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Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

theregister.com

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Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#51

Post by andrewstuart »

brianmcc wrote: post #44
andrewstuart wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen vast amounts of developer effort go into “programming the cloud instead of the application”. It’s complete fiction that somehow developers are freed for all except application coding if the use the cloud.

A million application devs who used to write Java and SQL, but now do mostly Terraform, laugh and give a nostalgic sigh...

And then turn back to trying to work out how to grant IAM access to the resource that developer asked for before turning their attention to why traffic won’t come out of the VPC before trying to work out how to do compression on API gateway.

The whole time pining for the old days of running everything on Linux.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#52

Post by vidarh »

csomar wrote: post #33
andrewstuart wrote: post #26

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…

AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.

When I was doing devops consulting, my "cloud clients" were always by far my most profitable, because they were so used to that and so blind to the cost savings they could get.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#53

Post by doubled112 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #41

In the event of a fire: - In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running. - On prem, your company is essentially dead. If you want to deploy to another region: - In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template. - On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.

I worked at a software shop that survived not one but two fires.

This was before cloud.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#54

Post by ilikerashers »

These articles are usually pretty honest and non-controversial but bring out all the AWS brainwashed "Cloud Transformation" consultants.

They cling to a set of vendor principles drummed into them and can't seem to view other angles. Good 'ole Enterprise IT.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#55

Post by DeathArrow »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #41

In the event of a fire: - In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running. - On prem, your company is essentially dead. If you want to deploy to another region: - In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template. - On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.

Because if you have your own servers you are forbidden by law to back up data to another location.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#56

Post by vidarh »

xwdv wrote: post #31
andrewstuart wrote: post #26

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…

Is there a way to just provide the hardware for your machines somewhere and have someone else manage everything else?

Yes, you can. I used to provide those kind of services on retainer. Actually managing the "low level" parts of "everything else" was always a near rounding error of the cost, though. Managing modern hardware is not time intensive. And then you put a VM/container setup on top and tie it into an orchestrator and it still looks like a a PaaS to the devs.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#58

Post by bsenftner »

api wrote: post #23
mabbo wrote: post #20

My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…

I always tell people to do the spreadsheet. There is a point at which bare metal or colo becomes cheaper and that point will depend on your work load. If it’s outbound bandwidth intensive that point will come sooner than say a storage intensive work load. You always hear stories like this where people didn’t do that and were lazy and massively overpaid on cloud.

I am often surprised how people in our field don't run the numbers, so they are not talking nonsense when these hard numbers are so easy to generate.

Also, people seem to forget that not all startups are consumer lo-CPU requiring applications. If one has a product that requires non-trivial compute, going immediately colo can be essential. In my own previous startup, my calculations showed an AWS monthly expense of $96K, while I could spend $60K to acquire higher end hardware than AWS to build a server cluster and colocate that for a measly $600 a month.And forget about the "it's hard to run a server, let along a server cluster" propaganda - it is not hard at all.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#59

Post by VBprogrammer »

yardie wrote: post #15

This keeps being brought up since the early days of AWS. Yes, the cloud is more expensive. It simply adds another layer of management, scalability, and flexibility you would not be able to build yourself. And there is a layer of profit for the cloud provider as well. Whoever was told the cloud would be cheaper was being lied to. I've built cloud, colo'ed and hybrid systems. Every few years this would come up. Now, so…

Something which sometimes gets lost from a US centric perspective is that cloud lets you get servers much closer to the end user without having to establish relationships with hosting companies and colo facilities on another continent. Shaving 100ms off of each request can be useful in a lot of circumstances.

Re: Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

#60

Post by andrewstuart »

csomar wrote: post #33
andrewstuart wrote: post #26

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…

AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.

So much kubernetes is just overkill.

A fast modern 16 core machine with 128 gig of ram can meet a lot of needs.

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