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Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

theregister.com

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Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#151

Post by teerak »

fidgewidge wrote: post #149
teerak wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. Just let [cloud services company] handle it for you until you reach that point. This is an old myth. Today you can get dedicated servers provisioned in minutes with an API call. A competent DevOps person can manage 10s if not 100s with proper automation. When you have a c…

I'd say testing/CI is one of the best cases for renting dedicated metal because of the huge speed increase available, everyone hates slow CI, and CI workers are easy to setup so if hw fails (it probably won't) it's not a big deal, you don't need to scale up again immediately.

Agreed, but I include CI in baseline usage. With testing I mean compute for feature branches, experiments.. that kind of stuff.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#152

Post by jjav »

bsenftner wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people to do the spreadsheet. There is a point at which bare metal or colo becomes cheaper and that point will depend on your work load. If it’s outbound bandwidth intensive that point will come sooner than say a storage intensive work load. You always hear stories like this where people didn’t do that and were lazy and massively overpaid on cloud.

I am often surprised how people in our field don't run the numbers, so they are not talking nonsense when these hard numbers are so easy to generate. Also, people seem to forget that not all startups are consumer lo-CPU requiring applications. If one has a product that requires non-trivial compute, going immediately colo can be essential. In my own previous startup, my calculations showed an AWS monthly expense of $9…

> I am often surprised how people in our field don't run the numbers, so they are not talking nonsense when these hard numbers are so easy to generate.

Agreed. Unfortunately the tech industry is driven largely by fashion instead of objective engineering as we'd like to think. Trying to diverge from the fashion du jour (here, cloud.all.the.things) is difficult no matter how solid the numbers are.

At my last couple startups I've run a recurring review of all the cloud costs so at least there is good awareness of how fast the expenses are rising (faster than revenue in every case).

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#153

Post by TimPC »

mh- wrote: post #134
citrin_ru wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard many times that while retails AWS prices are high all big AWS customers are getting discounts. Just curious at which scale this starts in terms of $$.

Somewhere around $100k/mo or $1mm/year. This usually requires a term spending commitment and gets you an effective discount of around 5-10%. Higher spends can yield significantly deeper discounts, of course. I think you'll find it difficult to get specifics at higher spends due to non-disclosures. Google 'AWS EDP negotiated' and you'll find some more info on the process.

If you’re getting a 5% discount on $1 million per month you’d need to host using a team of 1.5 people at SF salaries and benefits to break even.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#154

Post by teerak »

ilikerashers wrote: post #54

These articles are usually pretty honest and non-controversial but bring out all the AWS brainwashed "Cloud Transformation" consultants. They cling to a set of vendor principles drummed into them and can't seem to view other angles. Good 'ole Enterprise IT.

"AWS Well-Architected Framework" aka overengineer your service for optimal cash burn (hint: optimal for AWS).

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#155

Post by TimPC »

ldoughty wrote: post #62
dathinab wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it. For some mid-sized…

> It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it I agree. I'd like to add that AWS's value add can be the lack of need to understand the product configuration, just the SDK. Your start up already has developers tha…

I think it depends. My best friend works at a company that took four years to architect and build V1 of its product on prem. They had to build a lot of things by hand that are standard components in the cloud. They architected and built V2 on AWS is a single year. The higher cost is considered small by them compared to three additional years of waiting for a system to offer key features that upsell customers.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#157

Post by teerak »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #41

In the event of a fire: - In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running. - On prem, your company is essentially dead. If you want to deploy to another region: - In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template. - On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.

You really haven't looked into the possibilities with dedicated hardware vendors in a very long time.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#158

Post by jjav »

mbesto wrote: post #103
andrewstuart wrote: post #26

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…

> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a: - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) - Data center environment specia…

> Hardware specialist, Network specialist, Data center environment specialist

If we're talking startups here, still working on product market fit with small active user counts.. this is massive overkill.

Every startup I've been part of (except one) could've very easily been hosted from a single server under someone's desk (sure, get two for redundancy). The cost would be approximately nothing instead of a 5 figure AWS monthly bill. This isn't resume-building though, so it doesn't happen.

(Amusingly, the one startup I was part of that grew way too big for my "server under the desk" hosting model, they went to a colocated datacenter.)

> Security specialist

Yes you always need this if you're going to have anything connected on the internet.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#159

Post by jjav »

ckozlowski wrote: post #96

There's a major element missing from these discussions, and I'm stunned I don't see it in the comments either. And that is, ...what happens when things go wrong? One of the major advantages of cloud, be it AWS, Azure, GCP, etc, is the ability to bridge across failure domains. Properly architected, a workload can be resilient in the face of data center outages and circuit breaks. To me, these savings from operating in…

> ...what happens when things go wrong?

The same that happens when things go wrong with AWS (just cheaper).

One can of course engineer for any level of redundancy the business needs, whether on colo or cloud. Or not, as in most cases. We had four multi-hour outages due to AWS being down last year.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#160

Post by vidarh »

mh- wrote: post #134
citrin_ru wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard many times that while retails AWS prices are high all big AWS customers are getting discounts. Just curious at which scale this starts in terms of $$.

Somewhere around $100k/mo or $1mm/year. This usually requires a term spending commitment and gets you an effective discount of around 5-10%. Higher spends can yield significantly deeper discounts, of course. I think you'll find it difficult to get specifics at higher spends due to non-disclosures. Google 'AWS EDP negotiated' and you'll find some more info on the process.

Numbers I heard involved a much steeper discount than that, but may well have been an account they saw as particularly important. If you can only get a 10% discount you're still paying massively above the odds.
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