Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 202 posts

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

#101

Post by ericd »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #71
luizcdc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers on premise with regular backups stored in the cloud can still be cheaper than offloading all your compute, storage and backup to AWS.

The problem is not having the backups, it's restoring them. How do you restore backups when you have no servers to restore them on because they all burnt down?

You trivially and quickly lease them from Hetzner, OVH, or literally any of the other shops that lease out dedicated servers? Or large cloud instances.

I don’t understand why you’re artificially constraining this? When we had colo’d servers, we still used cloud services where it made sense (especially S3, scaling storage sucks). I don’t think people are arguing for never using anything but your own equipment.

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

#102

Post by weberer »

xwdv wrote: post #31
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…

Is there a way to just provide the hardware for your machines somewhere and have someone else manage everything else?

Yes, that's exactly what "colo" in the title of this article is talking about. It is short for "colocation center". You just take your server to their data center, plug it in, and let them handle all the physical operations of running a data center.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre

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

#103

Post by mbesto »

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…

> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it.

You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a:

- Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.)

- Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.)

- Data center environment specialist (usually can come with the data center, but they still need to be vetted)

- Security specialist

Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this. So not only do I need to find a, for example, a network specialist, I need to find someone who uses Nagios because my infra lead made that decision.

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

#104

Post by whoknew1122 »

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.

I'm assuming by AWS 'experts' you mean third-parties? Because every SA I know at AWS will proactively tell you when to not use AWS. Half of my job at AWS is reviewing architecture diagrams and determining whether workloads are a good fit for AWS.

I've never met any AWS expert at AWS who isn't quick to tell you when an AWS service isn't a fit for your needs.

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

#105

Post by q1w2 »

dboreham wrote: post #100

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 les…

As an old-school co-founder, honestly, I just enjoy managing the infra. Sometimes there are issues and outages, but I'm offline maybe 3-4 hours per year - no big deal. It's about 1/4th the price (for the equivalent performance).

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

#106

Post by weberer »

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…

>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.

If you're operating at that scale, you're likely to be operating in multiple data centers with load balancers already.

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

#107

Post by t344344 »

bob1029 wrote: post #88
t344344 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to run LLaMA in cloud...

VPNs and hybrid architectures exist for a reason. If 99% of your IT infra is boring crap but you have this one special unicorn machine, maybe throw it on an employee's fiber connection and set up a point-to-site VPN for that machine. Does it make sense to abandon the entire cloud because of 1 use case?

> abandon the entire cloud

I was never on cloud. I have a big home with fiber connection and some backup connectivity. Setting up new server is like $50/year in electricity. If project works I will sell it, and let new owner deal with cloud and scaling it up!

Just reading price list from cloud providers gives me a headache. We will charge you between X and Z, and hopefully you will not bankrupt on next bill. Also we may terminate services anytime for whatever reason.

> unicorn machine

If you have a specialized startup, that is 90% of your cost! Not some sort of unicorn single machine. If you can use consumer grade hardware without extra cost, that is major competitive advantage!

> VPNs and hybrid architectures

What is that? Do I have to study that? Seems like a major obstacle!

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

#108

Post by sofixa »

t344344 wrote: post #70
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…

Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home). Cloud at scale is VERY expensive. And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc.

> Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home) (...) And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc.

Yeah, just don't forget the backups and monitoring, the networking setup (load balancing between your two servers or workstations at the very least), patching, moving to new servers/workstations when you outgrow the current ones (while also taking the risk of overprovisioning) etc.

Or just throw it all in a PaaS, ideally a container-based one (like Google Cloud Run or AWS Lambda or Scaleway Serverless Containers) where you won't have any lock-in and migrating away to something that makes more sense at your new scale would be easy. The only concern that would remain in that case is data backups to a different provider/place - scaling up/down is automatic, monitoring (at least the basics) are already covered, and there's no patching outside of your application's libraries.

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

#109

Post by sofixa »

andrewstuart wrote: post #60
csomar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So much kubernetes is just overkill. A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.

> A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.

True, as long as you don't care about redundancy or scalability or wasting money because you actually only use 4GB of RAM and barely any CPU.

> So much kubernetes is just overkill.

Absolutely true. Kubernetes is great in some scenarios, but pretty complex so overkill when starting. Serverless (ideally containers as a service), docker-compose and Nomad* are much better options unless everybody is already a Kubernetes pro that has all the tooling ready.

* - disclaimer, I work at HashiCorp, but I actually believed Nomad is amazing, sufficient in most scenarios, and actually better than Kubernetes in some aspects before joining and it's one of the reasons I joined.

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

#110

Post by viraptor »

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…

> "it's hard to run a server, let along a server cluster" propaganda - it is not hard at all.

It's not hard at all if you have skills to manage hardware switches, deal with rack power budget, configure the power on sequence, establish procedures for hardware failures, establish procedures for disk management, redundancy, early earnings and replacements, deal with rolling out firmware updates for all components, provision resource limits between apps, provision and secure iLO or similar access, configure hardware monitoring and alerting, maybe run a SAN, ... (and lots of other things)

Sure, it's not hard when you have those skills. And you can offload some of that to another company if you're doing single servers rather than full rack(a). But it's not exactly a common set of skills either.

Edit: Also you can easily forget things at small scale. Just remembered LTT's "Sure we can host our video archive ourselves. Oops, forgot to turn on scrubbing. Aaand the old archive is gone."

Post reply on HN