Excellent write up! This is not the first blog post I see in recent times on going to owning infrastructure direction, but it is certainly well written and I liked the use of Excel in it, a good use, although visually daunting!
So you want to build your own data center
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Re: So you want to build your own data center
#212This is how you build a dominant company. Good for you ignoring the whiny conventional wisdom that keeps people stuck in the hyperscalers. You’re an infrastructure company. You gotta own the metal that you sell or you’re just a middleman for the cloud, and always at risk of being undercut by a competitor on bare metal with $0 egress fees. Colocation and peering for $0 egress is why Cloudflare has a free tier, and why…
Yup. Bingo. We've had to pass the cloud egress costs onto our customers, which sucks. With this, it'll mean we can slash that in half, lower storage costs, remove "per seat" pricing, etc Super exciting
If you didn't lower your bandwidth costs way more than 50% we should chat.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#213Man, I get an anxiety attack just thinking about making this stuff work. Kudos to all the people doing this.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#214[dead]
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#215As someone who lost his shirt building a data center in the early 2000s, Railway is absolutely going about this the right way with colocation.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#216There's places where it makes sense to be on the cloud, and places where it doesn't. The two best examples I can give are for high bandwidth, or heavy disk intensive applications.
Take Netflix. While almost everything is in the cloud the actual delivery of video is via their own hardware. Even at their size I doubt this business would be economically feasible if they were paying someone else for this.
Something I've seen often (some numbers changed because...)
20 PB Egress at $0.02/GB = $400,000/month
20 PB is roughly 67 Gbps 95th Percentile
It's not hard to find 100 Gbps flat rate for $5,000/month
Yes this is overly simplistic, and yes there's a ton more that goes into it than this. But the delta is significant.
For some companies $4,680,000/year doesn't move the needle, for others this could mean survival.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#217Was really hoping this was was actually about building your own data center. Our town doesn't have a data center, we need to go an hour south or an hour north. The building that a past failed data center was in (which doesn't bode well for a data center in town, eh?), is up for lease and I'm tempted. But, I'd need to start off small, probably per-cabinet UPSes and transfer switches, smaller generators. I've built up…
Why did it fail would be my question.
If it turns out to be any of “location, location, location” then getting a partially kitted out building may not help you.
Did they get independent data into the building via different routes? How’s the power?
Could be the data was coming in through a route that sees frequent construction. I knew a guy who ran the IT dept for a university and he discovered that the excavation crews found it was cheaper to maybe have to pay a fine for cutting data lines than it was to wait for them to be marked accurately. He spent a lot of time being stressed out.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#218I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers. Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they want to keep clients away with a 3 meter pole. My AWS account manager is someone I am 100% certain would roll in the mud with me if necessary. Would sleep in the floor with us if we asked in a crisis. Our Google cloud representatives make me sad because I can see…
My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend. I don’t sense they would roll in mud with me, which is kind of incredible. I wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?
> "My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend."
I assume that's written into the contract somewhere and not a kickback, right?
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#219I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers. Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they want to keep clients away with a 3 meter pole. My AWS account manager is someone I am 100% certain would roll in the mud with me if necessary. Would sleep in the floor with us if we asked in a crisis. Our Google cloud representatives make me sad because I can see…
> Microsoft (...) have a very strange cloud… thing. Risking a going off on a tangent, this is something I rarely see discussed but is perhaps one of the main problems with Azure. The whole cloud service feels like something someone oblivious to cloud computing would design if all they knew was renting bare metal servers. It's cloud computing in a way that completely defeats the whole concept of cloud computing.
Same feeling here. It's like they wanted a way to "play datacenter in the browser", but then asked 30 different teams to do it on their own, and only have them come together after they are all done to put the pieces together.
Then find out it's not good at all and go "oh well, I guess we'll polish it over in the UI" (not knowing that no serious scale works with a UI).
If I can't have AWS I'll make do with GCP. But if someone wants to go full Azure, I'll find work elsewhere. Screw that. Life is too short to work with bad technology.
Re: So you want to build your own data center
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft (...) have a very strange cloud… thing. Risking a going off on a tangent, this is something I rarely see discussed but is perhaps one of the main problems with Azure. The whole cloud service feels like something someone oblivious to cloud computing would design if all they knew was renting bare metal servers. It's cloud computing in a way that completely defeats the whole concept of cloud computing.
Same feeling here. It's like they wanted a way to "play datacenter in the browser", but then asked 30 different teams to do it on their own, and only have them come together after they are all done to put the pieces together. Then find out it's not good at all and go "oh well, I guess we'll polish it over in the UI" (not knowing that no serious scale works with a UI). If I can't have AWS I'll make do with GCP. But if…
Seriously wondering what you guys experienced with Azure. Never had an issue and prefer it over AWS.