Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why? • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by ozkatz » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #482

llarsson wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sure, but when they think they have written something to S3 and got a successful HTTP response back from the API, perhaps they want to be able to tell clients to go fetch the new data from the bucket. But those clients may not get the new data then, due to eventual consistency.

S3 is immediately consistent for new objects unless the service received a GET on the object before it was created. It's easy to use this to make an immediately consistent system.

S3 ListObjects calls are eventually consistent (i.e. list-after-put). EMRFS [1] and S3Guard [2] mitigate this for data processing use cases.

[1] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-f... [2] - https://blog.cloudera.com/introducing-s3guard-s3-consistency...

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

#662

Post by nemothekid » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #523

nemothekid wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap was spending 2B over 5 years - so 400M/yr. By comparison, Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters. Who knows how much they are paying in engineering salaries so manage those datacenters. Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is wo…

> Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters 200 million a year, huh. The cost of commercial office space in the U.S. can range from $6 per square foot in low cost regions to over $12 per square foot in New York City. On average, a 50-cabinet data center will occupy about 1,700 square feet. At a median cost of $8 per square foot, the space alone would cost…

>Office and data center rent expense was $194 million and $221 million for the years ended December 31, 2017 and 2018, respectively.

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/ar...

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

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Post by waz0wski » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

erulabs wrote: post #298

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s might eventually get there, technically it fits the bipl,but it's got many moving parts thats its rarely worthwhile in a domestica setup

I don't disagree with you (certainly I'm bullish on Kubernetes, hence the startup) but I have to say many people felt similarly about running web-servers in general back in the day. Init script management, maintaining RAID arrays, etc was a project for nerds, not a mainstream activity. Today though, we have replicating databases, we have cloud storage available for backups, we have intelligent disk-replication system…

a problem with these 'easy' kubernetes deployments, quickstart guides etc is that they have people churning out insecure and nowhere near production-grade clusters that are often using $cloud-provider managed k8s control plane and cloud-specific features & integrations for storage, load-balancing, databases, and more which prevent easy replication of the environment to another cloud provider, let alone a home/lab environment - and it's just as difficult to port a non-cloud k8s setup over to a cloud provider, no matter how many sidecars are tacked on.

this problem extends even further down, because the cloud infrastructure substrate that k8s runs on needs to be configured too, and even when using a tool that supports multiple cloud providers, such as terraform, you end up with lots of cloud-specific code

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

#664

Post by fpierfed » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

We do not use the cloud. We operate (24/7) facilities in remote locations where we do not have super reliable internet connection (we do have redundant links including three different fibres on distinct paths plus radio links but still). For this reason alone nothing critical can be in the cloud. In our experience, however, cloud offerings are not that cheap compared to purchasing and operating your own machines. Besides, one still needs sysadmins even when operating infrastructure in the cloud.

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

#665

Post by nemothekid » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #512

soniman wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber 10-K has operating lease payments in 2019 of $196M and in 2020 of $216M. That's not all data centers but a lot of it is data centers.

Why would you assume that? SF office space goes for way more than data center space.

You can look up the prices of Uber's current office space - they currently pay 16M/yr for their HQ.

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

#666

Post by irishcoffee » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

Accujack wrote: post #602

ATsch wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't run your own datacenter, you would colocate. Even if that's not possible, you can still rent servers for significantly cheaper than cloud offerings.

Wow... really a first world perspective here.

So its true [0]

[0] https://pics.me.me/me-i-prefer-mangoes-to-oranges-random-per...

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

#667

Post by leroy_masochist » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

Background: I consult extensively in the SaaS space and ask people this question all the time in the course of strategy reassessments, transactional diligence, etc.

1. Physical control over data is still a premium for many professional investors. As a hedge fund CIO told me recently when I asked her why she was so anti-cloud migration, "I want our data to live on our servers in our building behind our security guard and I want our lawyer, not AWS's, to read the subpoena if the SEC ever comes for us."

2. There are a lot of niche ERP- and CRM-adjacent platforms out there -- e.g., medical imaging software -- where the best providers are still on-prem focused, so customers in that space are waiting for the software to catch up before they switch.

3. A lot of people still fundamentally don't trust the security of the cloud. And I'd say this distrust isn't of the tinfoil hat, "I don't believe SSL really works" variety that existed a decade ago. Instead it's, "we'd have to transition to a completely different SysAdmin environment and we'd probably fuck up an integration and inadvertently cause some kind of horrendous breach".

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

#668

Post by jll29 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

The smartest approach is to be able to run anywhere, which is increasingly practical due to VMs, Docker etc.

(At least funded) startups should start with the cloud as speed to completion is key, but can later optimize for cost.

Elasticity of the cloud is also great, dealing with peak demands dynamically without having to purchase hardware.

I'd suggest larger companies to use at leas two cloud vendors to add resilience (when MS Teams went down, so did Slack - I was told they both use MSFT's cloud).

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

#669

Post by iajrz » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

Accujack wrote: post #602

ATsch wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't run your own datacenter, you would colocate. Even if that's not possible, you can still rent servers for significantly cheaper than cloud offerings.

Wow... really a first world perspective here.

3rd world perspective: They're not far off from the mark.

You'd want to co-locate with ISP who already has infrastructure for continuous services through blackouts et al, or you could have a datacenter if it's small-ish, because you already have some infrastructure to keep operating during blackouts.

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

#670

Post by iajrz » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

WilliamEdward wrote: post #579

adim86 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but…

You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency…

Even so, having say a bare metal server (à la Vultr) can be way cheaper than having a cloud setup in one of the most flexible kinds of providers.

The detail to look at is that flexibility is a feature of the cloud offering, and an expensive one at that. If you don't need it, you need to find a way to not pay for it.