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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

#191

Post by jtrtoo »

Everyone is going to have a different answer to this (and that answer may evolve as the business does).

All business decisions like this are about what level of abstraction is appropriate for us (today) and what level of specialization is conducive to our strategy[1] (today).

In some cases the infrastructure outsourcing question won't even be particularly important - a wash essentially regardless of the path taken (in the bigger picture of the enterprise's mission anyway). Other times, it'll be - effectively - paramount.

[1] Or current priorities, concerns, strengths, weaknesses, biases, pressures, risks, opportunities, competitors, etc.

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

#193

Post by vidarh »

TimPC wrote: post #153
mh- wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere around $100k/mo or $1mm/year. This usually requires a term spending commitment and gets you an effective discount of around 5-10%. Higher spends can yield significantly deeper discounts, of course. I think you'll find it difficult to get specifics at higher spends due to non-disclosures. Google 'AWS EDP negotiated' and you'll find some more info on the process.

If you’re getting a 5% discount on $1 million per month you’d need to host using a team of 1.5 people at SF salaries and benefits to break even.

If you were getting a 50% discount, you'd still not be competitive with hosting your own or using managed servers most of the time.

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

#194

Post by brodock »

nerdix wrote: post #129
dinedal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

don't forget the "cloud cost engineer", just to figure out how much it will cost to run the 20 services that should have been part of your app with random ways of billing the usage of it

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

#195

Post by nprateem »

jjav wrote: post #163
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.

POCing a new project that requires fast global performance to be viable.

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

#196

Post by sgjohnson »

Nextgrid wrote: post #189
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.

They offer BGP sessions only to colo customers, and I have my own IPv6 space that I want to use.

If they suddenly decided to offer BGP for dedi customers too, colo would no longer look that attractive.

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

#197

Post by exabrial »

Melatonic wrote: post #183
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.

It’s definitely working with hardware, but more of working with operations that I’m concerned about! What needs to be done at what regular intervals. In addition, what are things to inspect at potential hosting sites, etc.

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

#198

Post by sitkack »

vidarh wrote: post #164
dinedal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As soon as the machine boots over PXE and is on the network, it becomes software. Hardware actually becomes easier to manage as you get more identical machines as you can do differential analysis to figure out which components could possibly be out of spec.

I have seen multiple thousand host clusters managed by 1-2 people, and day to day ops looked like absolutely nothing was happening. This included messing with hardware racking and networking. The most resource intensive was just uncrating, moving and routing cables.

Managing hardware is bogey man, false toil.

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

#199

Post by sitkack »

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…

Backups and monitoring are you responsibility anyway! You are making a distinction where there is none.

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

#200

Post by Justsignedup »

Retric wrote: post #113
Justsignedup wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh. Sort of. I disagree with that statement. So far the devops of managing my cloud stuff on heroku has been a few days a year. And we have a better pull-request environment setup than most places I worked with that did or didn't use cloud.

Point is, devops as a service is great for small scale. I've done the math of what it would cost to switch away from heroku, and at this point it is quadruple our current costs, because of the time investment, and that's over a few years. And then moving to our own servers? even worse.

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