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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

#101
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?

Certainly not going to fit on the real-time production instance, but two computers isn't a whole lot more than one considering how many extra features we just added.

There is a lot of elegance with this type of setup too. You can have your analytics system receive a synchronous replicated log from the production system (what else is it gonna analyze?), so it can also double as a manual failover site.

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

#102
post #76
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…

We noticed that our RTXs, although considered gaming cards, are comparable (if not better) in performance to Tesla V100 You don't buy Tesla cards because you care about maximizing operations pr second, you buy them because you care about operations pr KWh.

No, you buy tesla cards so Nvidia doesn't sue you and stop providing firmware.

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

#103
post #94

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.

Been a sysadmin for many years. Your right, for a few computers. Once you start getting into more than a quarter rack, you also need to start worrying about cooling (which also is lots of electricity) and usually things like ensuring the electricity stays on. (UPS, generator, etc). Don't forget to monitor and service all this stuff regularly. Once your past a few racks of equipment, you have generator tests and servi…

In the bad old days we bought our own servers and rented rack space in a datacenter they took care of all the hardware management, we looked after the software.

Mind you this was only about 4U worth.

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

#104
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still use them. Easier than fiddling with AWS.

The biggest thing for me is no surprise bills. Sure, it's pretty unlikely that a t2.small instance and its associated storage and network subscriptions are going to produce a $1000 bill one day, but there's literally no way to set a hard cap on billing so clearly Amazon thinks it might be possible.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear that said a lot. I don’t think it stands. A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. The cloud actually requires more investment for large organisations. Previously you might of only had a handful of sysadmins but now you have a large dedicated platform team doing devops type work building…

> A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. Ani. If the hardware you’re running on is dying. In ec2 you stop it and start it. It’s on new hardware. If you run bare metal you’re screwed. Disk is dying ? Don’t matter cos your data exists multiple times over in AWS elastic storage. With bare metal y…

The cost isn't gone. It's just included. Fact is, at scale, it's still cheaper to do it yourself. You just need to reach the scale it's worth paying people to do the managing.

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

#106
post #37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all commercial use of the consumer grade nVidia products prohibited under that license? I thought (and this seems to agree: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/geforce-license/ ) that it was just use in a datacenter that was prohibited.

I reckon they will consider what he has constructed to be a data center. A lot of places do it and just fly under the radar, but if you're going to publish a blog post bragging about it and how much money you are saving ...

They run two GPUs. I highly doubt NVIDIA, their lawyers, or a judge would consider that a datacenter. The license is clearly directed at a different crowd.

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

#107
post #37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all commercial use of the consumer grade nVidia products prohibited under that license? I thought (and this seems to agree: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/geforce-license/ ) that it was just use in a datacenter that was prohibited.

I reckon they will consider what he has constructed to be a data center. A lot of places do it and just fly under the radar, but if you're going to publish a blog post bragging about it and how much money you are saving ...

I don't think so. These are just workstations. It's not like they have a a rack full of 4u servers with RTX3900s and even then it's for their own usage.

The RTX datacenter restriction as far as read, but not a lawyer, is for data center providers like aws, ovh, hetzner etc to provide servers with these gpu and rent them.

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

#108
There are a lot of hidden costs for not using a cloud too. One of them is security. Frankly, you won't come up with anything better than AWS IAM in the short term. If you don't care much about that, then it is a different story, but I am happy to pay the premium knowing that all data is adequately encrypted and all lambda functions have the minimum permissions required to run.

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

#109
"First, it’s important to note that Enzymit’s use of cloud computing mainly entailed computationally intensive calculations for protein design"

So they got a very specific workload that is easy to run on any infra including on-prem.

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

#110
post #37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all commercial use of the consumer grade nVidia products prohibited under that license? I thought (and this seems to agree: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/geforce-license/ ) that it was just use in a datacenter that was prohibited.

I reckon they will consider what he has constructed to be a data center. A lot of places do it and just fly under the radar, but if you're going to publish a blog post bragging about it and how much money you are saving ...

It doesn't matter if they consider these 3 servers to be a "datacenter." There are legal definitions[0] that this usage doesn't fit in at all. Unless nvidia provides a different definition in their license (which they don't)

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/17112#a_1

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