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So you want to build your own data center

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Re: So you want to build your own data center

#261

Post by danpalmer »

neeleshs wrote: post #258
cj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS support in general is extremely good in my experience. (We pay for whatever the tier below Enterprise is called, I think it costs 10% of your spend) I’ve been on 4 hour screenshare with AWS engineers working through some infrastructure issues in the past, and we only spend $100k/yr. Even at the $100k/yr spend level, AWS regularly reaches out with offers to try new services they’re launching for free. We’ve said “…

I've had similar experiences with Google as well. Reaching out with new services, hours with some of their technical people, invites to meetups, free credits, an extremely pleasing and responsive account manager. We spend a few hundred thousand dollars a year with them. The actual software is top notch. Most haven't been just turn it on and forget it.

Yeah, I'm a little biased here as I now work at Google, but I joined in part due the positive experience we had migrating from bare metal to Google Cloud.

We went through two rounds of migration. First placing our data warehouse, where BigQuery was just so far past Redshift it was almost a joke. Then we wanted to move to a cloud provider with good container orchestration and GKE was obviously better than AKS and all of Amazon's proprietary orchestrators. It was pretty good.

Customer support varied between excellent and ~fine. Amazon customer support throughout that time (we had a few small bits on Amazon) was fine, but less enthusiastic about winning our business.

Not long after a friend of mine reported a security incident to AWS, something that looked like Amazon privileged access to their data, and it took months to get a response from them, and it was never an adequate explanation for what looked in all ways like a hack.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#262

Post by ksec »

kazen44 wrote: post #233
ksec wrote: post #181

I am just fascinated by the need of Datacenter. The scale is beyond comprehension. 10 years ago, before the word HyperScaler was even invented or popularised, I would have thought DC market to be on the decline or levelled off now or around this time. One reason being HyperScaler, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, to smaller ones like Oracle and IBM. They would all have their own DC, taking on mu…

just look at the insane amount of computers that currently exist and need to communicate to do data processing. I remember 30 years ago most people used one single computer for the family at home, half of the people i knew didn't have proper internet access. (and this is from a western perspective, the rest of the world was even far less digitized). Now look at how much networked computers are around you. - your phon…

>We have far more computers then a decade ago,

Yes that was already taken into account. We rushed pass active usage of Smartphone of 4B in 2020. With additional 1B user who have access to 4G / Smartphone but not using any Data. 1B people who cant afford it or are using feature phone. And around 1B people who are outside the age of using smartphone, child, baby etc. That is a total Around 7B people already. And anything after is a long tail of new generation outpacing older generation. Tablet usage has levelled off. PC market hasn't had new growth outside China and India. COVID managed to fasten a lot these digitalisation. I wrote about how the Growth of AWS in 2023 was roughly equal to doubling of itself in 2016. i.e 2023 AWS was building out the size of AWS 2016. That is insane. And yet we are still building more.

>Another thing which people seem to not notice is that a lot of older DC's are being phased out,

That is something I am not aware. But certainly will keep a look out. This got me thinking if building out a new DC is easier and cheaper than repurposing older DC not designed for high computing power density usage? While I have said we could increase Compute, RAM , Storage density in Rack by 10-20x, we have also increase power usage by 4 - 5x. Not only electricity / power usage but cooling and design also requires additional thoughts.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#263

Post by xhrpost »

motoboi wrote: post #122

I’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…

As a dev I recently sent my first AWS support request. Received a non useful response featuring factually incorrect statements about their own platform. Replied to support ticket, no reply. Sent email to two AWS reps, never got a reply.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#264

Post by justjake »

Twirrim wrote: post #204
ca508 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah that's my bad - I wrote this in Dec, we only published in Jan. Obv. missed updating that. Timeline wise; - we decided to go for it and spend the $$$ in Oct '23 - Convos/planning started ~ Jan '24 - Picked the vendors we wanted by ~ Feb/Mar '24 - Lead-times, etc... meant everything was ready for us to go fit the first gear by mostly ourselves at the start of May (that's the 5mo) - We did the "proper" re-install aro…

From working at a cloud, and speaking with capacity folks regularly when I was in certain roles, the supply chain strikes me as one of the biggest nightmares. Even at scale when vendors really, really want (or want to keep) your business. At times it almost seems like someone sneezes somewhere and whoops, there goes your hardware delivery timelines. The advantage at cloud scale is a lot of constant signal around capa…

FWIW this is the advantage of being able to run in the cloud and on perm

If we have to we can “burst” into the cloud

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#265

Post by justjake »

scarab92 wrote: post #126

Interesting that they call out the extortionate egress fees from the majors as a motivation, but are nevertheless also charging customers $0.10 per GB themselves.

That $0.10 per GB is direct pass along for the cloud ingress fees

We can lower that once we’re fully on metal

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#266

Post by motorest »

yeahwhatever10 wrote: post #199
motorest wrote: post #175

Earlier 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.

Can you be more specific?

> Can you be more specific?

To start off, read up on the ass-backwards concept of an app service plan. That nonsense is the ultimate anti-cloud computing approach to cloud computing.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#267

Post by whizzter »

icedchai wrote: post #257
motoboi wrote: post #122

I’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…

It's sad, because I legit found my experience working with Google's "serverless" stuff (like Cloud Run) to be superior to the AWS equivalent. The GCP command line tools ("gcloud") also feel better designed.

That's the thing GP is saying, Google might excel in engineering and even build superior products, but the issue bringing them down these days is that they can't manage customers/partners/etc for shit and if they fumble on search it could be over.

Most telling example was how iirc Terraria was a launch highlight for Stadia to show awesome indies, then somehow their magic systems lock down the developers account and despite internal pressure from Stadia devrel people they don't get it back in time until the developer just cancels development of the Stadia port. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_s...

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#268

Post by belter »

ttul wrote: post #198
motoboi wrote: post #122

I’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.

Unless the company is yours or it's a private company that can raise a compliance issue...Any other gifts?

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#269

Post by belter »

ignoramous wrote: post #223
ttul wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> ... wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory? When I was at AWS, our team used to (religiously / proactively) keep track of customers having multiple complaints, especially repeat complaints (all of which manifested in to some form of downtime for them). Regardless of their spend, these customers ended up getting the "white glove" treatment, which otherwise is reserved for (potential) top…

That was probably in the time of Bezos...Now with the new MBA CEO, it seems the rule now is to deprecate services without even putting out a newsletter or blog post. Customers just find out when they click on the Console...

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#270

Post by maayank »

jiggawatts wrote: post #245
maayank wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of issues you had that they could fix them immediately? I assume this is not about configuration issues on your part, but maybe I’m mistaken

I was one of the first users of the AWS Elastic File System because I had an ideal use-case for it exactly when it was first introduced. Everything worked just fine for 30 days, and then the web site basically locked up. It turned out that EFS had an initial "grace period" during which IOPS were unlimited, then it would become proportional to the GB of stored data. We had just a few hundred megabytes, so it worked ou…

Very interesting, thanks for the write up!
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