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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

#111

Post by q1w2 »

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…

I appreciate this argument, and let me give the counter-example. 99.5% uptime is good enough for nearly all businesses.

I run a small IT service company - we provide a hosted service in the insurance industry.

We host on-premise, in our physical office (well, across 2 offices for DR). I personally have a history in infra management, so I generally enjoy it. You're right that sometimes things go wrong. Last year, we were down for about 3 hours. The year before that, there was a 6 hour outage. We've had failures in power, ISP, networking, server hardware, software, etc... but we've matured to a point that we can handle them quickly.

Most importantly, these outages are understood by the business and the users. They know going in that they get a credit for outages, and that it won't exceed 1 business day per year (usually much less).

Because we accept this 0.5% downtime (it's actually much lower in reality), we pay 1/10th what I've been quoted by cloud services - probably even less.

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

#113

Post by Retric »

Justsignedup wrote: post #89
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…

Right. I pay under 2k for server costs. And combined with all the different platforms I use and the convenience features and not having to hire my own devops person, I assure you I am saving A LOT. There are few companies that operate at the scale at where it is cheaper to run your own servers. Once you hit that, it is a great problem to have.

Cloud doesn’t eliminate the need for dev ops. Sometimes it can help, but overall I’ve seen an increase in cost, workload, and stress.

The cloud is very much a your mileage can very situation. Just remember cloud providers are very interested in selling you a product due to their extremely high profit margins.

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

#114

Post by partyindiok »

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…

While I know what you mean, you can totally get 20TiB+ of NVME local to the machines you get from AWS

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

#115

Post by dinedal »

vidarh wrote: post #46
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…

The cost differential in my experience is generally higher on the low end. Once you get into the hundreds of k per month in cloud fees you can get steep discounts, and some of the gap starts to close. You also need devops resources to manage a cloud setup - most of my jobs in recent years have involved exactly that, and it's not appreciably cheaper than managing "raw" hardware resources these days (ever since IPMI et…

> You also need devops resources to manage a cloud setup

Don't you also need them in a colo?

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

#116

Post by ilikerashers »

nostrebored wrote: post #81
ilikerashers wrote: post #54

These articles are usually pretty honest and non-controversial but bring out all the AWS brainwashed "Cloud Transformation" consultants. They cling to a set of vendor principles drummed into them and can't seem to view other angles. Good 'ole Enterprise IT.

This comment is very ironic in context, especially with the makeup of comments on the article. There are passionate people on both sides and usually pretty good reasons for both.

I think the perceived laggard side is less enthused to engage in the debate.

On lots of public forums, there will be plenty of characters telling you to use Rust/Crypto/Serverless/AI for everything. Fair enough, they are cool technologies but don't blow up your business for them.

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

#117

Post by amerkhalid »

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…

This is my experience too. I love cloud as individual developer but it seems every company has a just as many DevOps people as they had System Admins.

To me advantage of cloud is easily versioned control and replicate-able environments instead of cost savings.

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

#118

Post by antisthenes »

mbesto wrote: post #103
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 specia…

Umm...no. Just no.

> - Security specialist

You need them in both environments if you're serious about security. Unless you somehow believe that being in the "cloud" grants you some kind of security by default?

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

You can contract this out to the datacenter itself. This is typically a one-time expense when installing infrastructure that will then last the useful lifetime of the hardware (e.g. 5-7 years)

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

What does this even mean?

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

Yes, true, a truly robust network setup that is colocated in multiple data-centers is probably the most difficult thing out of the entire setup.

> Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this.

You mean Dell? Or HP?

> 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.

You just need a linux admin on a contract. If they are worth their salt, they don't even have to be full-time.

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

#119

Post by elif »

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…

If you are only running in one cloud availability zone, with the backup plan being, we'll spin up new servers during downtime, maybe.. but if you are distributed over 2-3 hosting areas geographically for redundancy, I highly doubt that any cloud application is cost effective at any scale.

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

#120

Post by citrin_ru »

vidarh wrote: post #46
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…

The cost differential in my experience is generally higher on the low end. Once you get into the hundreds of k per month in cloud fees you can get steep discounts, and some of the gap starts to close. You also need devops resources to manage a cloud setup - most of my jobs in recent years have involved exactly that, and it's not appreciably cheaper than managing "raw" hardware resources these days (ever since IPMI et…

I've heard many times that while retails AWS prices are high all big AWS customers are getting discounts. Just curious at which scale this starts in terms of $$.
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