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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

#21

Post by emteycz »

sokoloff wrote: post #20
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.

Yeah, but when they do a blunder, they see they're not getting the results they expected and fix it, without any fear of 10x costs.

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

#22

Post by bsenftner »

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.

Yes, they are cheap. Running one's own server is also easy peasy; far too many think it is difficult, it is not. The most expensive part is the electricity.

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

#23

Post by fxtentacle »

Wholeheartedly agree. After my cloud storage costs exploded (mostly S3 egress over to Hetzner/OVH), I noticed that renting a 1GBit/s fiber connection to my office is actually quite affordable at $80 per month (in northern Germany).

Of course, it's not globally distributed and there is no fail-safe, but for the work we're doing, that is no issue. If we employees are offline, it doesn't matter if our tools are offline, too. And now that all AI storage is local anyway, building a GPU compute node is easy. I'm still waiting for 3090 prices to drop further, though, in contrast to the article. But I also went with Ryzon 5950 and Linux. I was positively surprised that 10G fiber networking is now down to $70 for a PCIe card + 20m cable kit. My workstation now has 1010MB/s 4k random write on the network filesystem. (We used SAMBA 3.1 and CIFS mounts)

I also grabbed the python/ubuntu package lists off Google Colab and created my own Docker to imitate it, and now data processing and AI training is fast (I always get the good GPU, no luck involved) and dirt cheap. Originally the idea was to run it on OVH, but I'm now also running it locally.

https://github.com/fxtentacle/ovh-colab-sagemaker-compatibil...

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

#24

Post by chrxr »

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…

Worth noting that using a gaming card for workloads like this would likely void the warranty.

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

#25

Post by croes »

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…

The dot-com bubble wasn't about SaaS companies but internet companies as such, basically everything with a .com address. Hence the name. It was more about e-commerce than SaaS. Especially because of the internet data rate in the late 90s.

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

#26

Post by 300bps »

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…

Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups.

I started an ISP in 1996 and had the same reaction you did to that statement in the article.

The only thing I’d add to what you said is the article said what drew them to the cloud - hefty free credits.

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

#27

Post by bsenftner »

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.

Unless, like OP, you work in a high compute field. High compute and the cloud simply do not mix, because the cloud is optimized for web apps, which require practically no real compute power. The cloud has it's purposes, as does the web, and they are not the only game in town.

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

#28

Post by lillecarl »

pzduniak wrote: post #11
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 regula…

This is what I've come to realise too, as long as you can and do stick your workloads in Kubernetes it doesn't really matter what he logo says.

EKS, AKE, GKE, LKE, DOKS, OKD, Rancher... Whatever they're all compatible with what you want to do. There are definitely upsides to the cloud, but Kubernetes is the common denominator everywhere.

Wanna run GPU workloads on-prem? Buy some servers and do so. The only hairy thing is managing your own storage, quite the responsibility. (Look at Atlassian right now).

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

#30

Post by pjmlp »

pzduniak wrote: post #11
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 regula…

Sure, but wait for certain HR departments or RFP documents requiring specific certificates as gatekeeping job or specific product deals, and so the business of cloud architect certification goes on.
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