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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

blog.comma.ai

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#331

Post by spacebanana7 »

seg_lol wrote: post #303
spacebanana7 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is incredibly difficult in the public sector. Yes, there are various financing instruments available for capital purchases but they're always annoying, slow and complicated. It's much easier to spend 5k per month than 500k outright.

Your numbers don't line up, if you are spending 5k in cloud costs, and on prem is 1/3 of cloud. At 48 month replacement cycle, 1/3 of 5k * 48 months is 80k. So it is 80k vs 5k a month for 48 months. I think the primary reason that people over fixate on the cloud is that they can't do math. So renting is a hedge.

It’s not really about the numbers though.

Even spending 10k recurring can be easier administratively that spending 10k on a one time purchase that depreciates over a 3 year cycle in some organisations because you don’t have to go into meetings to debate whether it’s actually a 2 or 4 year depreciation or discuss opportunity costs of locking up capital for 3 years etc.

Getting things done is mostly a matter of getting through bureaucracy. Projects fail because of getting stuck in approvals far more often than they fail because of going overbudget.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#333

Post by sgarland »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #157

Stopped reading at "Our main storage arrays have no redundancy". This isn't a data center, it's a volatile AI memory bank.

You should have kept reading:

> Redundancy is not needed since no specific data is critical.

> we have a redundant mkv storage array to store all of our trained models and training metrics.

That's just called understanding your failure domains, and RTO/RPO needs.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#334

Post by sanderjd »

re-thc wrote: post #316
scalemaxx wrote: post #304

Everything comes circle. Back in my day, we just called it a "data center". Or on-premise. You know, before the cloud even existed. A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new? Better computing for sure. Better virtualization and administration software, definitely. Cooling and power and racks? More of the same. The argument made 2 decades ago was that you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital ex…

> you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital expense) and instead just account for the cost as operational expense (opex) That was part of the reason. The real reason was the internal infrastructure team in many orgs got nowhere. There was a huge queue and many teams instead had to find infinite workarounds including standing up their own. The "cloud" provided a standardized way to at least deal with this mess e.g…

Yep! The biggest win for me when AWS came out was that I could self-serve what I needed and put it on a credit card, rather than filing a ticket and waiting some number of days / weeks / months to get a new VM approved and deployed.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#335

Post by mgaunard »

kryptiskt wrote: post #217
mgaunard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I haven't seen a scenario where it makes sense beyond a small experimental lab where you value the ability to tinker physically with the hardware regularly. Offices are usually very expensive real estate in city centers and with very limited cooling capabilities. Then again the US is a different place, they don't have cities like in Europe (bar NYC).

If you are a bank or a bookmaker or similar you may well want to have total control of physical access to the machines. I know one bookmaker I worked with had their own mini-datacenter, mainly because of physical security.

Most trading venues are in Equinix data centers.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#336

Post by adamcharnock »

sanderjd wrote: post #321
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

This space of #2 like Lithus is not something I'm very familiar with, so thank you for the comment that piqued my interest! If you're willing to share, I'm curious who else you would describe as being in this space. My last decade and a half or so of experience has all been in cloud services, and prior to that it was #3 or #4. What was striking to me when I went to the Lithus website was that I couldn't figure out an…

Hello! I think this is a fair question, and improving the communication on the website is something that is steadily climbing up our priority list.

We're not really that kind of product company; we're more of a services company. What we do is deploy Kubernetes clusters onto bare metal servers. That's the core technical offering. However, everything beyond that is somewhat per-client. Some clients need a lot of compute. Some clients need a custom object storage cluster. Some clients need a lot of high-speed internal networking. Which is why we prefer to have a call to figure out specifically what your needs are. But I can also see how this isn't necessarily satisfying if you're used to just grabbing the API docs and having a look around.

What we will do is take your company's software stack and migrate it off AWS/Azure/Google and deploy it onto our new infrastructure. We will then become (or work with) your DevOps team to supporting you. This can be anything from containerising workloads to diagnosing performance issues to deploying a new multi-region Postgres cluster. Whatever you need done on your hardware that we feel we can reasonably support. We are the ones on-call should NATS fall over at 4am.

Your team also has full access to the Kubernetes cluster to deploy to as you wish.

I think the pricing page is the most concrete thing on our website, and it is entirely accurate. If you were to phone us and say, "I want that exact hardware," we would do it for you. But the real value we also offer is in the DevOps support we provide, actually doing the migration up-front (at our own cost), and being there working with your team every week.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#337

Post by tracker1 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #75
jillesvangurp wrote: post #29

At scale (like comma.ai), it's probably cheaper. But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk. Which means it doesn't make much sense for the majority of startup companies until they become late stage and their hosting cost actually becomes a big cost burden. There are in between solutions. Renting bare metal instead of renting virtual machines can be quite n…

> At scale (like comma.ai), it's probably cheaper. But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk. Which means it doesn't make much sense for the majority of startup companies until they become late stage and their hosting cost actually becomes a big cost burden. You rent a dataspace, which is OPEX not CAPEX, and you just lease the servers, which turns big CAPE…

I'm not disagreeing... but it depends on how you shift the complexity/work and how you lean into or don't lean into the services a given cloud provider offer or not.

Just database management is a pretty specialized skill, separate from development or optimizing the structures of said data... For a lot of SaaS providers, if you aren't at a point where you can afford a dedicated DBA/Ops staff just for data, that's one reason you might lean into cloud operations or hybrid ops just for dbms management, security and backups. This is a low hanging fruit in terms of cloud offerings evem... but can shift a lot of burden in terms of operational overhead.

Again, depending on your business and data models.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#338

Post by mbreese »

kevinkatzke wrote: post #276

Feels like I’ve lived through a full infrastructure fashion cycle already. I started my career when cloud was the obvious answer and on-prem was “legacy.” Now on-prem is cool again. Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.

Just one cycle?

This is cyclical and I see the main axis of contention as centralized vs de-centralized computing.

Mainframes (network) gave way to mini and microcomputers (PCs). PCs gave way to server farms and web-based applications. Private servers and data centers gave way to the Cloud. Edge computing is again a push towards a more decentralized model.

Like all good engineering problems, where data and applications are hosted involve tradeoffs. Priorities change. Technologies change. But oftentimes, what works in one generation doesn't in the next. Part of it is the slow march of progress. But I think some of it is just not wanting to use your parent's technology stack and wanting to build your own.

The cloud vs. on-prem tradeoff is one of flexibility, capacity, maintenance, and capex vs opex.

It's a similar story in application development. At one point, we're navigating text forms on a mainframe, the next it's a GUI local application, followed by Electron or Web applications with remote data. We'll cycle back to local-first data (likely on-phone local models).

When you start to hear about the network being the computer again, you'll know we've started to swing back the other way again.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#339

Post by regular_trash »

The distinction between rent/own is kind of a false dichotomy. You never truly own your platform - you just "rent" it in a more distributed way that shields you from a single stress point. The tradeoff is that you have to manage more resources to take care of it, but you have much greater flexibility.

I have a feeling AI is going to be similar in the future. Sure, you can "rent" access to LLM's and have agents doing all your code. And in the future, it'll likely be as good as most engineers today. But the tradeoff is that you are effectively renting your labor from a single source instead of having a distributed workforce. I don't know what the long-term ramifications are here, if any, but I thought it was an interesting parallel.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#340

Post by sgarland »

treesknees wrote: post #320
sgarland wrote: post #301

Note that they're running R630/R730s for storage. Those are 12-year old servers, and yet they say each one can do 20 Gbps (2.5 GBps) of random reads. In comparison, the same generation of hardware at AWS ({c,m,r}4) instance maxes out at 50% of that for EBS throughput on m4, and 70% on r4 - and that assumes carefully tuned block sizes. Old hardware is _plenty_ powerful for a lot of tasks today.

I’m on a project at work replacing our R430s and R730s. They’ve been absolute tanks with very few hardware failures. That said, my company chooses to have OEM support for replacing failed components and keeping firmware/bios/idrac updated. You can absolutely run these if you’re OK with 3rd party replacements or parting out spare machines. Some industries are more tolerant to this than others.

I ran 3x R620s 24/7/365 in my homelab for ~6 years (well, other than when I moved, or shut one down for a clean-and-inspect, or lost power in excess of what my UPS could handle... thanks, Texas). The only things that failed during that time were a couple of sticks of RAM, and a PSU.
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