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?

#21

Post by jwr » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

When determining what to use for development of my SaaS, I did a comparison of what you actually get from providers. The full article is at https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

My takeaways were that many cloud provider offerings make no sense whatsoever, and that Xeon processors are mostly great if you are a cloud provider and want to offer overbooked "vCPUs".

I haven't tested those specific setups, but I strongly suspect a dedicated server from OVH is much faster than a 4.16xlarge from AWS.

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

#22

Post by arpinum » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 12:52 PM UTC

These aren't the same product category. OVH sells a specific server, AWS is selling managed compute and storage. I won't buy OVH because the failure scenarios and recovery are incompatible with my needs without a lot of extra work

A better comparison would be Rackspace and AWS.

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

#23

Post by anticristi » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

jdub wrote: post #9

Are there tens of regions around the world? Are there multiple AZs within a region that are single-digit milliseconds apart? Can I autoscale? Is there a managed load balancer? Do I have to manage my own database instances and availability? Do I have access to hundreds of other services for things that I don't want to spend time managing myself? Aren't we years beyond the 1:1 cost comparison for a single server argume…

I wanted to write the same. One server in my basement never compares to a highly-available, compliant and secure infrastructure, surrounded by managed services. It's like complaining that taxis are more expensive than driving your own car.

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

#24

Post by Semaphor » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:00 PM UTC

> and a somewhat worst machine from AWS

I’m not a native speaker, but I see this usage of "worst" pretty often. Shouldn’t it be "worse"? Is this a mistake by someone or is this an actual construct I simply don’t know about?

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

#25

Post by wrkronmiller » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

kuon wrote: post #13

With the price of pro fiber (redundant with SLA) I recently moved some apps back to our own servers in house. This did cut the price down dramatically. I would not recommend it for super critical apps (except if you have your own state of the art data center, but I am not speaking about that), but having 5-10 servers in a secure cabinet will give you infinite flexibility for little cost. We pay around 5000$/y to keep…

How do you deal with data egress costs w/r/t AWS though?

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

#26

Post by lvh » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

viraptor wrote: post #10

He kind of touches on this in point IV, but never mentioned specifically: the cost comparison is not AWS vs ovh. It's fragment-of-EC2 vs ovh. If you need a predefined small number of VMs and no other functionality, it would be silly to go with AWS. But on the other hand, if you want a set of servers of a given class spawning on demand, with traffic coming in via load balancers, with integrated certificate and DNS man…

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.

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

#27

Post by prussian » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

Like I said on another site:

... people know AWS and know how to be productive with the services and frameworks for AWS. that alone is a figure hard to quantify. Sure I could save money bringing all the servers back internally or using cheaper datacenters, but I worked at a company that worked that way. You end up doing a lot of busy work chucking bad drives, making tickets to the infrastructure group and waiting for the UNIX Admin group to add more storage to your server. WIth AWS I can reasonably assume I can spin up as many c5.12xlarge machines as I want, whenever I want with whatever extras I want. It costs an 1/8 of a million a year, roughly. I see that 1/8 of a million that cuts out a lot of busy work I don’t care about doing and an 1/8 of a million that simplifies finding people to do the remaining work I don’t care about doing. The author says money wasted, I see it as money spent so i don’t have to care, and not caring is something I like; hell it isn’t even my money.

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

#28

Post by lvh » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #24

> and a somewhat worst machine from AWS I’m not a native speaker, but I see this usage of "worst" pretty often. Shouldn’t it be "worse"? Is this a mistake by someone or is this an actual construct I simply don’t know about?

Yep, that's not grammatical.

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

#29

Post by blunte » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

Comparisons of providers is about like comparisons of programming languages - the best choice will depend very much on the circumstance, and likely there will still be at least two possible choices which cannot be accurately differentiated based on overall cost. There are just so many variables...

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

#30

Post by varispeed » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

prussian wrote: post #27

Like I said on another site: ... people know AWS and know how to be productive with the services and frameworks for AWS. that alone is a figure hard to quantify. Sure I could save money bringing all the servers back internally or using cheaper datacenters, but I worked at a company that worked that way. You end up doing a lot of busy work chucking bad drives, making tickets to the infrastructure group and waiting for…

I had this mindset for a long time that we would save money running our own infrastructure. I remember talking days with our CTO about getting dedicated servers and spinning up one of the Citrix or VMWare offerings. I was sure that we could run our backend on one dedicated server for a fraction of the equivalent on AWS. I based my assumptions on running my own infrastructure for years without issues. However, once we started growing I understood that adding resources, changing network policies, spinning test environments would be extremely difficult and would stall our growth. I am so glad they didn't listen to me.