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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#281

Post by bluGill »

4nonverbal-alit wrote: post #273
bluGill wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)

From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minim…

How many problems is AWS able to handle for you that you are never aware of though?

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#282

Post by ndriscoll »

mbreese wrote: post #213
Symbiote wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Also very subject to wildly unstable market dynamics. If it's profitable to mine, they'll want as much capacity as they can get, leading Hetzner to over provision. Then once it becomes unprofitable, they'll want to stop all mining, leaving a ton of idle, unpaid machines. Better to have stable customers that don't swing 0-100 utilization depending on ability to arbitrage compute costs.

I wouldn't be surprised if mining is also associated with fraud (e.g. using stolen credit cards to buy compute).

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#283

Post by andrewstuart2 »

kevinkatzke wrote: post #276

Feels like I’ve lived through a full infrastructure fashion cycle already. I started my career when cloud was the obvious answer and on-prem was “legacy.” Now on-prem is cool again. Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.

The problem was always the platform. For me, I saw very early on that kubernetes was exactly what I wanted after reading about how Google "treats the datacenter like one large computer." And I've been very happily running my own side projects on my own home cluster for 10 ish years (my kube-system namespace is 9y old). But selling any of my employers on this was a very hard proposition until enough people had shown it working at that scale.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#285

Post by user34283 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #248

Naive comment from a hobbyist with nothing close to $5M: I'm curious about the degree to which you build a "home lab" equivalent. I mean if "scaling" turned out to be just adding another Raspberry Pi to the rack (where is Mr. Geerling when you need him?) I could grow my mini-cloud month by month as spending money allowed. (And it would be fun too.)

I paid 150€ for a Mini PC with an Intel N100, 16 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 500 GB SSD.

While I have no intention to scale up low spec hardware like this, it at least seems to beat the Azure VMs we use at work with "4 CPUs", which corresponds to two physical cores on an AMD EPYC CPU.

And that super slow machine I understand costs more than $100 per month, and that's without charges for disk space slower than the SSD, or network traffic.

Renting at Azure seems to be a terrible decision, particularly for desktop use.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#286

Post by torginus »

eitally wrote: post #256
couscouspie wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand…

They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.

Yeah, anyone who has >10 years experience with servers/backend dev has almost certainly managed dedicated infra.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#287

Post by infecto »

eldenring wrote: post #270
infecto wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also thinks it’s risk model too. Every time I see these kind of posts I think it misses the point there is a balance not only on cost like you describe but risk as well. You are paying to offload some of the risk from yourself.

The issue is that they have already paid off their datacenter 5x over compared to cloud. For offline, batch training, I don't ses how any amount of risk could offset the savings.

It’s no issue and it’s right in the front for their situation, if your business is computer it makes little sense for cloud.

That said from the risk perspective I assume for what their doing in the data center there is low risk if downtime happens.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#288

Post by torginus »

coredog64 wrote: post #259
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…

> If you're using something like ECS or serverless, AWS gains nothing by optimizing the servers to make your code run faster - their hard work results in less billed infrastructure hours. If ECS is faster, then you're more satisfied with AWS and less likely to migrate. You're also open to additional services that might bring up the spend (e.g. ECS Container Insights or X-Ray) Source: Former Amazon employee

We did some benchmarks and ECS was definitely quite a bit more expensive for a given capacity than just running docker on our own EC2 instances. It also bears pointing out that a lot of applications (either in-house or off-the-shelf) expect a persistent mutable config directory or sqlite database.

We used EFS to solve that issue, but it was very awkward, expensive and slow, its certainly not meant for that.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#289

Post by adarsh2321 »

adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

[dead]

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#290

Post by drnick1 »

On premises isn't only about saving money (that's not always clear). The article neglects the most important benefits which are freedom (control) and privacy. It's basically the same considerations that apply to owning vs renting a house.
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