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We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

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Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#11

Post by pzduniak »

lvl102 wrote: post #4

I hate the fact that hiring now basically requires cloud experience specific to vendors. This is basically going to force people into one of the three major cloud platforms.

Eh, it depends on the features that you're using. As long as you stick to the basic stack of Terraform + Kubernetes / IaaS with cloudinit + networking + S3-compatible storage API, you can quite easily jump between clouds. Sure, the logic that sets them up is different, but the concepts are generally roughly the same. Even if I end up choosing a managed service, I always implement a second OSS backend that gets regularly tested.

Every day I deal with AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud. Previously I used DigitalOcean and OVH. I have no issues onboarding people to work with the less popular options - as long as they get how Kubernetes / Linux / containers work, it's pretty good.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#13

Post by lioeters »

Just want to highlight how futuristic the author's title is: "Computational Biologist, Head of Protein Design @ Enzymit".

Why they moved to on-prem: lower and more predictable cost. At a public cloud provider, they lost thousands of dollars (of free credit they had) through "architectural blunders". And the running cost of GPU, CPU, storage, and data transfer summed up to $10K a month - at which point they figured they might as well purchase their own compute servers.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#14

Post by xuki »

manigandham wrote: post #9

> "Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS" Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups. There was even a little event called the dotcom boom all about internet companies. This lack of history and experience is why new companies get into this cloud-first mess in the first place. Cloud is primarily for flexibility in iteration, dynamic scaling, or…

I'd say don't even consider colo unless you have a specific use case. Rented dedicated servers are cheap, let someone else take care of the hardware.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#15

Post by manigandham »

xuki wrote: post #14
manigandham wrote: post #9

> "Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS" Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups. There was even a little event called the dotcom boom all about internet companies. This lack of history and experience is why new companies get into this cloud-first mess in the first place. Cloud is primarily for flexibility in iteration, dynamic scaling, or…

I'd say don't even consider colo unless you have a specific use case. Rented dedicated servers are cheap, let someone else take care of the hardware.

True, there's a wide spectrum in the middle from rented colo to managed servers.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#16

Post by raelmebrand »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #7
recuter wrote: post #3

After spending $100k in a year.. After doing the math, We decided to purchase three workstations at a total cost of $17k. One is a GPU-based workstation with two RTX 3090s and an Intel i9–12900 CPU, and another two workstations with 16 cores AMD Ryzen 5950X CPUs. It took us a few FTE days to set those up to our satisfaction with slurm, NFS, backups, and several other services. We noticed that our RTXs, although consi…

> They did the math. And bought 3 workstations instead of 3 servers. IMHO the headline of "Why Enzymit Decided to Build its Own On-Prem HPC Infrastructure" is a bit... stretched.

This is how universities (or people from academic background) interpret...

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#17

Post by goodpoint »

lvl102 wrote: post #4

I hate the fact that hiring now basically requires cloud experience specific to vendors. This is basically going to force people into one of the three major cloud platforms.

AKA lock-in. It was their strategy all along and the developer community fell for the trap once again.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#18

Post by tonyedgecombe »

lioeters wrote: post #13

Just want to highlight how futuristic the author's title is: "Computational Biologist, Head of Protein Design @ Enzymit". Why they moved to on-prem: lower and more predictable cost. At a public cloud provider, they lost thousands of dollars (of free credit they had) through "architectural blunders". And the running cost of GPU, CPU, storage, and data transfer summed up to $10K a month - at which point they figured th…

>"architectural blunders"

I wonder how much of this is by design. It seems it is in Amazon's interest to keep their systems and pricing as opaque as possible.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#19

Post by uniqueuid »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #7
recuter wrote: post #3

After spending $100k in a year.. After doing the math, We decided to purchase three workstations at a total cost of $17k. One is a GPU-based workstation with two RTX 3090s and an Intel i9–12900 CPU, and another two workstations with 16 cores AMD Ryzen 5950X CPUs. It took us a few FTE days to set those up to our satisfaction with slurm, NFS, backups, and several other services. We noticed that our RTXs, although consi…

> They did the math. And bought 3 workstations instead of 3 servers. IMHO the headline of "Why Enzymit Decided to Build its Own On-Prem HPC Infrastructure" is a bit... stretched.

Well, they do use slurm, so it's technically a HPC stack.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#20

Post by sokoloff »

lioeters wrote: post #13

Just want to highlight how futuristic the author's title is: "Computational Biologist, Head of Protein Design @ Enzymit". Why they moved to on-prem: lower and more predictable cost. At a public cloud provider, they lost thousands of dollars (of free credit they had) through "architectural blunders". And the running cost of GPU, CPU, storage, and data transfer summed up to $10K a month - at which point they figured th…

Now, when they make blunders, they don’t see an overt bill for them and are thereby happier.
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