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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?

#491

Post by Darkstryder »

brownbat wrote: post #387
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 remember a post here a while back from a guy running Bitcoin mining in his dorm room. One day he realized he could offer his spare cycles to grad students with high computing workloads and undercut cloud computing prices while increasing what he made far over just mining. It's very weird that we haven't fully arbitraged $/instruction to a single (low) price yet (or storage/hosting, whichever). If only there were an…

Remember that the "cost per instruction" ought to be very different depending on a lot of other factors, including but not limited to:

- how much data do you need to move to actually perform the computation

- whether the computation performance is expected to be reliable or if best-effort is acceptable

- whether there are confidentiality and accuracy requirements on the input and output of the computation.

Most software engineering teams are not working at a granular enough level to properly describe which parts of their computations and data are expected to be reliable or not (in availability, confidentiality and integrity). However this can impact the cost per instruction of a computation by multiple orders of magnitude.

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

#492

Post by michaelt »

weinzierl wrote: post #485
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…

Sorry, but what is LTO in this context? Google turns up Link Time Optimization and Legal Tribune Online and both seem not quite right....

Probably "Lease To Own" a.k.a. "hire purchase" which is kinda similar to buying something on long-term credit.

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

#493

Post by C1sc0cat »

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…

In that case Use Linode and not AWS - I ported a little POC system I had built to Linode and it cost 10x to run it on AWS.

Though I id get a understanding of the basics of AWS out of it probably not the best use of the share holders money

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

#494

Post by swyx »

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…

thanks for all the detailed info!

i find this hard to square with the evidence that the Netflixes of the world still find it worthwhile to pay AWS then. theres no way that they dont have the same problems you do. care to speculate on why they prefer to pay a vendor? (it seems the Dropbox story is the exception that proves the rule)

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

#495

Post by swyx »

Fornax96 wrote: post #471
brownbat wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a post here a while back from a guy running Bitcoin mining in his dorm room. One day he realized he could offer his spare cycles to grad students with high computing workloads and undercut cloud computing prices while increasing what he made far over just mining. It's very weird that we haven't fully arbitraged $/instruction to a single (low) price yet (or storage/hosting, whichever). If only there were an…

> If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees This is exactly what Sia.tech is building for storage. A competitive marketplace for storage providers where anyone can set up a host and start selling their spare storage space. It's not completely finished yet, but it's pretty close. A bunc…

how much replication do you need to make this kind of thing reliable? since anyone can pull storage at any time. does that then make transactions super slow? any numbers you can put on this would be helpful. also, whats your product? (just curious)

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

#496

Post by Darkstryder »

On top of what others have said, when outside the US the Cloud Act has been a big one for most previous companies I worked for.

Using AWS / Azure / Google Cloud (even using datacenters from your own country) implies that the US government can access your data at will.

As soon as you treat sensitive information, especially related to non-US governments, this becomes a blocking factor.

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

#497

Post by plq »

weinzierl wrote: post #485
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…

Sorry, but what is LTO in this context? Google turns up Link Time Optimization and Legal Tribune Online and both seem not quite right....

Not OP but he most probably meant lease-to-own. In my experience it's a financing model that spans the equipment's economical lifetime. Let's say 3 years for a server box. In the end of the contract you either pay the last instalment, which is bigger (5x-10x) than usual and keep it, or you return the equipment and get a new one.

There are many variations of this scheme but that's more or less the idea.

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

#498

Post by Strom »

swyx wrote: post #494
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…

thanks for all the detailed info! i find this hard to square with the evidence that the Netflixes of the world still find it worthwhile to pay AWS then. theres no way that they dont have the same problems you do. care to speculate on why they prefer to pay a vendor? (it seems the Dropbox story is the exception that proves the rule)

Netflix doesn't host its actual content on AWS. They built their own CDN and have their own dedicated servers all over the world. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

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

#499

Post by fock »

sudhirj wrote: post #397

The way I think about it this: not using the cloud is like building your own code editor or IDE after assembling your own laptops and desktops. It may make you happier and it’s a great hobby, but if you’re trying to run a business you need to do a cost benefit analysis. We currently have double digit petabytes of data stored in our own data centres, but we’re moving it to S3 because we have far better things to do wi…

maybe it doesn't need a SV-salary engineer to swap harddrives. Just pick (hehe) three good ones of the AMZ-warehouse people, train him/her and you'll have a very happy employee which is around fulltime (or three of them) and paid well (1/3 of your engineers salary). They'll enjoy working predictable shifts in a nice office and in time you can even train them to do 2nd level support.

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

#500

Post by samcrawford »

Cost is the sole reason for us as well. We have ~600-700 dedicated servers around the globe, and generate a lot of egress traffic (~20PB/mo). We last ran the figures a year or so ago, and it'd cost us around 13-15x in network costs alone.

A common thread of a lot of the replies to this post is network traffic costs. If one of the cloud providers can figure out a way to dramatically (and I mean at least 10x) reduce their network transfer pricing, then I think we'll see a second wave of companies adopting their services.

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