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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

#161

Post by jjav »

leviathant wrote: post #123
q1w2 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

As you know, the SLA isn't the same as the downtime. It just means the threshhold where you'd start paying back some credits for missing the SLA (only to customers who notice and ask). Which is often cheaper than building the infrastructure to actually support the promised SLA.

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

#162

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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…

I remember a time when SQL was advertised as "write programs in plain English and fire all your programmers". It ended with the situation where you can't get a job for Oracle SQL if you only know Microsoft SQL. Are we already at a point where you can't get a job as AWS DevOps if you only worked with Azure before?

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

#163

Post by jjav »

nprateem wrote: post #25

Over the weekend I created a globally distributed CDN pulling data from a globally distributed, auto healing database as a cache. It took a few hours then I tore it all down in 15 minutes, and it probably only cost a few dollars. The cloud trades agility for cost.

> The cloud trades agility for cost.

Very true.

Did you actually need a globally distributed CDN just for 15 minutes though, or was this a learning/PoC exercise?

For any business that has very spiky resource needs (such as this example), the cloud is ideal.

I've never been in such a business though, usually there is a fairly predictable (hopefully growing) steady load with small variance.

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

#164

Post by vidarh »

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?

What nerdix said, basically. People assume most devops work when you own hardware is hardware related, but for a typical setup, if your hardware related devops work make up more than a few percent of your total devops cost something is wrong.

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

#165

Post by swyx »

leviathant wrote: post #123
q1w2 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we provide a hosted service in the insurance industry.

its right in the second line of the comment

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

#166

Post by Jupe »

Isn't there a "throat to choke" aspect of this as well? While not actual indemnification, leveraging a cloud vendor at least allows for a "but AWS/Google/Azure" was down response to your customers. And cost offsets can come into play as well in the event of a failure, or even missing an SLA, in some cases. You don't get that when you roll your own.

Not to mention certain, tested disaster workflows are available such as global tables/databases/etc., alternate region backups.

If your solution is not mission/legal critical, and outages are simply "uncomfortable" then rolling-your-own seems a viable alternative. But, as your customer base grows in size/maturity/ the costs can start to look a little less important. You just bill it through to the end customer.

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

#167

Post by gscott »

viraptor wrote: post #110
bsenftner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, provi…

If you have that sweet investor money just go all cloud!

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

#168

Post by openplatypus »

yagni_dev wrote: post #40
openplatypus wrote: post #16

Cloud was always more expensive (in the short term) than self-managed/collocated servers. How is this news? In cloud, you pay for availability, for ad-hoc instances without waiting for a month to install new servers and more. You only need to hire “software” DevOps, rather than people who neatly lay your cables, journey to DC to replace disks, etc, etc, etc. Pick a good, cheap cloud. It is a commodity product. Just b…

"You only need to hire “software” DevOps, rather than people who neatly lay your cables, journey to DC to replace disks, etc, etc, etc." Lol, what year you think we are? 1998? There are colo facilities around the world, you have 'remote hands' to take care everything related to hardware. You just need ansible/xyz to deploy you software, thats all it takes

The last time I have seen such an operation was back in 2009.

Also, even today you can buy a barebone place in the rack, with climate control and power supply. I know companies who do their disk replaces, cable management even in 2023.

I am fully aware you can have mostly managed data centre, like for example, Leaseweb, OVH, Servers.com. But if you have specialized hardware requirements, sometimes you have to wait a few days/weeks for installation.

I am old, but I don't think we are back in the 1998.

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

#170

Post by eastbound »

brianmcc wrote: post #77
andrewstuart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then turn back to trying to work out how to grant IAM access to the resource that developer asked for before turning their attention to why traffic won’t come out of the VPC before trying to work out how to do compression on API gateway. The whole time pining for the old days of running everything on Linux.

The good old days of SFTP-ing one's .war files up to Tomcat and just have the sys admin team sort out Apache and SSL. Happy times :-)

Sending the .war in a ticket. Writing upgrade notes. Waiting half a week for deployment. Did a mistake. Pray that reopening the ticket will go faster.

I remember when GitHub started saying “We deploy a few hundred times a day.”

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