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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#501

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

conductr wrote: post #465
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its quite simple. if you are a profitable company paying taxes, you 100% want to defer taxes (part of EBITDA) thus trade earnings for market share. This is exactly what TCI did [1] with cable [1] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...

Believe you're talking about conserving cash through reduced taxes since this guy was against paying taxes. However, spending a premium on cloud services over what you could with an on-prem capital investment does not help your cash position. His tenant of frugality would have conflicted, especially since the cloud premium can easily exceed the tax rate - that is to say, paying taxes would have been cheaper Section i…

I didn't say conserve cash.

I say lower your tax bill.

"not the same ting" - nnt

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#502

Post by LeFantome »

adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

This is a good summary and my take as well.

The cloud is great when you just need to start and when you do not know what scale you will need. Minimal initial cost and no wasted time over planning things you do not know enough about.

The cloud is horrible for steady-state demand. You are over-paying for your base load. If your demand does not scale that much, you do not benefit from the flexibility. Distance from the edge can cause performance problems. In an effort to “save money” you will chase complexity and bake in total reliance on your cloud provider. AAA l

Starting with the cloud makes sense. Just make sure not to engineer a solution you cannot take somewhere else.

As you scale and demand becomes known, you can start to migrate some stuff on premises or to other managed providers.

The great thing about “cloud architecture” is that you can use a hybrid model. You can selectively move parts of the stack. You can host your baseline demand and still rely on the cloud for scalability.

Where you need to spend the money and gain the expertise is in design. Not a giant features waterfall but rather knowing how to build an application and infrastructure that is adaptable and portable as you scale.

Keep it simple but also keep it modular.

At least, that had been my experience.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#503

Post by undyingtrillion »

cgsmith wrote: post #6

I used to colocate a 2U server that I purchased with a local data center. It was a great learning experience for me. Im curious why a company wouldn't colocate their own hardware? Proximity isnt an issue when you can have the datacenter perform physical tasks. Bravo to the comma team regardless. It'll be a great learning experience and make each person on their team better. Ps... bx cable instead of conduit for elect…

Are there any resources on how to colocate as a hobbyist? Every colocation service makes it seem they only deal with big contract.

I'm imagining a setup that can work like this:

- I can purchase/lease from some vendor (maybe even a used dell 1U) and have it sent directly to them and they construct and install (same with ssd replacements, ram upgrade, etc.).

- They can setup remote KVM over IP access if needed.

- I never have to drive to their facility, but based in the US.

I'm willing to trade off some control and turnaround time here. The idea is to have something like a $500/month VPS but with a higher upfront cost and lower monthly cost for space, power, and bandwidth.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#504

Post by conductr »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #501
conductr wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe you're talking about conserving cash through reduced taxes since this guy was against paying taxes. However, spending a premium on cloud services over what you could with an on-prem capital investment does not help your cash position. His tenant of frugality would have conflicted, especially since the cloud premium can easily exceed the tax rate - that is to say, paying taxes would have been cheaper Section i…

I didn't say conserve cash. I say lower your tax bill. "not the same ting" - nnt

What you said doesn’t make sense. Make it make sense. I was left guessing.

In other words, please explain how it makes sense to lower tax bill by shift the expenses to opex when that process involves paying more for the same utility?

The only reason to lower the tax bill is to conserve cash. The article you linked to explains it that way too.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#505

Post by conductr »

nine_k wrote: post #462
conductr wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious question. If opex is so exceedingly high for cloud, pushing people back to capex to save money, then why has no cloud entrant come around with a price competitive alternative? It seems the main issue is that everyone is anchored to AWS so they have no incentive to reduce their prices. Probably same for Azure. I think Google is just risky because they kill products so easily.

It's just, like, not very easy? Say, Digital Ocean is one such entrant. Hetzner Cloud is, too, but it offers much, much fewer services than AWS. If all you want is spinning up instances, attaching storage, and maybe running a managed database and a managed k8s, it may be adequate. If you want DNS, queue services, email services, OCR, etc, etc, AWS has the widest assortment, and uniform access controls.

Once you build on AWS it’s hard to decouple. I get that. But companies that focus on reducing complexity still seem to find a way to do all these things for cheaper. Can’t find the link but yesterday there was a front page article about how you can just use Postgres instead of 7 other specialty databases. The reduced complexity of using one tool is a net gain. People just aren’t trying. It’s the whole “never got fired for buying IBM” thing again.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#507

Post by Symbiote »

acdha wrote: post #368
antonvs wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of AWS's favorite situations I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic. I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them. The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the c…

> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage compariso…

You are welcome to criticise my DB cluster comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#509

Post by nextaccountic »

sgarland wrote: post #294
vel0city wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can fairly closely replicate the experience of Aurora Nobody doubts one could build something similar to Aurora given enough budget, time, and skills. But that's not replicating the experience of Aurora. The experience of Aurora is I can have all of that , in like 30 lines of terraform and a few minutes. And then I don't need to worry about managing the zpools, I don't need to ensure the heartbeats are working…

The person I replied to said they wanted an open-source reimplementation of Aurora. My point - which was probably poorly-worded, or just implied - was that there's a lot of work that goes into something like that, and if you can't put the pieces together on your own, you probably shouldn't be running it for anything you can't afford downtime on. Managed services have a clear value proposition. I personally think they…

> Asking for that experience but also free / cheap doesn't make any sense.

Things that used to be very expensive suddenly gets available for free after someone builds an open source version of it. That's just the nature of open source.

It's unreasonable to demand it from someone, but people do build things and release them for free all the time! Indeed, it makes plenty of sense to imagine that at some point in time, open source offerings of Postgres will be comparable to Aurora in ease of use.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#510

Post by tgtweak »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #470
tgtweak wrote: post #385

>San Diego has a mild climate and we opted for pure outside air cooling. This gives us less control of the temperature and humidity, but uses only a couple dozen kW. We have dual 48” intake fans and dual 48” exhaust fans to keep the air cool. To ensure low humidity ( Oh man, this is bad advice. Airborn humidity and contaminants will KILL your servers on a very short horizon in most places - even San Diego. I highly s…

Cryptocurrency mines have been doing outside-air cooling in desert climates, at ungodly scales, for a long time now. At least a decade of that "long time" involved ordinary servers stuffed with GPUs (not ASICs) -- first for Bitcoin, then for Ethereum (until ~3 years ago).

Yes I've run many here in Canada - but you still need to keep intake air very clean and they will absolutely rust out or short from dirt ingestion if filters and humidity are out of check. They're also designed with higher tolerance to temperature than servers.

The amount of dead antminers I've seen from snow ingestion is honestly concerning.

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