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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

#61

Post by dathinab »

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…

As far as I can tell AWS Cloud requires more expertise to run properly then hardware, but comes with the benefit of more flexibility and availability of various not too hard to integrate services.

In a certain way that's the big failure of AWS and similar, in another way it's a big win for them as it means people will pay more then necessary all the time and there is a huge consultant industry pushing people to adapt AWS (and similar) to then charge them for consulting later on.

Through this kind of patterns tend to fall apart at some point and only hold up for a while due to monopolistic market dynamics around server centers due to their high cost and locality concerns of customers.

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

#62

Post by ldoughty »

dathinab wrote: post #50
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…

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it. For some mid-sized…

> It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it

I agree. I'd like to add that AWS's value add can be the lack of need to understand the product configuration, just the SDK. Your start up already has developers that can read SDKs, you might not have someone on your staff that can set up an elasicsearch, redis, or other service.

When you grow enough that the fine tuning of such services might matter, you likely can hire the right people to run those in house.

I've been on a team with ~6 DevOps members for 5 years, and it's been very helpful to be able to pick up and drop services as we evolve.

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

#63

Post by joelrwilliams1 »

nprateem wrote: post #25

Over the weekend I created a globally distributed CDN pulling data from a globally distributed, auto healing database as a cache. It took a few hours then I tore it all down in 15 minutes, and it probably only cost a few dollars. The cloud trades agility for cost.

This.

We're a small company that used to have a full rack in a colo, and have completely migrated to AWS 6 years ago. Our cloud costs are ~20x what our colo cost was.

There are things we use in the cloud (DynamoDB, Aurora, CDN, etc.) that I just don't want to have to build and manage on my own. For us, the managed services are very much worth the extra cost.

I couldn't believe how much better life is without having to diagnose failed DB backups.

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

#64

Post by eastbound »

vidarh wrote: post #52
csomar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the people running on the cloud are, therefore, efficient businesses? despite using a financially costly option? or thanks to AWS allowing an immediate setup ?

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

#65

Post by bsenftner »

johnklos wrote: post #17
rippercushions wrote: post #8

From the caveat at the end of the original article: > This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc. You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing ser…

You know, you can't hand wave away all the additional costs of having anything in the cloud. You need lawyers to tell you your liability for using third parties. You need all that time and money engineering cloud solutions that work, that can scale, and aren't going cost tons of money. You need to factor all those multi-hour calls needed to get to a real person at the cloud company who isn't reading from a multiple c…

The curse of our industry: the majority of us are weak communicators, unable to explain why they sense the cloud is a poor choice. Meanwhile, the cloud sales people - picked because they are adept communicators - create a comprehensive reasoning mesh, literally playing with the in-house developers inability to explain the dangers they know and with which they are trying to snare the client.

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

#66

Post by dathinab »

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, through depends what you mean with "everything else".

There are "rent a rack" options (you provide hardware, they provide a rack in a datacenter + network switch(es) + management tooling through the network etc. and when asked will replaces RAM/Disks etc as asked). You still have to maintain the OS through depending on the service you get and what you want to do this can be easier then expected (e.g. because networking is handled through their switches/tooling this can makes things easier and if you e.g. just want to run a single application per server there are net-boot options which allow you to do so in a manner similar to running docker containers. But if you want to run your own OCI container orchistrations then it comes with the cost of you having to well do that.).

But if you ask for you provide server hardware and container and they manage all the rest then I'm not sure it exists. It seems like a bad deal for them.

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

#67

Post by andrewstuart »

endisneigh wrote: post #19
openplatypus wrote: post #16

Cloud was always more expensive (in the short term) than self-managed/collocated servers. How is this news? In cloud, you pay for availability, for ad-hoc instances without waiting for a month to install new servers and more. You only need to hire “software” DevOps, rather than people who neatly lay your cables, journey to DC to replace disks, etc, etc, etc. Pick a good, cheap cloud. It is a commodity product. Just b…

What is a "good, cheap cloud?"

Ionos

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

#68

Post by vidarh »

eastbound wrote: post #64
vidarh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the people running on the cloud are, therefore, efficient businesses? despite using a financially costly option? or thanks to AWS allowing an immediate setup ?

Getting set up in AWS in a remotely manageable way is in no way "immediate" - a lot of my income came from that fact (and another large chunk came from fixing setups that had descended into total chaos because people "just" started spinning up resources without properly managing it)

If you want ad hoc rapid setup you can get a managed server up and running about the same time as an instance with AWS too, from a provider that also offers colos and cloud so you can pick and choose and move between the three depending on what is most cost effective for specific needs. In practice, ironically, having that option makes cloud instances even less cost-effective because having the option of spinning up cloud instances an tie them into your environment means your can allow yourself to have less spare capacity on your managed/colo servers.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by t344344 »

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…

Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home). Cloud at scale is VERY expensive. And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc.
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