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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

#71

Post by iLoveOncall »

luizcdc wrote: post #48
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.

Servers on premise with regular backups stored in the cloud can still be cheaper than offloading all your compute, storage and backup to AWS.

The problem is not having the backups, it's restoring them. How do you restore backups when you have no servers to restore them on because they all burnt down?

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

#72

Post by brodouevencode »

siva7 wrote: post #30
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…

Sure, cloud is usually more expensive, so is developer time. If your team is wrangling more with the quirks of your own setup instead of the standardized workflow of a paas provider, your calculation won't work in your favour anymore.

Not sure why the downvotes. I don't completely agree with your point but it's not a bad one.

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

#73

Post by sysadmindotfail »

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…

I worked in Datacenter Ops for a decade+, running 3-6 private datacenters as an HPC/Nix admin wearing many hats. The amount of work involved with physical plant, circuit management, staff coverage, weather events, regulation, travel, hardware upgrades, replacement...the list was seemingly endless.

That's also not to mention hopefully you never have to staff augment for junior-level tasks. Try hiring someone to correctly rack and stack an entire rack. You just end up re-doing it yourself or paying CDW to ship you an entire pre-assembled rack the next time.

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

#74

Post by arunkant »

t344344 wrote: post #70
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.

Cloud is cheap when starting. Saves time

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

#77

Post by brianmcc »

andrewstuart wrote: post #51
brianmcc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million application devs who used to write Java and SQL, but now do mostly Terraform, laugh and give a nostalgic sigh...

And then turn back to trying to work out how to grant IAM access to the resource that developer asked for before turning their attention to why traffic won’t come out of the VPC before trying to work out how to do compression on API gateway. The whole time pining for the old days of running everything on Linux.

The good old days of SFTP-ing one's .war files up to Tomcat and just have the sys admin team sort out Apache and SSL. Happy times :-)

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

#78

Post by nikau »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #59
yardie wrote: post #15

This keeps being brought up since the early days of AWS. Yes, the cloud is more expensive. It simply adds another layer of management, scalability, and flexibility you would not be able to build yourself. And there is a layer of profit for the cloud provider as well. Whoever was told the cloud would be cheaper was being lied to. I've built cloud, colo'ed and hybrid systems. Every few years this would come up. Now, so…

Something which sometimes gets lost from a US centric perspective is that cloud lets you get servers much closer to the end user without having to establish relationships with hosting companies and colo facilities on another continent. Shaving 100ms off of each request can be useful in a lot of circumstances.

In that circumstance a CDN would likely deliver the same performance.

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

#79

Post by toss1 »

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…

Yup, I'm a bit fascinated that an entire industry is built on the drug dealer / puppy / loss-leader model -- "here; try this for a while for free; you'll like it!"

No question, it is easier to spin up an instance and ler them handle the scaling. And unless you are really careful, it's then very hard to extricate yourself and provision your own servers in a/multiple colo sites...

I always like the control of vertical integration, but evidently enough like convenience to support a huge industry (and there are other advantages, but I don't think that cost is on the list of advantages)

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

#80

Post by t344344 »

arunkant wrote: post #74
t344344 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cloud is cheap when starting. Saves time

Try to run LLaMA in cloud...
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