Why We Moved Off The Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#41

Post by physcab » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 8:56 PM UTC

jbyers wrote: post #38

physcab wrote: post #31

This is somewhat unrelated, but I remember reading in one of Mixpanel's job posts that they had over 200 servers. 200 for a company of their size that charges by the data point seems kind of a lot. I've worked at a couple tech companies who get by with an order of magnitude less servers and deal with the same load that I bet they deal with. So either they were exaggerating by re-defining what a "server" was in the cl…

Or you bet wrong about the load they deal with. They may also have higher availability requirements than most companies and need 2X (more?) the infrastructure to protect against a data collection failure. They may be counting nodes used periodically, e.g. a large Hadoop map-reduce run. Edit: don't get me wrong -- 200 servers is a lot. :)

I wouldn't doubt it. But they also don't publish any figures so its difficult to confirm. I work for one of their competitors and we most likely have the same availability requirements... anyways, just curious. Here's where we're at, as a comparison http://bit.ly/qLrKOt

edit: looks like they did publish some figures :) http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/mixpanel-billion-datapoints...

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#42

Post by jbrendel » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

Engineering is always about making the right compromises. Why does it have to be 100% dedicated or 100% cloud? What most people don't realize is that it really is a continuum.

For example, why not run the disk performance sensitive DB server on a dedicated machine, while fronting the whole arrangement with proxies and app-servers hosted in the cloud? Ok, so there are latency considerations to be made, but you can see that mixed architectures can make sense.

I think what's stopping people from considering this is that there haven't been good cross-provider network virtualization solutions available. But if you could create your own network topology and your own layer 2 broadcast domains, no matter where your machines are located, things are starting to look up.

There are a number of network virtualization providers out there now, which you might want to look at to see what's possible. Disclaimer: I work for vCider ( http://vcider.com ), which provides solutions for on-demand virtualized networks, which can span providers and data centers.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#43

Post by noodle » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:02 PM UTC

crag wrote: post #22

noodle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short. smaller businesses where economies of scale don't kick in, and/or smaller businesses that want to hedge their bets on growth.

Except of course when that small business relays to much on the cloud. I know a local gym that decided to "host" their cash register. I told the owner it was a mistake. He basically said I was suck in the past. Until his Comcast went/slowed down. Or a local non-profit who's board came up with a great way to save money - host their phone system in the cloud. A local carrier was happy to sign them to a 3 year contact.…

those are examples of people making (or being sold on) poor choices and/or not having all information necessary to make an informed choice.

the cloud is not for everyone. physical servers aren't for everyone, either. stories like these don't automatically imply that using the cloud is a bad idea for everyone.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#44

Post by joshaidan » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

The disk problem is always something I've always been fighting with when it comes to virtual private servers. I've never had to do so much optimizations with dedicated servers as I had to do with VPSs.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#45

Post by hasanove » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:09 PM UTC

Not to mention, that if you _really_ need to, you can spin cloud instances at Softlayer as well. We are running on dedicated hardware most of the time, but if we anticipate a temporary and significant influx of the traffic, we run a few additional pre-built Cloud Computing Units (as they call it) and are ready in 20 minutes.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#46

Post by jedberg » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:09 PM UTC

powertower wrote: post #11

> One last thing about getting dedicated hardware. It's cheaper a lot cheaper. We have machines that give us 2-4x performance that cost less than half as much as their cloud equivalents and we're not even co-locating. I've been saying this for ages, and every time people would fall over backwards trying to defend/prove their cloud mistake... "The cloud is cheaper, faster, and infinitely scalable." Except none of thos…

> The moment a popular site like Reddit switches to the cloud, is the moment it becomes barely usable during certain times of the day.

That's completely false. The moment reddit blogged about moving to the cloud, it was * perceived* as being slower.

The cloud move happened 7 months before the blog post came out.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#47

Post by fleitz » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:14 PM UTC

tabizzle wrote: post #27

Can the multi-tenant problem be solved by just using the beefiest EC2 instance available? At some point don't you become the only one occupying that box? And if your site has the volume that MixPanel does, I assume you wouldn't be exposing yourself to single-point-of-failure issues because you'd still have many such boxes. Can someone more knowledgeable please address these?

It could, but it can also be solved reliably by buying your own hardware tailored to the needs of your specific application.

Single point of failure issues aren't solved by the cloud. Their solved by eliminating single points of failure. 1 VM is just as much of a single point of failure as one real machine.

Even if it were true about buying the beefiest VM you're betting your company on an implementation detail that you have no control over.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#48

Post by jedberg » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:18 PM UTC

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers.

You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years).

This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#49

Post by papercruncher » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:31 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #48

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers. You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years). This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Dedicated implies that only your bits run on that hardware which is huge for I/O.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#50

Post by jedberg » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

papercruncher wrote: post #49

jedberg wrote: post #48

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers. You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years). This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Dedicated implies that only your bits run on that hardware which is huge for I/O.

> Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Dedicated implies that only your bits run on that hardware which is huge for I/O.

True, but the blog post didn't say if they are using virtualization or not.