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Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#361

Post by Aeolun »

dahfizz wrote: post #274
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic Or if you're just constantly iterating on a large product with many engineers. Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs and so making them productive is cost effective. Things like SNS/SQS/S3/VPC/ELB/etc. save you countless hours and often make up for the increased cloud costs with increased developer productivity.

> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost. If all you need is a lit…

> If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting.

Over time, buying things yourself will always win out on cloud architecture, or the cloud business would be bankrupt.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#362

Post by sixothree »

MattGaiser wrote: post #186
sixothree wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a small business and hosting costs are killing us. Spending $300+ on a small VM that I can only describe as measly really hurts.

What the heck are you running? Ouch.

When you factor in storage, backups, and all the little support costs, things start to get pricey. Just the db can go from 500gb to a tb. Then all of that data came from somewhere and needs to be stored at least for a while.

Never mind the load balancing. And then we need another server for a different client, and another, and a demo server, and test & staging environments. Ugh. I wish this were on-premmable. We could probably hire an employee for the amount we could save. He'd probably be pulling his hair out supporting it tho. lol

My little on-prem HP dev server's got hundred gigs of ram and 8tb of fast storage. We run a bunch of VMs on there. We paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. And I don't even want to think of what it would cost to ship those VMs to the cloud. Nevermind just how poorly they would perform.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#363

Post by generatorguy »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #116

Manufacturing. The cost to a factory if the internet is down is too great. Each facility has its own highly redundant virtualization infrastructure hosting 50 to 100 VMs.

Not sure what you are making but that’s way more advanced than any factory I’ve been to!

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#364

Post by ps »

Cost.

We recently moved one rack to the different DC in the same city and used Digitalocean droplets to avoid downtime. Services running on Linux were migrated without high-availability (e.g. no pgsql replication, no redis cluster, single elasticsearch node...) and we just turned off Windows VMs completely due to licensing issues and no need to have them running at night.

The price of this setup was almost 4x higher than what we pay for colo. Our servers are usualy AWS/GCP/Azure was out of question due to cost. We considered moving Windows servers to Azure with the same result - the cost of running Windows Server (AD, Terminal, Tomcat) + MS SQL was many times higher than the price of colo per month. It is bizarre that you can buy the server running those VMs approximately every 3 months for the Azure expenses (Xeon Platinum, 512GB RAM).

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#365

Post by RachelF »

llarsson wrote: post #349
RachelF wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox did the same thing a few years back - moved everything from Amazon S3 to their own storage. My guess is they did it for cost reasons.

That S3 is eventually consistent with object updates (HTTP PUT) might also screw up things for a company whose core value is synchronized storage.

I suspect that is behind many problems with Google Drive.

Sometimes old versions seems to take precedence over newer ones, for some reason.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#366

Post by pavelevst »

AWS is one of most expensive options, and far not perfect, I can’t understand why people consider it as default choice... To compare - dedicated server on hetzner (core i7, 32gb ram, 20tb network) is cheaper than medium VM on AWS. If the product is growing, cloud cost can quickly become the biggest expense for company. Than it will make sense to spend some time make things run in more cost effective way

I think if you choose cloud hosting that costs about same as renting dedicated server plus settings virtualization by yourself - than it’s a fair choice (can check on https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ or similar)

Another sweet configuration is dedicated servers with kubernetes: good user experience for developers, easy to setup and maintain, easy to scale up/down

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#367

Post by mcny »

cortesoft wrote: post #300
Groxx wrote: post #216

Meta-comment: cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098576 cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097812 cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098658 abilities / guarantees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097213 cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090325 cost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23097737 threat model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098612 cost: https://ne…

There is also another answer... I work for a CDN, so we can't really use the cloud when in many ways we ARE the cloud. Although we do often make jokes about "what if we just move the CDN to AWS?"

It is a pity East Dakota won’t make jokes like these. Can you imagine cloudflare running on aws? What happens when someone tries to denial of service them while on aws?

On a different note, Netflix still runs “on the cloud”, right? I mean what does it really mean? Dropbox can still have most of its stuff on aws and do the expensive part on premises if cost is a concern?

The truly bizarre stuff happens at hybrid cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#368

Post by dmlittle »

tigerstripe wrote: post #334
tjbiddle wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the time trade-off? I've been drawing out my plans lately for a hobby project, all 100% on AWS. Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all. I can't imagine buying hardware, ensuring my home is setup with proper Internet, configuring ev…

What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo

If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#369

Post by cwojno »

AgentK20 wrote: post #207

Like many others have pointed out: Cost. I'm the CTO of a moderately sized gaming community, Hypixel Minecraft, who operates about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players. We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth, something along the lines of 32gbps 95th-percentile. The big cloud providers have repeatedly quoted us an order of magnitude more than our entire fleet's cost....JUST in bandwid…

I worked for a boss that pretty much demanded that we move to the cloud. I showed them the costs for the then 2 providers (GCP/AWS) and arrived at the exact same conclusion on server hosting alone, as bandwidth wasn't the main driver of our application. The rationale was that we'd save so much money by not having to manage the servers ourselves, but we honestly spent much, much more time in software deployments than managing hardware migrations and failures.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#370

Post by quanto »

> The more I learn, the more I believe cloud is the only competitive solution today, even for sensitive industries like banking or medical. I honestly fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least for business. Cost-wise, security-wise, whatever-wise. [emphasis mine]

Most people here seem to point out cost and utilization. I would like to offer another perspective: security.

I worked in both of these industries: finance ("banking", not crypto or PG) and medical (within a major hospital network). The security requirement, both from practical and legal perspectives, cannot be understated. In many situations, the data cannot leave an on-prem air-gapped server network, let alone use a cloud service.

It costed us more to have on-prem servers as we need a dedicated real estate and an engineering team to maintain. Moreover, the initial capital expenditure is high -- designing and implementing a proper server room/data center with climate control, power wiring, and compliant fire extinguishing system are not trivial.

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