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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

#121

Post by pritambarhate »

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…

Meanwhile AWS keeps having region wide outages almost every year which last for many hours - https://awsmaniac.com/aws-outages/

Architecting a multi-region app on AWS is not trivial. All basic building blocks AWS provides makes running MultiAZ very easy, however very few AWS services support multi region deployments and failover out of the box.

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

#122

Post by pritambarhate »

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

Many enterprises use cloud because the cloud offers a very high level of compliance. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/

The hosting providers which provide similar level of compliance are not cheap either.

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

#123

Post by leviathant »

q1w2 wrote: post #111
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 w…

>99.5% uptime is good enough for nearly all businesses.

I don't know what your business is, but as a presales engineer in the ecommerce field, if our SLA was 99.5% we wouldn't even make it past the first round of vendor selection.

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

#124

Post by t344344 »

sofixa wrote: post #108
t344344 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curren…

It is a startup, not a space program. Backup can be done with simple ssh+rsync script. Patching is a weekly weekend cron script+reboot. Some heartbeat monitoring... If it goes down for a few hours, not a biggie.

For "throw it all in a PaaS" you need dedicated person, monitoring, billing etc... It is more expensive, not simpler. Cloud provider may also terminate your accounts, change settings etc...

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

#125

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

> The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers

Running k8s on bare metal is incredibly annoying and brittle. Upgrading your clusters is a constant firefighting experience, and because k8s doesn't have something like an LTS version [1], you have to keep upgrading ALL THE DAMN TIME, which often enough means you have to upgrade not just the clusters but also your resource definitions (e.g. ingressClass), or mess around neck-deep in the bowels of MetalLB because it managed to shart all over its configuration yet again.

In contrast, EKS is relatively painless.

[1] https://kubernetes.io/releases/

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

#126

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

Computation is the easy part, you can pick that kind of performance up at your local IT box store.

The hard part, that what Kubernetes makes easy, is the rest: dealing with failing compute nodes, with isolating workloads, writing load balancer configurations, keeping them up to date, setting up and tearing down volatile (=feature branch) environments...

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

#127

Post by mirzap »

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 software startup, then you don't need all those cloud services. You need a server, install webserver, database, redis or whatever you need and you're good to go. Going cloud as startup is almost always over-engineering. Just go simple. Your total costs will be couple of hundreds $$ and you'll serve a million people with this simple infra. Probably much more.

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

#128

Post by dpkirchner »

alephnerd wrote: post #76

Why are people on here so militantly pro- or anti- On-Prem/Cloud? (Rhetorical question) It's so god damn annoying. Either works depending on your usecase.

Everyone is smarter than everyone else, and damn it, you're going to hear about it.

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

#129

Post by nerdix »

dinedal wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. But people use "you have to hire people to manage it" as an argument against on-perm. When in practice, most companies hire "devOps engineers" or "cloud engineers" to manage their cloud infrastructure too. And those salaries seem higher than the infrastructure/ops guys of yesteryear. So resource cost isn't really an advantage.

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

#130

Post by mbesto »

antisthenes wrote: post #118
mbesto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 infrastruct…

> 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?

I don't disagree that you need a security focused person in cloud. However, the scope of security is drastically different in cloud vs data center (and varies depending on what your data center setup is).

> What does this even mean?

What happens if your server is overheating? As I said, this is usually provided by data center itself, however you have to still have to vet the vendor. AWS/GCP/Azure all have reputations about environmental factors that are rarely questioned.

> You mean Dell? Or HP?

Yes, AND Nagios, Solarwinds, Cisco, IBM, VMWare, etc. etc. and every one of their subsidiaries that have esoteric needs.

> You just need a linux admin on a contract.

Ummm...no. Just no. Have you ever had to create multiple subnets, DMZs, SD-WAN setups, plus VPN access, etc. etc. with multiple locations, all with security in mind, and full redundancy across three data centers? "just a linux admin" isn't the job description for that.

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