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Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

theregister.com

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Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#91

Post by sgjohnson »

It's true even for hobbyist-scale. I can rent 1/3rd of a rack at Hetzner facility in Helsinki for €120/month. They'll even throw in a BGP session, 1gbit uplink and 2TB of traffic for free.

Sure, I need to put a physical server in there, but it's not hard to get something decent for €300-ish on ebay.

And €120/month is nothing for rack space when comparing to how easy it is to rack up an AWS bill. Also, it's 14U space, so scaling is also quite trivial.

And this is Hetzner, getting a 2U space in some local datacenter might be even cheaper.

I'm actually strongly considering doing this, cause currently I'm renting 2 dedis from them at about €90/month. If I need more capacity, it's definitely going to be cheaper in the long run to just colocate.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#92

Post by re-thc »

bob1029 wrote: post #84
mabbo wrote: post #20

My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. Exactly. I cringe every time I look at the AWS/Azure running total, but at the same time I realize that paying a separate team would be even more ludicrous at our current scale . Right now, I can single-handedly administer 100% of our IT infrastructure as barely a side-co…

There's always the in-between. It's not a manage your own physical server or nothing scenario.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#93

Post by dboreham »

samelrici wrote: post #39

Why don't companies just use hosting services such as Hetzner? way cheaper expecially for bandwidth, you don't have to pay the hardware costs, and you can scale

Plenty of companies to that, have rented bare metal, have owned bare metal, etc. It's just not a very visible practice and not backed by armies of marketers.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#94

Post by re-thc »

bauruine wrote: post #49
DeathArrow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware But you pay for a team to manage the cloud instances and services. Usually more than the hardware guys.

Most of the hardware stuff is done by the data center anyway. You just create a ticket for remote hands and the data center staff is going to rack the server you sent them or replace a hard disk etc.

Not so true. Not all remote hands are made equal. Some are there just for simple repairs / maintenance tasks. Don't be surprised that it may need a lot more hand holding.

Experienced it all first hand.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#95

Post by re-thc »

bsenftner wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people to do the spreadsheet. There is a point at which bare metal or colo becomes cheaper and that point will depend on your work load. If it’s outbound bandwidth intensive that point will come sooner than say a storage intensive work load. You always hear stories like this where people didn’t do that and were lazy and massively overpaid on cloud.

I am often surprised how people in our field don't run the numbers, so they are not talking nonsense when these hard numbers are so easy to generate. Also, people seem to forget that not all startups are consumer lo-CPU requiring applications. If one has a product that requires non-trivial compute, going immediately colo can be essential. In my own previous startup, my calculations showed an AWS monthly expense of $9…

Sadly with "microservices" and "microfrontends" and what not, it does become a CPU/memory expenditure.

Every split service has overhead and requires some minimal allocation to start its own server, own database etc.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#96

Post by ckozlowski »

There's a major element missing from these discussions, and I'm stunned I don't see it in the comments either. And that is,

...what happens when things go wrong?

One of the major advantages of cloud, be it AWS, Azure, GCP, etc, is the ability to bridge across failure domains. Properly architected, a workload can be resilient in the face of data center outages and circuit breaks.

To me, these savings from operating in a single colo are living on borrowed time. Because they're one data center fire or cable break away from failure. Can the workload survive a sudden outage for hours? A day? Will it survive a loss of the data center and implementation of the business continuity plan? (There is a plan, right?)

Every organization is different of course, and not everyone needs active-active failover, or 4-nines of availability, etc. But when figures of $400m start getting thrown around, I can't imagine it's in a state where "oh, we'll just rebuild it elsewhere" is the plan.

Show me where they achieve these savings and still have a viable DR/COOP, and I'll be impressed.

Disclaimer: I'm a TAM for AWS

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#97

Post by dboreham »

ckozlowski wrote: post #96

There's a major element missing from these discussions, and I'm stunned I don't see it in the comments either. And that is, ...what happens when things go wrong? One of the major advantages of cloud, be it AWS, Azure, GCP, etc, is the ability to bridge across failure domains. Properly architected, a workload can be resilient in the face of data center outages and circuit breaks. To me, these savings from operating in…

You use more than one colo. Nothing about not using AWS says you need to not care about HA.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#98

Post by re-thc »

eastbound wrote: post #64
vidarh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was doing devops consulting, my "cloud clients" were always by far my most profitable, because they were so used to that and so blind to the cost savings they could get.

Maybe the people running on the cloud are, therefore, efficient businesses? despite using a financially costly option? or thanks to AWS allowing an immediate setup ?

Or they're not aware of the options. AWS has massive marketing and market share. A lot of businesses aren't even aware of AWS savings plans and spot instances. That's even why there are companies that purely offer to optimise "cloud costs" as their core business.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#99

Post by weberer »

csomar wrote: post #33
andrewstuart wrote: post #26

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…

AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.

>And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack.

Nah, I'd recommend serverless for the vast majority of use cases. But otherwise, yeah it gets heavily into the AWS stack with SQS, SNS, Kinesis, S3, DynamoDB, Aurora, etc.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#100

Post by dboreham »

Another aspect, not mentioned in the article, is that you can arrange to have machines with hardware resources specifically tailored to your workload. e.g. AWS can't get you a box with 20T of NVMe storage. So if you have a workload that needs 20T of fast storage, hosted on AWS the system architecture is different : you're using NAS which has much higher latency so now you're probably using more machines, which is less efficient, and of course much more costly.
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