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So you want to build your own data center

blog.railway.com

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Re: So you want to build your own data center

#161

Post by jpgvm »

jdoss wrote: post #30

This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks. https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

Netbox is crap unless you are trying to manage a small but very heterogeneous environment. For anything big, very homogeneous etc you really don't want it.

It feels more like an OSS tool for managing university campus scale infra, which is completely fine if that is the problem you have but for commercial scale infrastructure unfortunately there isn't a good OOTB DCIM option right now.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#162

Post by walterbell »

ca508 wrote: post #72
matt-p wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not that difficult to build it into your app, if you're already storing information about hosts, networking etc. All you're really doing is expanding the scope, netbox is a fine starting point if you're willing to start there and build your systems around it, but if you've already got a system (or you need to do anything that doesn't fit netbox logic) you're probably better off just extending it. In this case r…

correct; I think the first version of our tool sprung up in the space of a couple of weekends. It wasn't planned, my colleague Pierre who wrote it just had a lot of fun building it.

Were there any promising OSS alternatives to Netbox?

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#163

Post by winash83 »

cbg0 wrote: post #134
winash83 wrote: post #120

We went down this path over the last year, lots of our devs need local and dev/test environments and AWS was costing us a bomb, With about 7 Bare metals(Colocation) we are running about 200+ VMs and could double that number with some capacity to spare. For management, we built a simple wrapper over libvirt. I am setting up another rack in the US and will end up costing around $75Kper year for a similar capacity. Our…

Sounds like a good chunk of money saved, but are you getting the same level of redundancy as you did on the cloud?

For most dev/test workflows redundancy is not a huge concern, because we can just recreate the environments, in practice things are quite stable, most HW vendors like Hp Dell etc let you rent the servers instead of buying them, in case of serious HW issues they take care of the fixes, and usually there is someone at the Colocation site to take care of the day to day

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#164

Post by dkersten »

inopinatus wrote: post #133
jonatron wrote: post #16

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

But if I said I’m building an office, would you assume I’m furnishing an empty rented space, or constructing the building?

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#165

Post by walterbell »

jpgvm wrote: post #161
jdoss wrote: post #30

This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks. https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

Netbox is crap unless you are trying to manage a small but very heterogeneous environment. For anything big, very homogeneous etc you really don't want it. It feels more like an OSS tool for managing university campus scale infra, which is completely fine if that is the problem you have but for commercial scale infrastructure unfortunately there isn't a good OOTB DCIM option right now.

Even for campus scale (e.g. CERN), there are limited options, https://www.epj-conferences.org/articles/epjconf/pdf/2019/19...

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#166

Post by _kb »

justjake wrote: post #45
walrus01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? The cynic in me says this was written by sales/marketing people targeted specifically at a whole new generation of people who've never laid hands on the bare metal or racked a piece of equipment or done low voltage cabling, fiber cabling, and "plug this into A and B power AC power" cabling. By this, I mean people who've never done anything that isn't GC…

I think that's my fault BTW (Railway Founder here). I asked Charith to cut down a bit on the details to make sure it was approachable to a wider audience (And most people have only done Cloud) I wanted to start off with the 101 content to see if people found it approachable/interesting. He's got like reams and reams of 201, 301, 401 Next time I'll stay out of the writing room!

Sitting on the front page of HN with a good read, and what is ultimately company promo and a careers link seems like a job well done. It made me read/click.

Yes, building a physical DC is much wider scope than colo. This is one part of that, which is also still interesting. The world is built on many, many layers of abstraction which can all take lifetimes to explore. There are non-devs who enjoy learning about software, web-devs who dabble in compilers, systems programmers curious about silicon, EE's that are aspiring physicists, who in turn peek into the universe of pure path (cue yes, that xkcd you're thinking of).

A 'full stack' overview of a standalone DC build still has to set a bound somewhere. This was an approachable intro and look forward to reading more from the layers you operate.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#167

Post by t0mas88 »

random_savv wrote: post #143

I guess there's another in-between step buying your own hardware, even when merely "leasing individual racks", and EC2 instances: dedicated bare metal providers like Hetzner. This lets one get closer to the metal (e.g. all your data is on your specific disk, rather than an abstracted block storage, such as EBS, not shared with other users, cheaper, etc) without having to worry about the staff that installs the hardwa…

Hetzner is very good for low cost high bandwidth things that don't need a serious SLA. But if you're selling a platform like Railway.com the stability and flexibility of Hetzner aren't going to be good enough.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#168

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

pinoy420 wrote: post #146
llm_trw wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I have stories. One of the better was the dead possum in the drain during a thunderstorm. >So do we throw the main switch before we get electroduced? Or do we try to poke enough holes in it that it gets flushed out? And what about the half million in servers that are going to get ruined? Sign up to my patreon to find out how the story ended.

Give me a link to your patreon

pay to the man's patreon and then tell me the story please!

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#169

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

vel0city wrote: post #104
jonatron wrote: post #16

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

How to build a house: Step 1: sign a lease at an apartment

its crazy how this is actually true in terms of this sentiment , they should probably change the name of blog article.

HN people are smart

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#170

Post by jeremyjh »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #42
jonatron wrote: post #16

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

> You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean? TFA explain what they're doing, they literally write this: "In general you have three main choices: Greenfield buildout (...), Cage Colocation (getting a private space inside a provider's datacenter enclosed by mesh walls), or Rack colocation... We chose the second option" I don't kn…

The title is "So you want to build your own data center" and the article is about something else. Its nice that they say that up front, but its valid to criticize the title.
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