So you want to build your own data center • Hacker News Board

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#281

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:31 AM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #219

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.

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…

I don't think that's it. I think Microsoft wanted a way to migrate already Microsoft workloads to something they could more aggressively bill by the GB or second or user or whatever revenue extraction metric you're down with. Basically, O365 extended to the entire M$ ecosystem. And for that it seems...er...ok. We've migrated a couple of dozen major M$ workloads from on-prem reasonably easily, and a bunch of little ones. Lots of skillsets transferred easily...I vividly recall talking a really fine SQLServer admin off the ledge when the "move to cloud" mandate came out who's now like "I had to learn a few new things, but it's pretty much like what I was doing before". Big win.

But then everyone said "a cloud should do X and Y and Z", and they try to bolt X/Y/Z on to the side with various levels of success. And now all the app owners who aren't native M$ have declared Azure not fit for purpose and picked up the torches and pitchforks. So we're going to support AWS, too.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#282

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:41 AM UTC

Bluecobra wrote: post #208

PaulRobinson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once worked in a "DC" in a converted cow shed in the English countryside. Hot takes that align with your experiences: - A key microwave link kept going down with intermittent packet errors way down in the data link layer. A short investigation discovered that a tree across the road had come into leaf, and a branch was blowing into the line of sight of the kit on our building. A step-ladder, a saw and 10 minutes later…

> It was all terrific fun, but I'm so glad I now only really do software. I don't blame you, a lot of us had to do things outside the box. Could be worse though, I saw a post on r/sysadmin yesterday where a poor guy got a support ticket to spray fox urine outside near the generators.

Squirrels are a real bitch.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#283

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:45 AM UTC

greenavocado wrote: post #125

toddmorey wrote: post #44

Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories: - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.) - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but t…

When it comes to Internet service we're living in the early 2000s in the some parts of the manufacturing world

[deleted]

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#284

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:48 AM UTC

greenavocado wrote: post #125

toddmorey wrote: post #44

Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories: - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.) - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but t…

When it comes to Internet service we're living in the early 2000s in the some parts of the manufacturing world

Manufacturing is always about 25 years behind the times. I made good scratch in the '00s helping manufactures with their DEC PDP-11 and DG Novas (from the 70s).

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#285

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:49 AM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #192

wgx wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall getting a DC tour of LON3 and being totally blown away by it all as a 20-something web dev. Good times.

When I was in college I’d call up datacenters pretending to be a prospective customer and schedule a tour. I was totally fascinated by them and knew enough to sound legit, it was like going to an amusement park for me.

When I was in college, I got a job in the campus DC for the same reason. Best job ever for an undergraduate student.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#286

Post by neeleshs » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #261

neeleshs wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. BQ,GKE, and at a metalevel the simpler project structure -all have been great. I cannot still fully understand the org hierarchy that AWS has yet.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#287

Post by fatnoah » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

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?

I worked for a large company that committed to a >$400M spend with AWS. Even though I owned a very tiny piece of that pie, I could get my account manager and a technical resource on the phone at pretty much any time.