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

61–70 of 218 posts

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

#61

Post by fxtentacle »

GordonS wrote: post #60
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

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,…

> I was positively surprised that 10G fiber networking is now down to $70 for a PCIe card + 20m cable kit. Wow, that is surprising, maybe it's time I started upgrading my LAN...

I use Intel 82599ES SFP+ and a TL-SX3008F router. But let me warn you: Things are affordable, but NOT consumer-friendly. I needed to study the 500 page PDF manual and do basic link configuration through telnet via USB before I could connect to the router via Ethernet and use its web-GUI to finish the setup.

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

#62

Post by manigandham »

the_duke wrote: post #59
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…

In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. It took longer to provision than EC2 and all you had for storage is a fixed amount of disk, but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses.

Definitely more process involved, but the requirements were also simpler compared to sprawling modern architectures. I think the overall effort is similar, but was slower due to the speed of communications and paperwork at that time.

Getting hard assets is a core part of business in basically every industry, so I found it strange to claim that it was some major obstacle just because it happened to be servers instead of trucks or factory equipment.

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

#63

Post by stephbu »

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.

To add to this statement - don’t make any investment unless you have a solid plan to fully utilize it for the full length of the purchase terms. This applies as much to AWS @ minute terms, as it does to a rental @ daily terms, as it does to co-lo capital investment @ yearly terms.

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

#64

Post by Protostome »

zmmmmm wrote: post #29

Hope he's prepared for a letter from nVidia's lawyers for breaking their license agreement for the RTX3090's.

https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-workstations/vector

Lambda sells "GPU workstation built for Deep Learning" with RTX 3090.

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

#65

Post by rcarmo »

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.

Most of the skills are transferable. Yes, APIs and provisioning tools can be different, but Terraform and Kubernetes abstract a lot away unless you really need to use PaaS (which can be a lot more useful than VM-centric folk usually care for).

But anyone who’s done infra at scale can easily get up to speed on any of the big three—-as long as you take the time to understand the differences, and actually model costs before starting to play around.

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

#66

Post by v-yadli »

GordonS wrote: post #60
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

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,…

> I was positively surprised that 10G fiber networking is now down to $70 for a PCIe card + 20m cable kit. Wow, that is surprising, maybe it's time I started upgrading my LAN...

Actually if you have cat5 or cat6 base-T setup, you can get second hand dual port 10gbe pcie cards for 30 dollars each(!)

10GbE baseT switches are more expensive than fiber equivalent though.

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

#67

Post by ykevinator2 »

m348e912 wrote: post #55
bsenftner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Easy or not, it's a job. Configuring, patching, upgrading, troubleshooting, securing, monitoring. It's only not expensive if your time is worth nothing.

No post body was provided.

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

#68

Post by theta_d »

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.

In the 90s we didn’t use the term SaaS. It was ASP back then, Application Service Provider.

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

#69

Post by SpaceMartini »

I work in HPC for a cloud provider, and fully endorse this move. Anonymously, of course.

You can make an economic argument for or against cloud in practically every IT domain, but in HPC the case for on-prem is really compelling; none of the cloud networking/resiliency value-add is relevant to batch workflows, and costs per core-hour are only remotely comparable if you use spot - which is itself a major compromise.

The only real advantage cloud has for science is object storage, which is genuinely a much better idea than trying to manage your own long-term archival storage.

If I were independent I would recommend people buy and build on-prem clusters and shuffle data out of fast scratch into Glacier, but other than that just don't worry about cloud until price pressure kicks in and we are down to 1-2 cents per core-hour on-demand.

I'd love a role where I can say these things non-anonymously, but the salary for such a position would be at least 50% lower than working for a cloud provider. Keep that in mind when talking to your supplier - we may not believe the pitch ourselves, but making it is just part of the job.

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

#70

Post by vidarh »

maccard wrote: post #43
bsenftner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have to use more than one a day a month managing the server, you are doing something wrong.

I used to manage multiple racks worth of servers on top of managing the 1k containers running on them, maintaining the (pre-kubernetes) orchestration software I had written to deploy containers to our servers, and still had time left over to spend the majority of my time on the architecture and project management of new projects for clients.

Post reply on HN