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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?

#551

Post by znpy »

Many of the customers of my previous employer had hardware on premises, including the customer that I was handling.

It had both compute and storage (netapp). It had two twin sites in two different datacenters. The infra in each site consisted basically in six compute servers (24c/48t, 128gb ram) and netapp storage (two netapp heads per site + disk shelves).

Such hardware has basically paid itself across its seven or eight years of life, and having one of the sites basically in the building meant basically negligible latency.

The workload was mostly fixed, and the user base was relatively small (~1000 concurrent users, using the services almost 24/7).

It really checks all of the boxes, does all it is supposed to do and in a cheap manner.

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

#552

Post by close04 »

biztos wrote: post #355
dkdk8283 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintenance is actually quite low. I do hope you regularly patch and reboot your systems.

I hope so too, but it's not like a fleet of fine-tuned EC2 instances running CentOS 6.5 is going to be patched and rebooted regularly without a similar amount of sysadmin attention. (Not picking on CentOS, just using it as a placeholder for $REQUIRED_OS_BECAUSE_OF_CUSTOM_SOFTWARE.)

The main difference is in admin effort even with the same amount of automation. It doesn't scale linearly because of economy of scales. With reasonable automation a relatively small team can handle a pretty large cloud fleet. For smaller on-prem fleets the scale down might not be ideal though.

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

#553

Post by the_angry_angel »

moondev wrote: post #272
tjbiddle wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the time trade-off? I've been drawing out my plans lately for a hobby project, all 100% on AWS. Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all. I can't imagine buying hardware, ensuring my home is setup with proper Internet, configuring ev…

Do you think automation doesn't exist with on-prem? The vSphere terraform provider is very mature. https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/vsphere/index.html You can build your own machine images with packer, and actually have more control by building them from scratch (ISO) rather than being locked into a selection of base AMIs. https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/vmware/ You can launch HA kubernetes clusters with c…

> You can launch HA kubernetes clusters with cluster API. vSphere, openstack and even bare metal pxe all have providers

I've been looking for a decent solution for pxe and cluster-api. I've not pushed the button on any as I feel like they're all a little immature. Admittedly I've not had time to set up any in a test env yet. Any recommendations?

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

#554

Post by rainforest »

reacharavindh wrote: post #5

University research group here. Simply, _cost_ Our compute servers crunch numbers and data at > 80% util. Our servers are optimized for the work we have. They run 24/7 picking jobs from queue. Cloud burst is often irrelevant here. They deal with Terabytes or even Petabytes of moving data. I’d cry paying for bandwidth costs if charged €/GB. Sysadmin(yours truly) would be needed even if it were to be run in the cloud.…

When I was in academia I was stuck using the HPC facilities at my institution. I was lucky to get about 30 cores and my jobs took many months to run to get out of the queue (overall I used about a decade of CPU time).

I'm quite sure that 2 months of my time waiting for results (and the impact on colleagues occupying their HPC cluster) was worth the $9k or so it would have cost to rent enough VMs to get my results in about 4 hours or so instead of 2 months.

That's not counting the hours of machine and my time wasted building enough support for the awful queueing and execution environment it used which was almost impossible to mock up locally.

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

#555

Post by lewis1028282 »

AgentK20 wrote: post #420
kjsthree wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I very much want to hear about how you get your bandwidth.

We actually just get a datacenter blend, but I _believe_ they've got us cordoned off on our own dedicated 40gbps Level3 (now Centurylink) line to prevent us getting attacked from harming other customers. It's not so much about which provider you go to, it's more just about the economies of scale. Our entire fleet exists in one physical DC location due to the requirements of Minecraft's netcode, so rather than having…

What do you do about backups? I saw you only have one DC, are you worried about that DC being flooded etc and losing all your data?

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

#556

Post by bravura »

twic wrote: post #528
kortilla wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.

There are three things that make sense to me. Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem. (It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirem…

Do you mean PaaS, not SaaS? What other good PaaS exist besides heroku?

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

#557

Post by kokey »

I think when the economy is hit hard a lot of companies are going to have to look at what they can do to make sure they remain profitable since investor appetite has changed. This means some companies will have to look at what is being spent on cloud providers. Renting RAM by the hour makes sense if you are optimistic about future revenue growth, but if the market changes and you have to worry about how you can sustain profits while just keeping your current customer base then this makes a lot less sense. The cloud vs on prem argument also really includes all the things in between, e.g. colo, managed servers, VPSes and also better tooling to manage your own VM and container clusters on these, which I think will now get increased attention and competition when people are considering alternatives to the big cloud providers in order to bring down costs.

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

#558

Post by rhlsthrm »

sandGorgon wrote: post #428
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…

what i have generally seen is that storage - blob (s3) or database - is the blocker. Even if you go to k8s, the hassle to manage storage is non-trivial. And because of this singular fact, startups cannot move to on-premise. You really dont want to manage snapshots, restores, backups. Anyone can manage application servers.

s3 (or similar) and managed database seem to be the most "commoditized" (and cheapest) pieces of the cloud services stack. So it seems reasonable to move everything else to cloud-agnostic/on prem while still leaving those pieces in the cloud.

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

#559

Post by mikorym »

Here is a stupid example: Excel vlookups work on a network drive, but not on a cloud service like Dropbox or OneDrive. The absolute path can't resolve if it's used across multiple Excel users. If the users store the file locally, each will have a different path on their computers. Excel stores actual paths. [1]

There is one way around it: Mounting the cloud server as a network drive (some providers do this by default, but OneDrive is not one of them, neither is Dropbox).

I don't know of a way of mounting OneDrive as a virtual drive; I would be interested to know.

It sounds stupid, but the above was a real life scenario.

[1] Only if the files are closed. Excel can change the path if you have the file open, but it can't change it to multiple option across different PCs. But as I have mentioned before, Excel doesn't seem to document all of their more subtle features.

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

#560

Post by sokoloff »

kortilla wrote: post #517
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reads as fairly dismissive to me. Most people running serious gear have serious engineering payroll overhead. Sure, some folks are managing something fairly static like game servers, but many of us work for bigco with two dozen products and massive teams. Even with thousands of ec2 instances we continue to move our on-prem infrastructure to the cloud because developer productivity saves us big money in the long…

Does it actually save or does it just encourage waste by the developers and poor system design? I’ve heard stories of companies having each PR spin up something like 20 ec2 instances to build up a whole deployment. A CICD design like that used to be a fireable offense. Now people see that and assume it’s saving them money because it would have bottlenecked before.

If it spins those EC2 instances up, runs for a hour of “waste” and then turns off (or the alternate cluster turns off when no longer in use), it very likely is saving money. It might be saving money in that very moment; it might be saving money invisibly when “time to patch the servers again” is a complete non-event for staff time.
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