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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?

#631

Post by kaydub »

wwn_se wrote: post #527
koheripbal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - CTO of medium sized company. Our IT infra costs are 1/10th the cost of cloud, simply because I happen to be comfortable having on-premise machine and working on them (sometime myself). We have two dozen servers in two locations. It's more time to setup, but maintenance is actually quite low.

On factor for small companies that I have noticed at the places where I have been is that (as a dev consultant). The places that use the cloud often scale up to much. Since the cloud don't limit developers its very easy to just "spinn up a new xx" and not think about the long term costs. Unless you are really small, have variable workloads then the cloud is maybe not for you. Unless the cost is a small part of the to…

I've noticed small companies are more worried about the actual bills coming in where as big companies are more worried about the perceived lack of speed/agility in their development.

We could spend time making sure we use the smallest aurora instances possible in AWS or we could standardize on a version to support and use the smallest size of that version that's available. We spend a lot on this extra capacity in some places, but it greatly increases our speed in other places.

It's all about trade-offs and what your organization values.

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

#632

Post by twic »

bravura wrote: post #556
twic wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I did mean PaaS, not Saas! Apologies, and thank you!

I wish i had a good answer about PaaS. There are hosted Cloud Foundry services. I think CF is more sensible than Heroku, myself. The various serverless platforms are PaaS of a specific kind. I think SalesForce counts. Is OpenShift still a thing?

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

#633

Post by tomohawk »

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…

Agree on the cost for a sane organization. One draw with the cloud is that not all organizations are sane, so doing the work in house / on prem can be more expensive in terms of money, time, and politics than outsourcing to the cloud.

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

#634

Post by kaydub »

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #511
machiaweliczny wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you forgot to include cost of engineers in this calculation.

Engineers cost $130,000/month? Thats a fulltime salary for 14 network engineers (salary from Indeed). There is no way you need that many for maintaining a fleet of 50 CPUs (chance is that in OPs case they got duel socket servers as well).

$130,000 a month is not 14 network engineers. Salary is not the full cost of an employee to the business.

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

#635

Post by twic »

mwcampbell wrote: post #575
twic wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs. I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only need…

If you're small, you can get that redundancy on a PaaS. If you're big enough to move off a PaaS, you can rent physical machines in multiple datacentres.

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

#636

Post by Fornax96 »

thotypous wrote: post #614
Fornax96 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sia uses reed-solomon encoding to spread files over 30 hosts with a redundancy of 3x. So Any 20 hosts can fail at the same time and the files would still be available. This does mean that you need to upload all your data 3 times. Sia also needs to monitor your uploaded files all the time to make sure the hosts behave. This means hosts periodically run checksums on the stored data to prove to the client that the data…

This is really interesting! How does Sia prevent hosts from precomputing the checksums to fake they are behaving but erasing the data itself? Does it checksum over random ranges of data? Which source does it use for entropy so that the network remains distributed but nodes can't predict the ranges? Does it use the last block nonce? Which checksum algorithm does it use? Is care taken as to not be vulnerable to prepend…

I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of storage proofs, but as far as I know it's something along these lines:

When uploading data the renter (that's what we call the node which pays for storage) computes a merkle tree of the data which the host should be storing. When a contract is nearing its end the host will enter a proof window of 144 blocks (1 full day) in which it will need to prove that it is storing the renter's data. The proof is probably based on the block hash of the block where the window started. The host stores the proof in the blockchain and the renter will be able to see the transaction. If the proof matches the merkle tree (which the renter has stored) the contract will end and the host will receive the payment and their collateral back. If the proof is invalid or was not submitted at all the renter can cancel the contract which destroys the funds in it. The host won't get paid and loses its collateral, but the renter also won't get their money back (to discourage the renter from playing foul)

There is some more info on this on the wiki: https://siawiki.tech/about/trustlessness and the website: https://sia.tech/technology. And here is some incomplete technical documentation: https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/-/blob/master/doc/Resour...

If you want to go more in-depth you can go on our Discord where lots of developers hang out, eager to help others to get started with the network :) https://discordapp.com/invite/sia

EDIT: The whitepaper is of course the best source of knowledge. It's quite old at this point but the core principles still apply https://sia.tech/sia.pdf

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

#637

Post by troupe »

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.

So I've setup processes like you described where every PR would spin up 20 ec2 instances, run a huge number of parallel testing, and then shut itself down. The savings associated with developers getting feedback on a full regression test of the system in 20 minutes vs. 400 minutes was significant.

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

#638

Post by INTPenis »

v4dok wrote: post #583
INTPenis wrote: post #353

Becuse we don't trust a foreign cloud provider with our client's data. Why is that so hard to understand? All the best cloud providers are from the US and as a european company with clients in european government and healthcare we are often not morally or legally allowed to use a foreign provider. The sad thing is that this is an ongoing battle between people on a municipal level who believe they can save money in cl…

What about the existing/upcoming technologies of let you use the cloud without trusting it?

Doesn't matter because all US companies are subject to US laws and agencies. Even if the data is in Ireland, they are obliged to cooperate and before you know it all our patient records are leaked in the states.

And speaking of Ireland, I have a memory of a Microsoft EULA saying that even if the data is stored in Ireland they can't guarantee that it won't be transferred to the US.

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