engineering and the cloud enables it.

Except that nearly all companies greater than a certain size have an engagement with AWS so they shifted CapEx to CapEx.

> shifted CapEx to CapEx

or in other words, shifted nothing?

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

#320

Post by asymptotically3 »

hinkley wrote: post #291
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…

I have a small app I run just fine in Digital Ocean, but at work we care about not just geographical redundancy but geographical load balancing. Having user traffic cross the country puts you at a deficit for response times, and if that matters to your company, having servers close to clusters of users is a good thing. I can do that a little bit with DO. What are my options with OVH? I see them bragging about having…

>I can do that a little bit with DO. What are my options with OVH?

OVH have datacentres in multiple countries just like DO.

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