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We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

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Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#51

Post by charcircuit »

chrxr wrote: post #24
recuter wrote: post #3

After spending $100k in a year.. After doing the math, We decided to purchase three workstations at a total cost of $17k. One is a GPU-based workstation with two RTX 3090s and an Intel i9–12900 CPU, and another two workstations with 16 cores AMD Ryzen 5950X CPUs. It took us a few FTE days to set those up to our satisfaction with slurm, NFS, backups, and several other services. We noticed that our RTXs, although consi…

Worth noting that using a gaming card for workloads like this would likely void the warranty.

No it doesn't

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#52

Post by criddell »

Nextgrid wrote: post #38
anonymousDan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with a good general understanding of systems (distributed systems, operating systems etc), but perhaps lacking in hands on experience of deploying in a specific cloud, what would you say the key things are to learn? For me they almost seem like trivial things you could pick up in no time on the job.

Product-specific functionality & configuration. Every cloud provider has their own product, features & configuration for the same basic thing. In the past, if you needed a load-balancer & reverse proxy you'd use Nginx or HAProxy regardless of the underlying machine. Now in the cloud, although you can technically run it on a VM, it's not "best practice" and you should instead reimplement it using your cloud vendor's p…

I'm pretty confident that somebody who has been able to master one provider is going to be able to figure out a different one relatively quickly. I think that breadth of knowledge could ultimately be pretty valuable.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#53

Post by koolba »

bsenftner wrote: post #22
xuki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say don't even consider colo unless you have a specific use case. Rented dedicated servers are cheap, let someone else take care of the hardware.

Yes, they are cheap. Running one's own server is also easy peasy; far too many think it is difficult, it is not. The most expensive part is the electricity.

> The most expensive part is the electricity.

There’s more than a kWh rate for that though. There’s battery backup power, diesel backup, and failover hot switching. It’s not like just plugging in your phone to charge.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#54

Post by nikanj »

1) You save a metric boatload of money this way

2) Onprem experience looks bad on your resume, compared to cloud experience

3) Incentives work for people, and resume-driven development is key, as our industry is very stingy in passing the savings from 1) to the developers

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#55

Post by m348e912 »

bsenftner wrote: post #22
xuki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say don't even consider colo unless you have a specific use case. Rented dedicated servers are cheap, let someone else take care of the hardware.

Yes, they are cheap. Running one's own server is also easy peasy; far too many think it is difficult, it is not. The most expensive part is the electricity.

Easy or not, it's a job. Configuring, patching, upgrading, troubleshooting, securing, monitoring. It's only not expensive if your time is worth nothing.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#56

Post by formerkrogemp »

pzduniak wrote: post #11
lvl102 wrote: post #4

I hate the fact that hiring now basically requires cloud experience specific to vendors. This is basically going to force people into one of the three major cloud platforms.

Eh, it depends on the features that you're using. As long as you stick to the basic stack of Terraform + Kubernetes / IaaS with cloudinit + networking + S3-compatible storage API, you can quite easily jump between clouds. Sure, the logic that sets them up is different, but the concepts are generally roughly the same. Even if I end up choosing a managed service, I always implement a second OSS backend that gets regula…

Y'all are always recommending "if you stick to tech stack a, b, and c , then you can always have good work," but a year or two later you'll recommend learning or expertise in "x, y, and c." You're the first person I've seen recommend a vague, general-ish skillset.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#57

Post by Maxburn »

We came to the same conclusion.

We do hosing for commercial HVAC systems and due to software requirements and the human factor of training the VM's we had in azure cost us significantly more than on premises servers. Add to that we generally keep those servers a little longer than some others would just increases the savings. This is still true even though we pay a colocation to host those servers.

The cloud flexibility is completely irrelevant for us in light of multi year service contracts from each customer we work with.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#58

Post by manigandham »

croes wrote: post #25
manigandham wrote: post #9

> "Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS" Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups. There was even a little event called the dotcom boom all about internet companies. This lack of history and experience is why new companies get into this cloud-first mess in the first place. Cloud is primarily for flexibility in iteration, dynamic scaling, or…

The dot-com bubble wasn't about SaaS companies but internet companies as such, basically everything with a .com address. Hence the name. It was more about e-commerce than SaaS. Especially because of the internet data rate in the late 90s.

The quote also says "web-based". Anyways the point is that web/internet businesses were common and growing rapidly way before any modern IaaS provider.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#59

Post by the_duke »

manigandham wrote: post #9

> "Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS" Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups. There was even a little event called the dotcom boom all about internet companies. This lack of history and experience is why new companies get into this cloud-first mess in the first place. Cloud is primarily for flexibility in iteration, dynamic scaling, or…

In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers.

It took longer to provision than EC2 and all you had for storage is a fixed amount of disk, but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses.

Re: We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

#60

Post by GordonS »

fxtentacle wrote: post #23

Wholeheartedly agree. After my cloud storage costs exploded (mostly S3 egress over to Hetzner/OVH), I noticed that renting a 1GBit/s fiber connection to my office is actually quite affordable at $80 per month (in northern Germany). Of course, it's not globally distributed and there is no fail-safe, but for the work we're doing, that is no issue. If we employees are offline, it doesn't matter if our tools are offline,…

> I was positively surprised that 10G fiber networking is now down to $70 for a PCIe card + 20m cable kit.

Wow, that is surprising, maybe it's time I started upgrading my LAN...

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