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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

#461

Post by mattbillenstein »

sanderjd wrote: post #436
mattbillenstein wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a database, you still have work to do - optimizing, understanding indexes, etc. Managed services don't solve these problems for you magically and once you do them, just running the db itself isn't such a big deal and it's probably easier to tune for what you want to do.

Absolutely yes. But you have to do this either way. So it's just purely additive work to run the infrastructure as well. I think if it were true that the tuning is easier if you run the infrastructure yourself, then this would be a good point. But in my experience, this isn't the case for a couple reasons. First of all, the majority of tuning wins (indexes, etc.) are not on the infrastructure side, so it's not a big…

Maybe, but you're paying through the nose continually for something you could learn to do once - or someone on your team could easily learn with a little time and practice. Like, if this is a tradeoff you want to make, it's fine, but at some point learning that 10% more can halve your hosting costs so it's well worth it.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#462

Post by nine_k »

conductr wrote: post #450
scalemaxx wrote: post #304

Everything comes circle. Back in my day, we just called it a "data center". Or on-premise. You know, before the cloud even existed. A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new? Better computing for sure. Better virtualization and administration software, definitely. Cooling and power and racks? More of the same. The argument made 2 decades ago was that you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital ex…

Curious question. If opex is so exceedingly high for cloud, pushing people back to capex to save money, then why has no cloud entrant come around with a price competitive alternative? It seems the main issue is that everyone is anchored to AWS so they have no incentive to reduce their prices. Probably same for Azure. I think Google is just risky because they kill products so easily.

It's just, like, not very easy? Say, Digital Ocean is one such entrant. Hetzner Cloud is, too, but it offers much, much fewer services than AWS. If all you want is spinning up instances, attaching storage, and maybe running a managed database and a managed k8s, it may be adequate. If you want DNS, queue services, email services, OCR, etc, etc, AWS has the widest assortment, and uniform access controls.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#463

Post by sdbrown »

sgarland wrote: post #301

Note that they're running R630/R730s for storage. Those are 12-year old servers, and yet they say each one can do 20 Gbps (2.5 GBps) of random reads. In comparison, the same generation of hardware at AWS ({c,m,r}4) instance maxes out at 50% of that for EBS throughput on m4, and 70% on r4 - and that assumes carefully tuned block sizes. Old hardware is _plenty_ powerful for a lot of tasks today.

On a related-different axis, I've consistently seen on-prem GPUs running identical workloads ~35% faster than the same workloads on the same cloud hardware, regardless of intermediate infra stack layering/versioning choices. Weird but I'm not complaining!

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#464

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

conductr wrote: post #451
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very interesting insight from your message. The Cloud providers made a lot of sense to finance departments since aside from the promised savings, you would take that cloud expense now and lower your tax rate. After the passing of the One Beautiful Bill ("OBB"), the law allows you to accelerate CapEx to instead expense it[1], similar to the benefit given by cloud service providers. This puts way more wind on…

CFO here and I capex everything I can, never understood why you'd want to opex this. I'm trying to make EBITDA as enticing as possible for investors and anyone else that cares. Also want to show we have control over technology cost and it grows at a step function instead of a linear. Capex spending is usually large and planned, so we monitor it more closely and need to see a good reason to approve a large new purchas…

its quite simple.

if you are a profitable company paying taxes, you 100% want to defer taxes (part of EBITDA) thus trade earnings for market share.

This is exactly what TCI did [1] with cable

[1] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#465

Post by conductr »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #464
conductr wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFO here and I capex everything I can, never understood why you'd want to opex this. I'm trying to make EBITDA as enticing as possible for investors and anyone else that cares. Also want to show we have control over technology cost and it grows at a step function instead of a linear. Capex spending is usually large and planned, so we monitor it more closely and need to see a good reason to approve a large new purchas…

its quite simple. if you are a profitable company paying taxes, you 100% want to defer taxes (part of EBITDA) thus trade earnings for market share. This is exactly what TCI did [1] with cable [1] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...

Believe you're talking about conserving cash through reduced taxes since this guy was against paying taxes.

However, spending a premium on cloud services over what you could with an on-prem capital investment does not help your cash position.

His tenant of frugality would have conflicted, especially since the cloud premium can easily exceed the tax rate - that is to say, paying taxes would have been cheaper

Section in your linked article about frugality https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...

In any case, spending on this either opex or capex doesn't help you gain or lose marketshare. Conserving cash can help, so you'd want to employ the lower cost option regardless of what line of the financial statement it hits - it's not going to be cloud if you follow that thought through

If cost was equal then opex gives a tax advantage, most companies are valued on EBITDA so still may not be their priority to optimize tax spend - a lot of other methods to avoid taxes. But the environment I've operated in I choose to capex because it conserves cash (is cheaper) and improves EBITDA optics (is excluded)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#466

Post by tomcam »

MaKey wrote: post #245
tomcam wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when I’m running a busy site and I can’t figure out what went wrong, I freak out. I don’t know whether the problem will take 2 hours or 2 days to diagnose.

Usually you can figure out what went wrong pretty quickly. Freaking out doesn't help with the "quickly" part though.

I’m not as smart as you

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#467

Post by BobbyTables2 »

torginus wrote: post #151
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%…

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…

Also don’t forget the layers of REST services, ORMs, and other lunacy.

It runs slower than a bloated pig, especially on a shared hosting node, so now needs Kubernetes and cloud orchestration to make it “scalable” - beyond a few requests per second.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#468

Post by adeebshihadeh »

HanClinto wrote: post #275
rudolph9 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having your own data center is cool This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.

It kinda' does, doesn't it? Re: the "hobby" part is where I agree with you the most. Where you say it's not solving genuine problems is where I differ the most. It really feels to me like Comma is staffed by people who recognize that they never stopped enjoying playing with Lego -- their bricks just grew up, and they realized they can: 1) solve real-world problems 2) not be jerks about it 3) get paid to do it Not eve…

comma four, baby!!

glad you're enjoying it :)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#469

Post by adeebshihadeh »

rudolph9 wrote: post #129
yomismoaqui wrote: post #119

This quote is gold: The cloud requires expertise in company-specific APIs and billing systems. A data center requires knowledge of Watts, bits, and FLOPs. I know which one I rather think about.

> Having your own data center is cool This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.

you can have fun while solving real problems. it might even be a requirement

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#470

Post by octoberfranklin »

tgtweak wrote: post #385

>San Diego has a mild climate and we opted for pure outside air cooling. This gives us less control of the temperature and humidity, but uses only a couple dozen kW. We have dual 48” intake fans and dual 48” exhaust fans to keep the air cool. To ensure low humidity ( Oh man, this is bad advice. Airborn humidity and contaminants will KILL your servers on a very short horizon in most places - even San Diego. I highly s…

Cryptocurrency mines have been doing outside-air cooling in desert climates, at ungodly scales, for a long time now.

At least a decade of that "long time" involved ordinary servers stuffed with GPUs (not ASICs) -- first for Bitcoin, then for Ethereum (until ~3 years ago).

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