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Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

tech.ahrefs.com

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Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#121

Post by Symbiote »

oxfordmale wrote: post #81
botsbreeder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be 1000% in our comparison

Your calculation is over simplified. For example, hardware just doesn't run for five years without glitch once once you have multiple servers. For sure Cloud is more expensive, as it charges a premium for not having to invest upfront in a lot of hardware, however,if it was 1000% no one would be using the Cloud.

Scaling how often I have failures on my 80 servers, of which 50 are similar in spec to Ahrefs (16 HDDs), it should still be less than one full-time position to manage 850 servers. Probably much less, as I'm a bit inefficient when it's I have a fixed day or two each year working out what to buy and getting quotes (which would be the same time whether it's 20 or 200 servers), half a day per 20 servers for installation in racks, and call it half a day per 20 for initial configuration (most of the time to script the process, so it would also be similar for 200). After that, it's at absolute most an hour every couple of months to deal with a failed disc or similar.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#122

Post by Symbiote »

topicseed wrote: post #117
Symbiote wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can obviously buy servers from HP or Dell. I have about 80 in a colo datacentre. Power, air-conditioning, security etc isn't my problem. That's what we pay the colo for. I go there about once a year to install new servers, and about once at some other point in the year to replace a failed disk. I've taken various developers who are interested each time, so if I'm out of town there are several people who can cover…

To be fair, this sounds a lot of to do items that I don't want to do.

I think it's nice to have a completely different type of work a couple of days per year.

I've found there's generally developers who are into building custom gaming PCs or Raspberry Pis or whatever who are interested to see the servers and lend a hand installing new ones.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#123

Post by ReflectedImage »

bfeynman wrote: post #46
steve1977 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need headcount to manage systems on AWS. And not really fewer then if you would run them locally. Source: managed systems locally, am now managing systems on AWS

if you think you need more headcount to do things on cloud you're doing it wrong. Just the identity setup alone needs multiple people, and that's almost a full time job for them. On cloud you don't have to worry about that at all, and it comes with full auditibility and compliance.

Cloud requires a giant team of people working on cost management for any none trivial project. You ain't saving headcount.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#124

Post by thesh4d0w »

oxfordmale wrote: post #54
dtech wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that you have to do "extra" compared to managing the hardware yourself. E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

For example, hardware doesn't just survive five years. As the hardware ages, the failure rate will increase. This calculation doesn't even mention this at all.

They're using Dell and I would assume bought a 5 year warranty, so they don't have to factor that in.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#125

Post by fidgewidge »

oxfordmale wrote: post #89
warent wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When consulting for a seed funded startup, I suggested they buy their own servers and colocate them. It could save them almost 100k a year. Everyone looked at me like an alien speaking a different language, lol. Then was politely dismissed, even though I'm experienced in running hardware. AWS, GCP, Azure, really managed to expertly pull off the greatest heist of all time. They're useful for sure, but somehow they've…

Buying your own server requires an upfront investment. AS 90% of start-ups fail, hiring your computing resource flexibly is far better, even if it comes at a higher cost. Once your company is mature and relatively stable, it is worth considering if hosting your infrastructure is more cost-effective.

So don't buy them, rent them. There are plenty of points on the spectrum between buying your own HW and EC2.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#126

Post by fidgewidge »

oxfordmale wrote: post #75
cs702 wrote: post #2

I recently heard from a senior IT person that the company for which he works could save many millions by moving a certain application from a hairball of micro-services at AWS to a much simpler architecture on colocated servers... but the company's management doesn't want to hear any of it. In fact, management wants IT to move every legacy application that's not yet on the cloud to the cloud, specifically to AWS, beca…

On-Premise Indirect (Hidden) Costs There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” expenses due to how often they are overlooked rather than “hidden.” These include: The real estate of the storage space used for the servers Tools used for temperature control in the data center The cost of set up, configurati…

You speak like clouds never have downtime, or don't charge you for space and power. Look at the article - that one company would needed to have paid more than their entire revenue to AWS for worse hardware. They'd have spent $400M in 3 years on the cloud! There are no "hidden costs" that can even begin to approach a fraction of that.

As for staff salaries, lol. It's not like AWS is self administering.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#127

Post by fidgewidge »

mirochnik wrote: post #4
cs702 wrote: post #2

I recently heard from a senior IT person that the company for which he works could save many millions by moving a certain application from a hairball of micro-services at AWS to a much simpler architecture on colocated servers... but the company's management doesn't want to hear any of it. In fact, management wants IT to move every legacy application that's not yet on the cloud to the cloud, specifically to AWS, beca…

This is a new type of conflict of interests. I assumed only good intentions from IT guys. But you're right that some of them may be more interested in complexity of used solutions, bigger budgets, and their personal job security than in company results and sustainability.

It's not like they want complexity, it's the latter: the "nobody ever got fired for buying AWS" problem. They stated it explicitly. They're terrified of anything counter-cultural or that seems to be going against the tide because they want to be seen as in the future and not stuck in the past. Fashion, FOMO and weakness combine to yield a "cloud at any cost" mentality.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#128

Post by fidgewidge »

turtlebits wrote: post #113
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #3

I often fantasize about moving a bunch of my company's crap off of ECS/EKS and onto a managed colo with just old-school ansible deployments. I've even spec'd out some bare metal from our local colocation facility and the servers they offer are so ridiculously powerful and CHEAP. We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS. But alas, nobody will ever go for it and I'm left…

Who’s going to be on call for hardware failures? Who is going to build/manage your monitoring/alerting stack? Will you hire a network engineer? Will you have redundant hardware running to failover to? What about disaster recovery, are you going to colo in more than 1 physical data center?

None of these are the gotchas cloud people seem to think they are. The answers look like this.

Who's going to be on-call: the same people who are on call now. HW failures don't need special on-call people.

Who is going to build/manage your monitoring/alerting stack. Same people as now. Your servers are monitored, right? Adding RAID into the mix is hardly difficult.

Will you hire a network engineer? No, colos will often offer to manage the network for you up to the switch and at that point it's just a matter of plugging the server in. You don't need any expertise to do that and remote hands can do it for you.

Redundant hardware? Only if you need it currently. HW is reliable these days and you'd going to have spare capacity anyway, so this really doesn't change much.

Disaster recovery? Take whatever answer you currently have in the cloud for multi-AZ.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#129

Post by Symbiote »

manv1 wrote: post #109
hotpotamus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRACs are a Dell specific term for what is generically known as IPMI or out of band management. They were quite well developed when I worked on servers well over a decade ago now. The good ones are basically as independent of the system they're attached to as possible and essentially give you the equivalent of physical access to a server.

I know what DRACs are (it's Dell's LOM). I asked whether the DRAC bios stuff required a reboot.

I have rarely needed to make changes, but if I recall correctly there were some settings that would take effect immediately, and others that required a reboot. I'd need to refer to the documentation.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#130

Post by fidgewidge »

dtech wrote: post #26
nik736 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

Anything that you have to do "extra" compared to managing the hardware yourself. E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

Do you think that would make any impact at all when they'd be looking at a $400M difference in hardware costs? People these days act like you need 5 PhDs to plug in a computer, it's insane.
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