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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#191

Post by Annatar »

adamcharnock wrote: post #154
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain 2 to me. How is a managed private cloud different from full cloud? Like you are still using AWS or Azure but you are keeping all your operation in a bundled, portable way, so you can leave that provider easily at any time, rather than becoming very dependent on them? Is it like staying provider-agnostic but still cloud based?

To put it plainly: We deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner dedicated servers and become your DevOps team (or a part thereof). It works because bare metal is about 10% the cost of cloud, and our value-add is in 1) creating a resilient platform on top of that, 2) supporting it, 3) being on-call, and 4) being or supporting your DevOps team. This starts with us providing a Kubernetes cluster which we manage, but we als…

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#192

Post by Symbiote »

TonyStr wrote: post #78
Symbiote wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I plugged in our own numbers (60 servers we own in a data centre we rent) and Microsoft thinks this costs us an order of magnitude more than it does. Their "assumption" for hardware purchase prices seems way off compared to what we buy from Dell or HP. It's interesting that the "IT labour" cost they estimate is $140k for DIY, and $120k for Azure. Their saving is 5 times more than what we spend...

Thank you, I've wanted to see someone use this in the real world. When doing Azure certifications (AZ900, AZ204, etc.), they force you to learn about this tool.

I may be out of date with RAM prices. Dell's configuration tool wants £1000 each for 32GB RDIMMs — but prices in Dell's configuration tool are always significantly higher than we get if we write to their sales person.

Even so, a rough configuration for a 2-processor 16 core/processor server with 256GiB RAM comes to $20k, vs $22k + 100% = $44k quoted by MS. (The 100% is MS' 20%-per-year "maintenance cost" that they add on to the estimate. In reality this is 0% as everything is under Dell's warranty.)

And most importantly, the tool is only comparing the cost of Azure to constructing and maintaining a data centre! Unless there are other requirements (which would probably rule out Azure anyway) that's daft, a realistic comparison should be to colocation or hired dedicated servers, depending on the scale.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#193

Post by Symbiote »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #185
adamcharnock wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting question, so time for some 100% speculation. It sounds like they probably have revenue in the €500mm range today. And given that the bare metal cost of AWS-equivalent bills tends to be a 90% reduction, we'll say a €10mm+ bare metal cost. So I would say a cautious and qualified "yes". But I know even for smaller deployments of tens or hundreds of servers, they'll ask you what the purpose is. If you say…

Why would a client who wants to run a Blockchain be risky for Herzner? I'm not a fan, I just don't see the issue. If the client pays their monthly bill, who cares if they're using the machine to mine for Bitcoin?

They are certain to run the machines at 100% continually, which will cost more than a typical customer who doesn't do this, and leave the old machines with less second-hand value for their auction thing afterwards.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#194

Post by infecto »

bojangleslover wrote: post #179
torginus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is 1) Senior engineer starts on AWS 2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't) 3) New engineer comes in and panics 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic 5) New engineer leaves 6) Second new engineer comes in and not only…

It’s all anecdotal but in my experiences it’s usually opposite. Bored senior engineer wants to use something new and picks a AWS bespoke service for a new project.

I am sure it happens a multitude of ways but I have never seen the case you are describing.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#195

Post by wiether »

otherme123 wrote: post #67
sschueller wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, does anyone remember the OVH fire[1][2]? [1] https://www.techradar.com/news/remember-the-ovhcloud-data-ce... [2] https://blocksandfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ovhclo...

I fully lost three small VPS there, and their response was poor: they didn't even refund time lost, they didn't compensate for time lost (e.g. a couple of months of free VPS), I got better updates from the news than from them (news were saying "almost total loss", while them were trying to convince me that I had the incredible bad luck that my three VPS were in the very small zone affected by the fire). The only way…

OVH VPS is not the same as say, AWS EC2.

It's their "Compute" under "Public Cloud" that is competing against AWS EC2. https://us.ovhcloud.com/public-cloud/compute/

They handled the fire terribly and after that they improved a bit, but an OVH VPS is just a VM running on a single piece of hardware. Quite not the same thing as the "Compute" which is running on clusters.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#197

Post by infecto »

mrweasel wrote: post #171
torginus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

Just this week a friend of mine was spinning up some AWS managed service, complaining about the complexity, and how any reconfiguration took 45 minutes to reload. It's a service you can just install with apt, the default configuration is fine. Not only is many service no longer cheaper in the cloud, the management overhead also exceed that of on-prem.

What managed service? Curious, I don’t use the full suite of aws services but wondering what would take 45mins, maybe it was a large cluster of some sort that needed rolling changes?

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#199

Post by wiether »

bob1029 wrote: post #152

The #1 reason I would advocate for using AWS today is the compliance package they bring to the party. No other cloud provider has anything remotely like Artifact. I can pull Amazon's PCI-DSS compliance documentation using an API call. If you have a heavily regulated business (or work with customers who do), AWS is hard to beat. If you don't have any kind of serious compliance requirement, using Amazon is probably not…

> The #1 reason I would advocate for using AWS today is the compliance package they bring to the party.

I was going to post the same comment.

Most of the people agreeing to foot the AWS bill do it because they see how much the compliance is worth to them.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#200

Post by infecto »

iso1631 wrote: post #140
Lucasoato wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

> I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) Out of interest, how old are you? This was quite normal expectation of a technical department even 15 years ago.

No it was not. 15 years ago Heroku was the rage. Even the places that had bare metal usually had someone running something similar to devops and at least core infrar was not being touched. I am sure places existed but 15 years while far away was already pretty far along from what you describe. At least in SV.
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