Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 218 posts

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

#41

Post by dahfizz »

ldoughty wrote: post #6

This is a good explanation of cloud issues for a company with resources and consistent workload... IaaS is not really competitive in this space, I don't think... If you have access to system admins, and have a consistent work load, you could avoid the cloud, trading the cloud premium for more employees and skills in your team. This is fine, if that is what you're team needs. The cloud is not a silver bullet that solv…

It takes just as much, if not more, IT work to maintain cloud infrastructure as local infra.

People who have never managed servers imagine them blowing up once a week or something.

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

#42

Post by vidarh »

croes wrote: post #25
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.

What it was "more about" is irrelevant the point is there was plenty of SaaS, and plenty of options to host them without owning servers. Many of us here we're around and running internet companies at the time.

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

#43

Post by maccard »

bsenftner wrote: post #22
xuki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The most expensive part is the electricity.

No, the most expensive part is the persons time for managing it. I can rent a monstrous Dedicated Server for $400/month from OVH, but even with a UK salary, if I have to spend more than 1 day a month on it in any shape or form (and that includes the initial setup), it's cheaper to use "the cloud" or some form of a managed service.

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

#44

Post by maccard »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #18
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.

I've spent a lot of time with Amazon's Architects who have given us a huge amount of advice on how we could reduce our costs. Maybe we've gotten lucky with our contact, but their approach for keeping us on AWS seems to be "provide enough value on top of AWS that the extra pricing doesn't really matter" mostly in the form of handing us architecture templates for common workflows that we've never set up.

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

#45

Post by jollybean »

Yeah, for on-prem scientific work, heavy CPU usage, probably bursty, no need for all the fancy things, security etc. - this is a pretty straight forward case for on-prem use.

Or not even on-prem, just renting some physical boxes from some place where they're only going to have a basic markup.

You have to wait a week to get few more boxes but that's not a big deal.

This is the kind of thing I'd imagine a corp would start doing pretty early, because the 'flexibility' of IaaS just isn't worth the cost.

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

#46

Post by vidarh »

bmj wrote: post #8

Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) companies. There were simply too many hurdles, and the expenses were too high — you’d have to purchase dedicated servers and a high bandwidth connection to handle a load of incoming visitors to your website, hire engineers to build a scalable system, and if you planned to go inte…

I cofounded an ISP in '95. There were plenty of alternatives offered by ISPs like mine. People often chose to host themselves when they had the skills, sure.

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

#48

Post by pjerem »

Nextgrid wrote: post #38
anonymousDan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with a good general understanding of systems (distributed systems, operating systems etc), but perhaps lacking in hands on experience of deploying in a specific cloud, what would you say the key things are to learn? For me they almost seem like trivial things you could pick up in no time on the job.

Product-specific functionality & configuration. Every cloud provider has their own product, features & configuration for the same basic thing. In the past, if you needed a load-balancer & reverse proxy you'd use Nginx or HAProxy regardless of the underlying machine. Now in the cloud, although you can technically run it on a VM, it's not "best practice" and you should instead reimplement it using your cloud vendor's p…

"In the past" ? My current employer, a high growth company uses HAProxy and Nginx in production with no plan to change anytime soon.

Those are not tools from the past. They still work really well and there is no law requiring your brand new startup to be on AWS.

Most companies (even more when they are B2B) have very predictable workloads.

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

#49

Post by charcircuit »

bob1029 wrote: post #2

> We do not have (yet) any public-facing applications that need to scale across multiple geographical zones and handle millions of requests per minute. Most don't. 1mm requests per minute is very pedestrian for a single vm in virtually all cases. 1mm per second is totally reasonable too if you are careful with a few things... I genuinely believe you could put the literal public Netflix biz experience on a single VM.…

What about Netflix's recommendation system and analytics?

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

#50

Post by reacharavindh »

The flexibility and scalability of the cloud comes at a cost. Scientific, static and non web but IO heavy workloads are almost always better off run on-prem or in a co-located data centre with servers paid up front. As is most things in businesses, it’s a trade-off one needs to think about and make. The smart ones will come out ahead, and those that blindly follow FAANG and drink their kool-aid may or may not come ahead, albeit with a heavy hit to their(or their VC’s) pocket.

If you’re a startup that simply have a bunch of web apps and APIs where uptime and network are your major costs, on-prem is only going to become a worthless headache.

A good Systems Engineer should help to figure out such choices. Anybody need one?

Post reply on HN