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

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

#291

Post by hinkley »

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…

I have a small app I run just fine in Digital Ocean, but at work we care about not just geographical redundancy but geographical load balancing. Having user traffic cross the country puts you at a deficit for response times, and if that matters to your company, having servers close to clusters of users is a good thing.

I can do that a little bit with DO. What are my options with OVH? I see them bragging about having the biggest data center, as if I am supposed to think that's a good idea instead of a terrible one.

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

#292

Post by bsenftner »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #272
bsenftner wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem... It was far better to invest a little up front, and maintain at $600 my operations than the same for $96K a month, that's why. I never "lifted and shifted", I built and deployed, with physical servers, a 3-way duplicated environment that flew like a hot rod. At a fraction of cloud's expense.

Are you claiming that you knew exactly how powerful you needed your machines to be, before you launched? Or are your machines running at 25% utilization which AWS would charge substantially less for?

I'm not making any such claim. I'm saying I built a 24-7 available physical 17-server cluster to operate my startup's needs. I had more capacity than I needed, but at the same expense thru AWS I'd not have enough to operate. At less than the expense of one AWS month, I had my entire environment owned outright. How is that difficult to understand?

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

#293

Post by AtlasBarfed »

The lawyer/legal department bottlenecks on cloud usage is a pretty maddening aspect of corporate cross-shopping of clouds.

At this point, every semi-established cloud provider must have sufficient paperwork to cover the various legal permutations. And it's not like the lawyers are doing any technical research to verify any security aspects.

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

#294

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mrh0057 wrote: post #246
wazoox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you remember that for years, Stack Overflow ran out of a couple of well administered servers. YAGNI. KISS. People forget the basics because "infrastructure astronautics" is fun, and it probably helps make a beautiful resume, too.

Another issue is people don't understand how powerful modern hardware is. You have modern systems that process less transaction per a second ones from the 1970s. Just look at the modern SPA. They are slower than ones 10 years ago, and the JavaScript VM is much faster plus all the hardware gains. Why does it make Twitter and Gmail a few seconds to load?

I don't doubt certain mainframe apps of the (late) 1970s could beat the TPS of a generically frameworked app in certain situations, but do you have any real numbers/situations/case studies to back that up?

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

#295

Post by GhostVII »

Or maybe cost just doesn't really matter to many companies. If using AWS helps you scale easier, and lets developers spend less time managing servers, that can be extremely valuable, especially at a company that is growing quickly. Who really cares if you are spending too much, the goal isn't profitability it's getting as many users as possible. For many tech companies, I think money is pretty much a non-issue, as evidenced by the insane salaries they offer - the real challenge is scaling up an organization without completely paralyzing all progress, and AWS can help do that.

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

#296

Post by AtlasBarfed »

vidarh wrote: post #188
x0x0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up Cloud…

Or, you know, you could have brought in a consultant part time. If you're small enough that you can handle an AWS setup without someone full time, you could run on a managed hosting setup for less including an external consultant charging ridiculous hourly rates. Clients on AWS were always my best ones, because they were used to paying so much over the odds I could set my rates much higher.

Yeah, I wanted an extra person on our desperately understaffed team, so I proposed I cut about a million bucks of spending year-on-year from AWS.

They didn't want to increase the head count. The AWS spend was a different silo/team/contract.

Corporate accounting is insane.

It almost smelled like "well, we negotiated this great AWS discount, so it doesn't bother us that we are spending an extra million. We're getting it at a DISCOUNT!"

Is there some MBA trend where every headcount is some ticking time bomb of liability that is 10x worse than their yearly salary?

You spend 150k on servers, they don't improve over a year.

You spend 150k on a decent employee, not even rockstar ninja 100xer, and they will deliver useful, although sometimes hidden, productivity and optimization.

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

#297

Post by erikbye »

mwcampbell wrote: post #90
Spivak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we colo at a few local datacenters and have do deal with a huge amount of pressure from our investors as to why we're not using AWS. The points that always seem to come up: * AWS is a known quantity and it's easier to evaluate our business with it. * AWS provides "outage damage control" because AWS outages make the news and customers are more understanding. When our ISP has issues it just looks bad on u…

How do you do failover if a server fails or if connectivity to one of those datacenters is lost? With AWS I could just set up a multi-availability-zone RDS deployment for the database and an auto-scaling group for the web tier and be confident that AWS will recover the system from most failures. To me, that is the major selling point of any of the hyperscale cloud providers.

> How do you do failover if a server fails

Not sure if you do not know anything about typical ESXi and vSphere setups, but if a server fails, all virtual machines are automatically migrated to a healthy server. And of course, your HPE G10s are compute only, all storage is on the fiber channel connected SAN.

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

#299

Post by freeone3000 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #274
freeone3000 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AWS premium for GPU instances is absolutely not worth it. You don't hear about people running local GPU compute clusters because it's not newsworthy -- it's obvious . Put a few workstations behind a switch, fire up torch.distributed, you're done. And after two months, you've beaten the AWS spend for the same amount of GPU compute, even if only 50% of the time is spent training. Timesharing is done with shell acco…

What if you want 10x the GPU for one month to build a model?

That's the only scenario I can think where it comes out clearly in favor of AWS - you've tested your model in the small on Colab, you're confident you'll need only a few training runs, you can schedule them in us-east, and you can inference on CPU, and you won't need to rebuild for another eight months (when purchased cards become outdated).

It's not an impossible scenario... But imagine the sort of company that trains their own model instead of using a huggingface refinement or an off-the-shelf redistillation. (These can be done reasonably on an average gaming PC, no need for a cluster.) Such a company has expensive human resources. They bothered to get a data scientist and at least a research engineer, if not a full researcher. Were they hired on six-month contract as well? This is a huge expense, so it must be an important differentiator to have built a custom model -- and it's a one-and-done? I don't see it. I think it's going to be an ongoing project, or it shouldn't have been approved in the first place.

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

#300

Post by Nextgrid »

908B64B197 wrote: post #153
duhast wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow is famous for running on-prem on bare metal Dell hardware: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha... Last time I checked, GitHub was also mostly on bare metal and cloud-free.

They launched in 2008, on a stack built around IIS because that was what their early devs were familiar with.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
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