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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#281

Post by msgodel »

ahdanggit wrote: post #279
msgodel wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to say "oh yeah just run qemu-kvm" until my girlfriend moved in with me and I realized you do legitimately need some kind of infrastructure for managing your "internal cloud" if anyone involved isn't 100% on the same page and then that starts to be its own thing you really do have to manage. Suddenly I learned why my employer was willing to spend so much on OpenStack and Active directory.

> until my girlfriend moved in with me lol, why was this the defining moment? She wasn't too keen on hearing the high pitch wwwwhhhhuuuuurrrrrrr of the server fans?

She was another software engineer and needed VMs too so I thought I'd just let her use some of my spare compute.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#282

Post by grg0 »

decasia wrote: post #7

Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then…

> if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.

Never underestimate the price people are willing to pay to evade responsibility. I estimate this is a multi-billion dollar market.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#283

Post by cnst »

runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

> types of solutions engineers even consider

I think the issue is actually the opposite.

With the cloud, the engineers fail to see the actual cost of their inefficient scaled-out code, because someone else (the CFO) pays the bill; and the answer to any issue, is simply adding more "workers" and more "cloud", since they're basically "free" from the perspective of the employee. (And the more "cloud" something is, like, the serverless, the more "free", completely inverting the economics of making a profit on the service — when the CFO tells you that your AWS bill is too high, you move everything from the EC2 to AWS Lambda, since the salesperson from AWS tells you that serverless is far cheaper, only for the bill to get even higher, for reasons unknown, of course.)

Whom the cloud tax actually constrains are the entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. If you have to pay $5000/mo to AWS just for the infra, you can only go so long without lots of revenue, and you'd need to have a whopping 5k/mo+ worth of revenue before breaking even. Yet with a $200/mo like at OVH or Hetzner, you can afford to let it grow at negligible cost to yourself, and it can basically start being profitable with the first few users.

Don't believe this? Look at the blog entries by the guy who bought Yahoo!'s Delicious, written before they went bankrupt and were up for sale. He was basically pointing out that the services have roughly the same number of users, and require the same engineering resources, yet one is being operated at a loss, whereas the other one makes a profit (guess which one, and guess why).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in

So, literally, the difference between the cloud and renting One Big Server, is making a loss and going out of business, and remaining in business and purchasing your underwater competitor for pennies on the dollar.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#284

Post by grg0 »

sgarland wrote: post #107
dardeaup wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what cost politically? I would expect political battles to be far more intense than any of the technical ones.

That’s because 75% (citation: wild-ass estimate) of tech workers are incapable of critical thinking, and blindly parrot whatever they’ve heard / read. The number of times I’ve seen something on HN, thought “that doesn’t sound right,” and then spent a day disproving it locally is too damn high. Of course, by then no one gives a shit, and they’ve all moved on patting each other on the back about how New Shiny is better…

I do wish this field were more scientific and factual. Rather, it more closely resembles cults.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#285

Post by Biganon »

railorsi wrote: post #63
matt-p wrote: post #6

A thoroughly good article. It's probably worth also considering adding a CDN if you take this approach at scale. You get to use their WAF and DNS failover. A big pain point that I personally don't love is that this non-cloud approach normally means running my own database. It's worth considering a provider who also provides cloud databases. If you go for an 'active/passive' setup, consider saving even more money by u…

What’s the issue with running Postgres inside a docker container + regular backups? Never had problem and relatively easy to manage.

Why use a docker container? I run Postgres as is, what would I gain with running it in a container?

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#286

Post by Nextgrid »

benjiro wrote: post #220
Nextgrid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on your power costs. In certain parts of Europe, power is so expensive that Hetzner actually works out cheaper (despite them providing you the entire machine and datacenter-grade internet connection).

Trust me, even with 35 cent/kwh (Germany), its easy to make it work. Just do not buy enterprise hardware. People are obsessed with running racks full of often obsolete hardware, that is not designed around energy efficiency. Here is a fun one ... https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1dqq3h8/my_12x_... Dude is running 12x AMD 6600HS with a power draw between 300 a 400W. The compute alone is easily 3x of a equi…

> Just do not buy enterprise hardware

But then you need to buy newer, more expensive hardware, which pushes your initial price up (divide by the amount of time you'll need to host the server to get the monthly equivalent, then add power/connectivity/maintenance and compare to Hetzner).

Btw generally the reason homelabbers flock to legacy enterprise hardware is that it generally gives you a good amount of compute for a cheap price, if you don't mind the increased power cost. This is actually fine as a lot of homelab usage is bursty and the machine can be powered off outside of those times.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#287

Post by Nextgrid »

andersmurphy wrote: post #270
christophilus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the cores on a dedicated Hetzner box obliterate the cores on an EC2 machine every time I’ve tested them. So, if anything, it understates the massive performance gap.

Hetzner also tends to have more modern SSDs with the latest nvme. Which can make a massive difference for your DB.

It's less about the modernity of SSDs and more about a fundamental difference: all persistent storage on AWS is actually networked - it's exposed to you as NVME but it's actually on a SAN and all IO requests go over the network.

You can get actual direct-attached SSDs on EC2 (and I'd expect performance to be on-par with Hetzner), but those are ephemeral and you lose them on reboot.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#288

Post by Nextgrid »

radiator wrote: post #273
benjiro wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility. Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory). Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully desi…

> Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75% For storage, Hetzner does offer Volumes, which you can attach to your VM and you can choose exactly how large you want them to be and are charged separately. But your argument about doubling resources and doubling prices still holds for RAM.

FYI he's talking about dedicated servers (or "root servers" as they call them).

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#289

Post by Nextgrid »

Biganon wrote: post #285
railorsi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the issue with running Postgres inside a docker container + regular backups? Never had problem and relatively easy to manage.

Why use a docker container? I run Postgres as is, what would I gain with running it in a container?

It makes the whole thing is configured in a docker-compose file (or your raw Docker CLI invocation) + the data volume. So as long as you have those two things you can replicate it and move it to other hosts regardless of their distro.

Compare that with using your distro's packaged version where you can have version variations, variations in default config or file path locations, etc.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#290

Post by Nextgrid »

andersmurphy wrote: post #228
Aeolun wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A multi node system tends to be less reliable and more failure points than a single box system. Failures rarely happen in isolation. Just like a lot of problems exists between keyboard and chair, a lot of problems exist between service A and service B. The zero downtime deployment for my PHP site consisted of symlinking from one directory to another.

Nice! Honestly, we need to stop promoting prematurely making everything a network request as a good idea.

> we need to stop promoting prematurely making everything a network request as a good idea

But how are all these "distributed systems engineers" going to get their resume points and jobs?

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