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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

blog.comma.ai

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#211

Post by mrweasel »

infecto wrote: post #197
mrweasel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think this was MWAA

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#212

Post by infecto »

olavgg wrote: post #63
speedgoose wrote: post #49

I would suggest to use both on-premise hardware and cloud computing. Which is probably what comma is doing. For critical infrastructure, I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues. Maintaining one server room in the headquarters is something, but two servers rooms in different locations, with resilient power and network is a bit too much effort IMHO. For running many s…

> I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues. Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.

Maybe you find it fun. I don’t, I prefer building software not running and setting up servers.

It’s also nontrivial once you go past some level of complexity and volume. I have made my career at building software and part of that requires understanding the limitations and specifics of the underlying hardware but at the end of the day I simply want to provision and run a container, I don’t want to think about the security and networking setup it’s not worth my time.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#213

Post by mbreese »

Symbiote wrote: post #193
StilesCrisis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d bet that main reason would be power. Running machines at 100% doesn’t subtract much extra , but a server running hard for 24 hours would use more power than a bursty workload.

(While we’re all speculating)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#214

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #177
mrweasel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd gladly use (and maybe even pay for!) an open-source reimplementation of AWS RDS Aurora. All the bells and whistles with failover, clustering, volume-based snaps, cross-region replication, metrics etc. As far as I know, nothing comes close to Aurora functionality. Even in vibecoding world. No, 'apt-get install postgres' is not enough.

serverless v2 is one of the products that i was skeptical about but is genuinely one of the most robust solutions out there in that space. it has its warts, but I usually default to it for fresh installs because you get so much out of the box with it

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#215

Post by mbreese »

objektif wrote: post #209
geocar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you thinking of? Netflix might be spending as much as $120m (but probably a little less), and I thought they were probably Amazon's biggest customer. Does someone (single-buyer) spend more than that with AWS? Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer, and Netflix's shareholders would probably be worried about risk relyin…

Figma apparently spends around 300-400k/day on AWS. I think this puts them up there.

How is this reasonable? At what point do they pull a Dropbox and de-AWS? I can’t think of why they would gain with AWS over in house hosting at that point.

I’m not surprised, but you’d think there would be some point where they would decide to build a data center of their own. It’s a mature enough company.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#216

Post by infecto »

acdha wrote: post #206
infecto wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heroku was popular with startups who didn’t have infrastructure skills but the price was high enough that anyone who wasn’t in that triangle of “lavish budget, small team, limited app diversity” wasn’t using it. Things like AWS IaaS were far more popular due to the lower cost and greater flexibility but even that was far from a majority service class.

I am not sure if you are trying to refute my lived experience or what exactly the point is. Heroku was wildly popular with startups at the time, not just those with lavish budgets. I was already touching RDS at this point and even before RDS came around no organization I worked at had me jumping on bare metal to provision services myself. There always a system in place where someone helped out engineering to deploy systems. I know this was not always the case but the person I was responding to made it sound like 15 years ago all engineers were provisioning their own database and doing other times of dev/sys ops on a regular basis. It’s not true at least in SV.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#217

Post by kryptiskt »

mgaunard wrote: post #96
adamcharnock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point! 5 - Datacenter (DC) - Like 4, except also take control of the space/power/HVAC/transit/security side of the equation. Makes sense either at scale, or if you have specific needs. Specific needs could be: specific location, reliability (higher or lower than a DC), resilience (conflict planning). There are actually some really interesting use cases here. For example, reliability: If your company is in a phys…

Personally I haven't seen a scenario where it makes sense beyond a small experimental lab where you value the ability to tinker physically with the hardware regularly. Offices are usually very expensive real estate in city centers and with very limited cooling capabilities. Then again the US is a different place, they don't have cities like in Europe (bar NYC).

If you are a bank or a bookmaker or similar you may well want to have total control of physical access to the machines. I know one bookmaker I worked with had their own mini-datacenter, mainly because of physical security.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#218

Post by mancerayder »

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…

You give customers root but you're on call when something goes tits up?

You're a brave DevOps team. That would cause a lot of friction in my experience, since people with root or other administrative privileges do naughty things, but others are getting called in on Saturday afternoon.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#219

Post by wulfstan »

adamcharnock wrote: post #181
wulfstan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros. Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit…

FYI, AWS offers free Egress when leaving them (because they were forced to be EU regulation, but they chose to offer it globally): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i... But. Don't leave it until the last minute to talk to them about this. They don't make it easy, and require some warning (think months, IIRC)

Extremely useful information - unfortunately I just assumed this didn't apply to me because I am in the UK and not the EU. Another mistake, though given it's not huge amounts of money I will chalk it up to experience.

Hopefully someone else will benefit from this helpful advice.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#220

Post by marcosdumay »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #14
simianwords wrote: post #13

The reason companies don’t go with on premises even if cloud is way more expensive is because of the risk involved in on premises. You can see it quite clearly here that there’s so many steps to take. Now a good company would concentrate risk on their differentiating factor or the specific part they have competitive advantage in. It’s never about “is the expected cost in on premises less than cloud”, it’s about the r…

It’s also opex vs capex, which is a battle opex wins most of the time.

Well, capex has a multi-year depreciation schedule and has to cover interest rates. So the simplified "opex wins most of the time" is right.

But we are talking about a cost difference of tens of times, maybe a few hundred. The cloud is not like "most of the time".

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