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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#291

Post by Nextgrid »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #253
vidarh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually only true of you lift and shift your AWS setup exactly as-is, instead of looking at what hardware will run your setup most efficiently. The biggest cost with AWS also isn't compute, but egress - for bandwidth heavy setups you can sometimes finance the entirety of the servers from a fraction of the savings in egress. I cost optimize setups with guaranteed caps at a proportion of savings a lot of the ti…

I'd definitely be curious to hear how you'd approach our overall situation. We don't have significant egress costs, nor has any place I've worked with before. Our AWS costs are about 80% EC2 and Fargate, with the rest scattered over various services. Roughly half our spend is on 24/7 reserved instances, while the other half is in bursty analytics workloads. Our workloads are primarily memory-bound, and AWS offers pre…

> while most rental options we found were much more CPU focused

Out of curiosity have you benchmarked it? I find that AWS "vCPUs" are significantly slower than a core (or even hyperthread) of a real CPU, and this constrains memory bandwidth too. A single bare-metal can often replace many EC2s.

Another thing to consider is the easy access of persistent NVME drives, something not possible on AWS. Yes you still need backups, but ideally you will only need those backups once a year or less. I've dealt with extremely complex and expensive solutions on AWS that could be trivially solved by just one persistent machine with NVME drives (+ a spare for redundancy). Having the data there persistently (at a cheap price per GB) means you avoid having to shuffle data around or can precompute derived data to speed up lookups at runtime.

If you're actually serious about exploring options to move your infra to bare-metal or hybrid feel free to reach out for a no-obligations call; email in my profile. It seems like you've already optimized it quite well so I'd be curious to see if there is still room for improvement. (Or if you don’t mind, share what your stack is and let others chip in too!)

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#292

Post by brazzy »

tgtweak wrote: post #268
brazzy wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colocation to me means you buy your own hardware and rent only the rack space (and power and connectivity) from the datacenter. Is that really what you're talking about? If so, why do you choose this over renting bare metal servers?

Not always - you can lease your servers from the vendor as well, in which case you're renting the rack space, power and cooling from the datacenter and you're renting the servers from the vendor - most of the leases are designed so you can refresh your hardware every 4-5 years and it's usually still cheaper than renting from a dedicated hosting company. Once you have an established baseline for your server needs - it…

What about the cost of having people actually go to the datacenter to install hardware, and go again whenever there is a hardware problem, possibly resulting in much longer downtimes than with a rented server?

Especially for the "one (or a few) big server" scenario in the article, that would seem to me a pretty big factor.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#293

Post by dijit »

icedchai wrote: post #226
mrweasel wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also interesting that the cloud engineer can apparently be both a DBA, network-, storage- and backup engineer, but if you move the same services on-prem, you apparently need specialists for each task. Sometimes even the certified cloud engineers can't tell you why an RDS behaves the way it does, nor can they really fix it. Sometimes you really do need a DBA, but that applies equally to on-prem and cloud. I'm a s…

I haven't seen a company that hired DBAs in over 15 years. I think the "DevOps" movement sent them packing, along with SysAdmins.

Sysadmins never left, they just got rebranded.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#294

Post by benjiro »

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.

> For storage, Hetzner does offer Volumes, which you can attach to your VM

The argument was about dedicated hardware. But it still holds for VPS.

Have you seen the price of Cloud Storage? ARM VPS 40GB is 4.51 (inc tax), for 40GB storage, your paying 2.10 Euro. So my argument still holds as your paying almost 50% more, just to go from 40GB to 80GB. And that ratio gets worse if your renting higher end VPS, and double your storage on them.

Lets be honest, 53.62 Euro for 1TB of SSD storage in 2025, is ridiculous.

Netcup is at 12 Euro/TB for SSD storage (same speed as the VMS as its just localized storage on the server, not network storage). Fyi: A ARM 6 Core 256GB, at netcup is 6.26 Euro.

Hetzner used to be the market leader and pushed others, but you barely see any new products or upgraded from them anymore. I said it before, if Netcup actually invested into a more modern/scalable VPS solution (instead of their 2010 VPS panels), they will eat a lots of Hetzners clients.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#295

Post by dardeaup »

grg0 wrote: post #284
sgarland wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I always cringe when I see a job posting where they're wanting to hire a "passionate" xxx engineer. I always think to myself, "no, you really don't. you want to hire a dispassionate engineer who is objective". It's very difficult to be objective when you're passionate about something (especially a technology). And then what do you do with that passionate person when the organization gets rid of the technology that they're passionate about?

ETA - fixed spelling error

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#296

Post by benjiro »

Nextgrid wrote: post #286
benjiro wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you need to buy more expensive hardware? The thing is, if you run a old Xeon server, and compare that performance vs modern consumer level hardware.

Unless you are bought a 50~64 core server (and the power bill to match), your often way cheaper with consumer level hardware. Older server hardware advantage is more on the amount of total memory you can install or the amount of pcie lanes.

The cheapest enterprise CPUs (AMD as example) are currently Zen2, the moment you want Zen3s, the prices go up a lot, for anything 32core or higher.

I have seen so many homelab that ran ancient hardware, only for them to realize that they are able to do the same or more, on modern mini-pcs or similar hardware. Often at the fraction of the power draw.

The reason why so many people loved to run enterprise hardware, was because in the US you had electricity prices in the low single digit or barely in the teens. When you get some 35 cent/kw prices, people tend to do a bit of research and find out its not the 2010's anymore.

I ran multiple enterprise servers, with 384GB memory, things idled at 120W+ (and that was with temp controlled fans because those drain a ton of power). Second PSU? There goes your idle to 150W+.

Ironically, just get a few minipcs and with the same memory capacity spread, your doing 50W (often less) or less. The advantage of using laptop cpus. I have had 8 core Zen3 systems, doing 4.5W in idle.

And yes, you can turn off enterprise hardware but you can also sleep minipcs. And they do not tend to sound like jet engines when waking up ;)

I have a minisforum itx board next to me, with 16c Zen4, cost 380 Euro. Idles at 17W. Beats any 32C Zen2 enterprise server. Even something like a AMD EPYC 7C13 (64C), will be ~40% faster and still costs 600 Euro from China. It will do better on actual multithread workloads where you can really have tons of processes but 400 bucks vs 600+400 motherboard.

Just saying, enterprise has its uses, like in enterprise environments but for most people, especially homelabbers, its often overkill.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#297

Post by nine_k »

benreesman wrote: post #217
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…

In 2025 if you need convenience and no red tape you've got fly.io in the general case and maybe Vercel or something on a particular framework (there are some good ones for a particular stack). If your needs go beyond that? Then you need real computers with real configuration and you have OVH/Hetzner/Latitude who will rent you MONSTER machines for the cost of some cheap-ass surplus 2017 Intel on The Cloud. And if you…

(1) How does fly.io reliability compare to AWS, GCP, or maybe Linode or DO?

(2) What do you do if your large Hetzner server starts to show signs of malfunction? How soon would you be able to replace it, and how easily?

(2a) What do you do when your large Hetzner server just dies? I see that this happens rarely, but what's your contingency plan, if any?

(3) What do you do when your load is highly spiky? Do you reserve bare metal capacity for the biggest peak you expect to serve, because it's so much cheaper than running an elastic serverless architecture of the same capacity anyway?

(4) Considering that your stack still includes many components, how do you manage them, and how expensive is the management overhead? Do you need an extra SRE?

These are not rhetorical questions; I'd love to hear firm real practitioners! (E.g. Stack Overflow used to do deep dives into their few-big-servers architecture.)

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#298

Post by nine_k »

sahilagarwal wrote: post #233
shrubble wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months? If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there. SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple. If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want. I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve bee…

I guess my non-management / non-business side is show here, but how can it be that much?? I still remember I designed a fairly simple cron job that took database backups when I was a junior developer. It gets even easier now that you have cheap s3 - just upload the dump to s3 every day and set the s3 deletion policy to whatever is feasible for you.

Taking database backups is relatively simple. What differentiates a good solution is the ease of restoring from a backup. This includes the certainty that the restored state would be a correct point-in-time state from the past, not an amalgamation of several such states.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#299

Post by tgtweak »

brazzy wrote: post #292
tgtweak wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always - you can lease your servers from the vendor as well, in which case you're renting the rack space, power and cooling from the datacenter and you're renting the servers from the vendor - most of the leases are designed so you can refresh your hardware every 4-5 years and it's usually still cheaper than renting from a dedicated hosting company. Once you have an established baseline for your server needs - it…

What about the cost of having people actually go to the datacenter to install hardware, and go again whenever there is a hardware problem, possibly resulting in much longer downtimes than with a rented server? Especially for the "one (or a few) big server" scenario in the article, that would seem to me a pretty big factor.

At 1 rack scale you're saving ~20-30k/mo in cloud fees - you can hire an excellent sysadmin in the 12-15k/mo range and they can do a lot more than just go to the datacenter as needed.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#300

Post by fragmede »

dijit wrote: post #247
fragmede wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much were you paid as a jr developer, and how long did it take you to set up? Then round up to mid-level developer, and add in hardware and software costs.

That's a deflection. The question isn't about a developer's salary; it's about the fundamental difference between a one-time investment and a permanent cost. Either way: 1 day of a mid-level developer in the majority of the world (basically: anywhere except Zurich, NYC or SF) is between €208 and €291. (Yearly salary of €50-€70k) A junior developer's time for setup and the cost of hardware is practically a one-off exp…

> The alternative you're advocating for

Not sure where I advocated for that. Could you point it out please?

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