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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?

#321

Post by hinkley »

asymptotically3 wrote: post #320
hinkley wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are parts of the US that are still pretty far from the nearest DO data center. If I go AWS I don't have that problem.

I should clarify that I am playing devil's advocate here. I've never been pro-Amazon (although I slipped for a bit there, I'm feeling much better again), they just have answers for some questions that I don't.

Or at least, not until multi-cloud is on everyone's radar. The combined coverage map of any two AWS competitors generally looks more competitive, but we collectively have to 'work' on the people who think that would be too hard.

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

#322

Post by cecja »

deadbunny wrote: post #290
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

Please patch your systems.

There is no need to patch if there is no attack surface.

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

#323

Post by csense »

I know someone who needed to run a large-ish distributed workload. The project had a pretty respectable budget (I think more than $10k, less than $1M).

They were going to rent DigitalOcean servers, because benchmarks showed they were the cheapest hosting provider around.

Then their account got banned due to "patterns associated with cryptocurrency mining." And they had no way to get in contact with a human, appeal the ban and explain their situation.

(Interesting side-note: Even if they were doing cryptocurrency mining, AFAICT it isn't against DigitalOcean ToS.)

They ended up switching to another provider (Linode I think?)

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, it's an example of a cheap provider who has good paper specs and even good benchmarks. But when you actually try to use the platform at scale, you'll discover there's some catch and you can't actually use it.

(I speculate that maybe DigitalOcean madly oversubscribes physical CPU, so anyone who actually uses the resources they pay for trips the automated system and gets their account banned, because DigitalOcean can't both keep their cheap prices and pay for the engineering effort to figure out how to throttle customers who peg their CPU. So they make enough money to stay in business from websites and non-CPU-heavy workloads, but have to use the backdoor "cryptocurrency mining" banning excuse to turn away customers who basically want to buy CPU-hours.)

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

#324

Post by Spivak »

erikbye wrote: post #297
mwcampbell wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do failover if a server fails or if connectivity to one of those datacenters is lost? With AWS I could just set up a multi-availability-zone RDS deployment for the database and an auto-scaling group for the web tier and be confident that AWS will recover the system from most failures. To me, that is the major selling point of any of the hyperscale cloud providers.

> How do you do failover if a server fails Not sure if you do not know anything about typical ESXi and vSphere setups, but if a server fails, all virtual machines are automatically migrated to a healthy server. And of course, your HPE G10s are compute only, all storage is on the fiber channel connected SAN.

Yep! We have a KVM and Ceph based setup but it's basically the same as you describe.

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

#325

Post by Spivak »

mwcampbell wrote: post #90
Spivak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we colo at a few local datacenters and have do deal with a huge amount of pressure from our investors as to why we're not using AWS. The points that always seem to come up: * AWS is a known quantity and it's easier to evaluate our business with it. * AWS provides "outage damage control" because AWS outages make the news and customers are more understanding. When our ISP has issues it just looks bad on u…

How do you do failover if a server fails or if connectivity to one of those datacenters is lost? With AWS I could just set up a multi-availability-zone RDS deployment for the database and an auto-scaling group for the web tier and be confident that AWS will recover the system from most failures. To me, that is the major selling point of any of the hyperscale cloud providers.

Physical hardware failures are handled by having everything in VMs and storage handled by Ceph. We can lose plenty of physical boxes simultaneously before we run into capacity issues.

Multi-DC failover is handled by announcing our public IP block at both locations with different weights. It’s technically active/active because traffic can come in at the secondary DC but we have a internal site-to-site VPN that is used to direct traffic to the primary. If the primary DC goes down the secondary starts handling the traffic instead of passing it along. All the database masters flip to the secondary and things keep humming along.

If we lose the site-to-site then the secondary stops advertising altogether and all traffic is forced to the primary.

So we can lose the site-to-site (which is dedicated) or one of the DCs at any time.

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

#326

Post by vaccinator »

speedgoose wrote: post #145
vaccinator wrote: post #69

Why not just buy the hardware and save even more then?

It depends on your needs. Buying hardware still make sense in some scenarios where quality of service is not a thing, you have space and some time.

yeah if you have a little time, you can save a lot

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

#327

Post by suifbwish »

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…

As someone who has built out over 30 different accounts in AWS for various clients, this is definitely not entirely accurate. Elasticache is a caching mechanism not a database. Anyone who thinks they are the same has not used them extensively. Also RDS and Aurora both have had their super privileges removed so you might have to possibly overhaul some of your code base just to make it work. I’m sensing some uninformed fan base propaganda here

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

#328

Post by tatersolid »

erikbye wrote: post #297
mwcampbell wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do failover if a server fails or if connectivity to one of those datacenters is lost? With AWS I could just set up a multi-availability-zone RDS deployment for the database and an auto-scaling group for the web tier and be confident that AWS will recover the system from most failures. To me, that is the major selling point of any of the hyperscale cloud providers.

> How do you do failover if a server fails Not sure if you do not know anything about typical ESXi and vSphere setups, but if a server fails, all virtual machines are automatically migrated to a healthy server. And of course, your HPE G10s are compute only, all storage is on the fiber channel connected SAN.

You don’t get 17 server licenses for vSphere or a SAN for $55k as outlined above. More like $500k plus another $100k/year in maintenance.

You’re still paying a cloud provider, but in this case it’s VMware

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

#329

Post by kikimora »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #159
tw04 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? 10Gbe ethernet was standard in 2013/2014. Space power and cooling is company dependent. If they're tiny, a closet in the building or a colocation facility, if they're larger, a room. If they're huge, a datacenter. >What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mb…

> Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago. The argument isn't that they are solved or not, but the cost of implementing and maintaining them vs AWS.

I never say a whop running on AWS and not having a person managing it. Said person always has enough skill to replicate same setup on a dedicated hardware/VPS. I don't say such shops does not exists, it just I never saw them.

To me AWS killer features are RDS and ability to provision 100 servers in a few minutes. Most of the time scaling is not needed and RDS alone cannot justify the cost of AWS.

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

#330

Post by kikimora »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #100
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…

> You'll pay more than the price difference for someone to implement all of that from scratch. This is a common trap for startups. AWS has been around long enough that everyone has a 1st-hand or 2nd-hand horror story about someone with a $5000/month AWS bill for a basic website. This creates a false narrative that AWS is bad and or dangerously expensive. Or worse, that clever devops engineers can simply roll their ow…

Can you share a story about how AWS helped to remove or redeuce spend on devops? In my experience with AWS you would get $5000/month for a basic website and also would be paying devops to manage AWS.
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