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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

rameerez.com

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#381
post #312
post #309

Jumping away from the article slightly, where would you go if you needed a ton of vanilla disk space, the ability to do compute near to that disk, and for it to be accessible with a reasonable pipe to the public internet? As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are there other options?

Well, is "a ton" a level that can fit in a dedicated server or many? Just looking at https://serversearcher.com you've got 72TB of storage on 10Gb pipe for $360 or so a month: 128 GB RAM 6c/12t E-2276G 2X 512GB NVME + 4X 18.0TB HDD 300TB / 10Gbps

Just a few PB, and sharding it across servers is fine.

It looks like all the disk-optimized examples on that site (still much more expensive than paying for raw disk, barely 5x cheaper than S3, when a disk-optimized colo solution only has ~3% overhead over the disks themselves) are through some no-name provider "HostKey". I suppose beggars can't be choosers, but in the contexst of storage (where systemic failures should be accounted for in the model) are you aware of more than one provider with reasonably priced storage?

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#382
I worked for a small, local insurance company 10+ years ago that was not interested in the cloud in any way, shape, or form. They had their servers in two locations—the basement of our office building, and an offsite location ~300 miles away. They were professional server rooms, complete with proper cooling, backup power, and the like.

At first I remember thinking they were behind the times, but now I'm certain they've avoided wasting a fortune on the cloud.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#383
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you have a dev DB that’s 12 TB, I can practically guarantee that it is tremendously unoptimized. But also, that’s extremely easily handled with physical servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.

that's what I always brag to my devs, why is our DB 1TB, and only 20 users are working in our app. They are collecting all garbage and saving it to DB. Poor development skills I would say. Our old app did the same thing, and after 15 years it was barely 100GB with tens of users. devs today are SELECT *. If it does not work, they say we need more resources. Thats why I hate cloud.

Nothing like piling transactions, analytics, and logs to the same database. /s

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#384
post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

The problem it really solved was your sysadmins were still operating by SSHing into the physical servers and running commands meticulously typed out in a releaae doc or stored on a local mediawiki instance, and acquiring new compute resources involved a battle with finance for the capex which would delay pretty much any project for weeks, while cloud vendors let engineers at many companies sidestep both processes.

Everything else was just reference material for how to sell it to your management.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

First of all, if you have a dev DB that’s 12 TB, I can practically guarantee that it is tremendously unoptimized. But also, that’s extremely easily handled with physical servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.

Eh, please find me a 120 TB NVMe.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you have a dev DB that’s 12 TB, I can practically guarantee that it is tremendously unoptimized. But also, that’s extremely easily handled with physical servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.

Eh, please find me a 120 TB NVMe.

https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d5/p5336.html

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#388

I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious. Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly d…

I would think a quant would understand arithmetic. Did you try crunching some of the numbers with him? I would hope a quant could also understand following the common wisdom can sometimes cost you more.

The quant was still happy, The Boss was the one with buzzword FOMO

Looks about right if you ask me

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that, but I don’t understand how that’s particularly relevant to a bare metal vs cloud discussion. Wouldn’t you need to do the work to shard regardless of where you’re running?

Banks running on mainframes don't shard. They just throw more hardware at the problem. The modern mainframes capacity for raw IO is insane, and much higher than what you can achieve with any PC setup. More hardware, more bandwidth, client facing applications in the cloud, database on the mainframe. The major difference lies in infrastructure, particularly networking infrastructure. With cloud providers like Azure, AW…

Right, the networking is the biggest hurdle in splitting up your infra.

The compliance issues are another big one though, for organizations that are still scaling up and don’t have that know how using cloud is a huge advantage as well.

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