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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

#181

Post by Melatonic »

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 can also use more than one COLO or have your DR stuff located in the cloud provider of your choice :-)

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

#182

Post by Melatonic »

jjav wrote: post #161
leviathant wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You can also have different levels of avaibility for your customer facing and critical infrastructure and the infrastructure running your internal services and less important stuff. No need to have a bunch of 9's for your internal test environment or for the systems managing app deployments to the fleet of internal laptops.

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

#183

Post by Melatonic »

exabrial wrote: post #131

My problem has been hiring a person that has experience with colocation and knowing all the ins/outs of hardware maintenance and keeping DC operations alive. It's a skill set that disappeared with AWS "engineering" became a thing unfortunately.

And this is exactly why I am making sure I keep this skillset (I am relatively young). Not that I am one of those people that is all in for on prem and anti cloud - both have their place. But knowing hardware I think will eventually become a more valued skill once all of the people your talking about finally do retire.

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

#184

Post by yunwal »

Melatonic wrote: post #180
yunwal wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? >> Again, if that's your use case, then we're not talking about 1 cloud engineer vs 3 non-cloud engineers. At my company we operate a setup like this on AWS with about 8 people total (5 infra engineers and…

At my company we operate something similar to that with 2 system engineers and 2 network engineers. 2 main offices and 2 separate physical COLO datacenters + lots of satellite offices and remote workers. Everything is HA and we have a DR site that is mostly unused. Everything is backed up securely (push only) and can be easily restored (database aware) extremely quickly if needed. In an absolutely worst case shit hit…

> Does this take awhile inititally to setup? Yes it does.

This is fundamentally the difference to me. I've worked with hardware before, and if your business and load is predictable, and you understand how to architect it before going in, it's a good option. You can put in a bit of extra up-front work and get more control and lower costs.

But most tech companies are not like this.

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

#185

Post by sudosysgen »

t344344 wrote: post #124
sofixa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

SSH+Rsync is the wrong way to go about it, you will fail to restore backups. You need something that allows you to make snapshots. Fortunately that's easy and cheap if you use something like Proxmox.

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

#186

Post by Nextgrid »

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?

> VPNs and hybrid architectures exist for a reason.

And that's why the rent-seekers got that covered too by outrageous egress bandwidth fees, to ensure they still get their cut no matter what.

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

#187

Post by Nextgrid »

sofixa wrote: post #109
andrewstuart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> wasting money because you actually only use 4GB of RAM and barely any CPU.

Hetzner will rent you a massive 128GB of RAM server for ~150 bucks a month. In company terms, that is peanuts and whatever time you'd spend installing and managing K8S is pretty much never going to pay for itself, not to mention the added liability of all those moving parts.

The whole "autoscaling" thing is mostly bullshit invented by the cloud providers to make their insane margins more palatable. A dedicated, non-cloud stack sized to peak capacity will be cheaper than the majority of "autoscaled" stacks at minimal capacity.

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

#188

Post by Nextgrid »

stcroixx wrote: post #172
jjav wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Our customer contracts obligate us to inform all customers about any outages. We can’t just hope they don’t notice and only pay the ones that happen to.

Out of curiosity, how do you handle cases where the cloud provider lies to you on their status page? Do you pass on the lie to your customers or do you have your own monitoring in place?

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

#189

Post by Nextgrid »

sgjohnson wrote: post #91

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,…

Out of curiosity, why go with a rack rather than just renting a server from them? At hobbyist scale this would be more cost-effective no? FYI they can give you 10Gbps uplinks on their servers too for an extra fee, no need for colo.

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

#190

Post by jtrtoo »

Yes, but it's much harder to have a legally enforceable SLA with your in-house team and much less fun to threaten to sue yourself.

[On the other hand, in-house gives you greater control. If you're good (enough) at alignment and execution, you can optimize your infrastructure for your use case and either save the organization money or enable more money to be made through enhanced capabilities.]

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