Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#181

Post by freeone3000 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #114

tw04 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>can afford a modest markup. I'm with you until that statement. AWS is nothing approaching "modest" in their markup. 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive.

> 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.

If you don't have an FTE in charge of servers, who's managing AWS? If you leave it up to the individual developers you end up with an overcosted mess.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#182

Post by qeternity » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #180

If I get a three-year reserved instance of a t3.small, it works out to $6/month. A t3.micro works out to $3/mo. Storage and bandwidth, for my use-cases, amount to less than a dollar a month. Are there any other providers that compete on the low end like this? The common suggestions (DO, Linode, etc.) all cost at least twice as much. I buy the author's argument for "real" use-cases where you need one or more expensive…

OVH, Hetzner, and a small army of very reputable but smaller providers (Ramnode, BuyVM, etc).

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#183

Post by freeone3000 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

lvh wrote: post #26

KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.

It's possible that "many" firms do this, but given AWS' growth numbers that would imply they don't really spend meaningful amounts to begin with. Counterpoint: I've seen a great many false economies with people trying to go on-prem and do alternative hosting because they don't think the AWS premium for e.g. GPU instances is worth it. I don't think that has generally worked out well.

The AWS premium for GPU instances is absolutely not worth it. You don't hear about people running local GPU compute clusters because it's not newsworthy -- it's obvious. Put a few workstations behind a switch, fire up torch.distributed, you're done. And after two months, you've beaten the AWS spend for the same amount of GPU compute, even if only 50% of the time is spent training. Timesharing is done with shell accounts and asking nicely. You do not need the huge technical complexity of the cloud: it gets in the way, as well as costing more!

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#184

Post by dzonga » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #156

wazoox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you remember that for years, Stack Overflow ran out of a couple of well administered servers. YAGNI. KISS. People forget the basics because "infrastructure astronautics" is fun, and it probably helps make a beautiful resume, too.

I would guess SO had a relatively small number of employees and their servers were running a pretty straight-forward CRUD app and a database. Comparing that to the heterogeneous workloads that large organizations deal with is a bit silly. No doubt there's still a lot of fat to trim in those large organizations, but trimming that fat is rarely their largest opportunity (much to the chagrin of those of us who like simp…

my guy, you literally made me laugh. how's this https://stackexchange.com/performance different from any so called workloads large organizations are running. you've your app servers, db servers, load balancers and failover servers. pretty standard setup. yet SO is running on bare-metal. resume driven development and everyone thinking they're google | fb has killed and made money in our industry

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#185

Post by vidarh » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #158

nemothekid wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.

It's such a meme on this site to compare costs of AWS to hardware costs as though the hardware operates itself. I'm sure there are many cases in which onprem actually is a better value proposition than AWS, and I would find it much more interesting if we talked about when to go with AWS vs onprem, but instead we try to make these silly comparisons about the upfront cost of a server blade vs an EC2 instance.

I've done operations stuff for ~25 years now. I've used AWS since it launched. I've done devops consulting for years.

I've yet to see an AWS deployment be competitive on cost with onprem or managed hosting. In fact, I used to make good money helping people cut costs by moving off AWS.

That includes paying more for devops, because AWS is incredibly complicated, and most people struggle to get it set up well.

There are valid reasons to pick AWS. Cost is not one of them.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#186

Post by freeone3000 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #162

smolder wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At no cost That's so ridiculous I'm not sure how to reply or even interpret your comment.

I can't tell if your comment is a particularly rude way of picking the nit that "nothing is free, the cost (e.g., of IAM) is built into other services" or if you really find it absurd that the nominal price of many AWS services is $0 or something else entirely.

The nominal price of $0 absolutely is absurd, since every individual service has a separate pricing chart down to the ELB.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#187

Post by ksec » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

I felt there are several important things missing in the article, and things that not mentioned in the 160 comments so far.

AWS listed Rate are literally for small fish. Which is the stage you get your $100K / 1% of your Investment. In the 10x example, let say $1M, you should start asking for discount. And it could range anywhere from 20% to much higher. Compared to OVH which is already offering at a very low price. The price stays the same at scale.

Amazon are also going full steam ahead with their own ARM instances, and those offering are 20% cheaper listed already. And in many cases they even perform better per vCore than Intel. On x86 instances vCore is a Thread, while on ARM instances vCore is an actual Core. ( Assuming your Apps works with ARM. )

Network quality - OVH, DO, Linode, none of them are any where near as good as AWS in terms of Network connection speed, routing and capacity. And this is something you can recreate with other IaaS such as OVH.

All this brings AWS to a much lower multiple of OVH. And then you add up all the extra benefits such as easier to hire, Resume Driven Development, Asset vs Lease Tax Break / Financial Engineering etc.

I really do wish Google and Microsoft brings in more competition though. As the author mentioned he was surprised with no single monopoly. Because the market is growing faster than all of these HyperScaler can handle. Intel has been selling as many Server CPU as they could Fab them.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#188

Post by vidarh » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #133

tw04 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS i…

We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up Cloud…

Or, you know, you could have brought in a consultant part time. If you're small enough that you can handle an AWS setup without someone full time, you could run on a managed hosting setup for less including an external consultant charging ridiculous hourly rates.

Clients on AWS were always my best ones, because they were used to paying so much over the odds I could set my rates much higher.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#189

Post by perlgeek » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

I work at a company that markets itself as a "premium IT service provider", and I think our cheapest VM is maybe 3x to 5x what the equivalent OVH or Digital Ocean VM costs.

What you get, is:

* actual humans to talk to, when things go wrong

* hosting in central Europe, without dubious ownership structures

* you actually get the VM specs you payed for, no overbooking of hypervisors

* colocation in the same datacenters as the VMs.

* custom deals. If you pay enough money, you can install cages with your own access control in our datacenters.

* architecture support and consulting

* you can visit our datacenters if you really want

* lots of certifications that will make your compliance department happy

* if the auditors come to you, and request access protocols to your servers, we can provide those

... and so on.

Why do I list all that? Because cost is just one aspect to consider, and some business have good reasons to optimize for other aspects.

Some value flexibility in their service provider, some value physical proximity, some value constant contact persons over multiple years.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#190

Post by throwaway1777 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #175

I wonder how many billions of dollars worth of unsold cars are just 'lying around'. How many billions of dollars worth of fire trucks are parked right now doing nothing? Given redundancy and inventory logistics, once your industry gets to some number of billions of dollars of equipment, you're goddamn right there's going to be a billion dollars worth of equipment lying around. It's not the magnitude, it's the ratio t…

Definitely need to consider spikes in demand too. A perfect example of this was covid 19 supply shocks. Supply chains got a lot better at just in time delivery and didn’t keep much back stock, but with covid this broke down when everyone went out shopping to stock up for lockdown and work from home.

Edit: s/panic shopping/shopping/