It is a question of the firm's model. A one time cost + electricity - depreciation or a recurring, variable monthly cost that may exceed the the cost of the hardware?
I have two used workstations that cost less than 6 months of GCE time. Does that work for me? yes might not work for others. (especially if the workstation dies)
We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
111–120 of 218 posts
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#112Just 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…
Nice to see how this move can be an architectural blunder by itself.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I can only speak for the last 15 years or so, but any time I rented virtual or dedicated servers the experience was basically the same as ordering a book from Amazon: you create an account, select what you want and how you want to pay, the next day you have an email with IP and credentials. Of course since then things have improved and you can now expect your sever to be provisioned within minutes, along with a nice…
Well speaking about the last 15 years, so 2007 to today, for me it was the same as modern clouds - register, add a credit card, order a server, few minutes later the root password arrives in e-mail. And oldschool LAMP webhosting is basically serverless cloud.
Edit: Actually I remember using actual cloud provider back in 2008 - it was called Virtualmaster, one of the first cloud providers in central EU. They offered a free (!) VPS with 256 MB RAM and 1/4 CPU - I had a minimalist Debian image that allowed me to run full LAMP stack on it and an IRC client in tmux session.
Another cool central EU provider was 4smart. Their offering used to be that you only paid for resources you actually used - but for VMs. If you consumed only 10MB RAM, you only paid for that. I had servers cheaper than 1 EUR/month running continuosly with their own IPv4 there. They changed the pricing structure after few years.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Use https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ then...
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thin…
GCE https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/c... GKE https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/cluster-autos... AWS https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/blob/master/cluster... Azure https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/blob/master/cluster... Alibaba Cloud https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/blob/master/cluster... Brightbox https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/blob/master/clust…
Most of those seem to be kubernetes autoscaler plugins that allow your cluster to manage resources in that cloud. That's quite different from cloud providers managing the cluster.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#116> "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…
Of course. I stumbled on that sentence too. Maybe he meant something else or he is very young. The only difference was that they were called ASPs, not SaaSs.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#117On premise can be a lot cheaper for bandwidth intensive app. We have a 10gbit/s dedicated fiber we use at like 80%, it cost us 1500$ per month (power+fiber). This kind of bandwidth is 10 to 100 times more expensive on the cloud depending on the service. Of course, no CDN, but as our customers are mostly local, we don't need global presence.
Also, we serve this from a single epyc based server, using elixir/phoenix. It's at about 6gbit/s outbound traffic. I realize this is not uber redundant, but it works and keep the costs low.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's what I did. A few months ago, I bought 2 10GbE NICs off Ebay to connect my main desktop and basement server directly. I already had cat 6a running between them.
Some advice: make sure you know the form factor of your NICs. I accidentally bought FlexibleLOM cards. They look suspiciously like PCIe x8, but won't quite fit. FlexibleLOM to PCIe x8 adapters are cheap though.
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#119After 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 also had a static workload, with no changing requirements, or really any need for scalability. They also had FTEs with experience to configure the systems (which for a lot of us technical people is a no-brainer, but if you had data scientists with no hardware experience, that might be different) This worked for them, and I'm happy for them.. the cloud does not solve all problems... It's simply one hardware strat…
That’s ok.
If you need a pickup truck two weekends a year, rent. If you need to carry tools and stuff every day, buy!
Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
#120Earlier 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…
>Disk is dying ? Don’t matter cos your data exists multiple times over in AWS elastic storage. With bare metal you got to shut down and replace.
Not really, this is what RAID is for