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The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

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Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#141

Post by red-iron-pine »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #133
mr_toad wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever, because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if something is going to fly or not. And that's where the advantage ends. Too many businesses aren’t even properly utilising that key advantage. They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development…

They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem. For many non-tech corps, the purpose of moving to cloud is to downsize IT admin staff. It works well.

nah, not really. we hoped it would. it didn't.

your sysadmins are now Cloud Admins and can get an extra 50k in the market with a GCP or AWS certs. you're going to bump up their salary, right?

the useless offshore team is now a Cloud useless offshore team, and also wants their 20% bump. And bet your ass that Tata or Cognizant will get blood from a stone to make it happen, cuz as useless as they may seem you still need them.

change control meetings haven't gone anywhere, and if anything they're more important since now your entire infrastructure is a long one-liner away from being borked; cloud is an API, basically. just because you're not racking and stacking doesn't mean the demand, architecture & design, review boards, implementations, and due diligence steps go faster.

now we need an entirely new strategy to handle costs, since our architects and procurement can't track day to day cost changes easily, so when SuperDev decides he's going to #yolo 6 VMs and a few dozen containers into existence to test a few things we now have launch a technical and financial investigation into 1) how that happened, and 2) how much it cost.

still gotta use fortigates or palo altos, and internal networking hasn't changed too much overall; lean teams to begin with.

so in exchange for shoveling huge quantities of OpEx to companies that don't deserve more money, we don't really cut labor, and lose control of practically every other facet of our infra. Hope that Azure AD doesn't fail again, cuz the dashboard says 100% green but nothing is working and the execs are concerned.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#142

Post by red-iron-pine »

seydor wrote: post #84
bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

this is the most undersung hero. Internet speeds are reaching the equivalent of a datacenter. This will open up so many possibities, that it makes it seem like the 2000s again. And finally we might actually need ipv6

half of asia is already using IPv6; I think Africa had a single /24 of IPv4 reserved for it back in the day

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#143

Post by red-iron-pine »

epberry wrote: post #15

This post, along with this Simon Wardley thread, https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1088780650860158978?s=20 , attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up. I started helping maintain https://ec2instances.info in my spare time and the code base is literally fu…

> attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up.

absolutely. massive struggle at the orgs I've been / am at.

processes for provisioning new resources haven't changed, and a lot of teams kind of push their own builds, or get reservations for X amount of space and dollars and then they can play with their space.

the result is OpEx shifts wildly from one quarter to the next, and control has been hit or miss. it continues mostly because projects need to deliver -- and do -- but that "do what you gotta do to make it work" approach has turned basically into the wild west and no one plays by the rules.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#144

Post by znpy »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #140
znpy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs. there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away. you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering). Frankly, i think that the time when you…

Upgrade to a professional connection ?

quoting myself:

> you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).

if your startup takes off and you can't get a professional connection on time... it might just drive users away. particularly paying users.

and depending on where you are, that might not even be possible at all.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#145

Post by sgarland »

bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

This is precisely what I plan on doing when I eventually launch my app. I have 3x Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster running K8s nodes, Ceph on NVMe with CSI-RBD, and a separate Supermicro 2U exposing ZFS for spinning storage. The only missing link is 10G networking, because 10G switches aren’t super cheap.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#146

Post by sgarland »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57
bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than…

My rack is about 500W, up to about 700W when the backup server kicks on (lots of spinning disks).

That’s a UniFi Dream Machine Pro, UniFi 24 port switch (powering two APs), 3x Dell R620s with a few SSDs and NVMe, and 2x Supermicros (one of which is the aforementioned backup server), each with a lot of spinners. Also some additional load from the overhead of the rack UPS.

I pay about $0.08/kWh, although with the base fee of $40 it's more like $0.11/kWh. In any case, it means I pay maybe an extra $30-40/month for my homelab, plus whatever additional heat load costs it places on my A/C.

If I moved to somewhere where electricity was significantly pricier, I would probably either invest in home solar, compress compute to a single node, or both.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#147

Post by sgarland »

znpy wrote: post #131
aftbit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud. If I really wanted to…

> I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet. I do some homelabbing at home and i do work for some "big tech". The difference, essentially, is reliability and high availability. Most homelab posts i see are one decent (not even large) disas…

Agreed. Most people seem to take a very cavalier approach to backups, for example, or using risky Ceph/ZFS setups without understanding the consequences.

In the absolute worst-case scenario for me, barring a lightning strike that fried my UPS and entire rack, I would lose a day’s worth of changes, as my backup node kicks on daily to ingest snapshots. Downtime would probably be 15 minutes or so - boot up backup, change target IP address on other nodes to access it.

I’m only running RAIDZ1, so I’d have to lose two disks in a VDEV for this to occur. I understand and accept the risks, but were I hosting anything of import, I’d probably accept the additional power draw of keeping the backup server on 24/7 and stream snapshots to it continuously.

Also, of course, I’d be streaming those snapshots off-site. Currently I do so for things like photos and documents.

If I lost 2/3 of my compute nodes, I’d be down for a bit longer, as I’d have to shift workloads to the backup server (which is a dual socket with enough RAM to handle it), and currently it doesn’t run K8s. I can shift things to Docker Compose easily enough, or I suppose I could register it as a worker node that’s just tainted most of the time.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#148

Post by sgarland »

znpy wrote: post #132
Aeolun wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.

> Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs. there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away. you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering). Frankly, i think that the time when you…

The shitty code most places are running have such horrific latency between awful SQL queries and choices like Node as a backend that the difference between a 1G and 10G uplink is unlikely to make a large difference, especially if you’re caching static content with a CDN.

This does presuppose you have a business class internet connection, of course.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#149

Post by sgarland »

jedberg wrote: post #62
flukus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

Any business that you can run from a home server with a residential business line is not the kind of business we are talking about here. Yes, you can potentially serve a lot of customers with that setup, but your reliability story is terrible so you better have very forgiving customers. What if your internet goes out? Even with a business line, I've had to wait five days for them to replace a fiber line that a squirr…

The only realistic concern for me here is the ISP failure. Even then, if I really wanted to I could have both AT&T and Spectrum uplinks with an LACP bond.

I have enough battery backup to run my rack for about 30 minutes, more if I shut down a node. That’s more than enough time for me to set up my generator and route power; it has an extended gas tank and can power the rack, fridges/freezers, fans, etc. for over 24 hours. I periodically run drills on this to ensure it’s doable, and that the gear works as expected.

If I’m not home, then yes, the latter would fail. Dual hardware failure is an unlikely scenario; single node failure is handled between K8s and Proxmox clustering.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#150

Post by ATMLOTTOBEER »

sokoloff wrote: post #58
jdoss wrote: post #52

Back in 2007ish the CEO of Parallels/SWSoft (the company behind Virtuozzo a very popular hypervisor used back in the day) stood on the stage of the keynote of HostingCon and said that the Cloud (AWS) was going to eat the WebHosting Industry's lunch. His entire keynote was very doom and gloom. Fast forward to 2015ish it totally it did. The days of VPS and Dedicated hosting being the only options for deploying your stu…

> keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs I love that we can use Cloud APIs to do our jobs. That's piles better than negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team to provision you hardware or networking that you don't have much visibility into and then relying on them to troubleshoot. I don't mind paying more for that (which you absolutely do on a per-unit of compute, network, or storage).

I still have to wait for infra to provision me an s3 bucket
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