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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#91

Post by adamcharnock »

bpavuk wrote: post #83
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

if someone on the DevOps team knows Nix, option 3 becomes a lot cheaper time-wise! yeah, Nix flakes still need maintenance, especially on the `nixos-unstable` branch, but you get the quickest disaster recovery route possible! plus, infra flexibility removes random constraints that e.g. Cloudflare Workers have

Indeed! We've yet to go down this route, but it's something we're thinking on. A friend and I have been talking about how to bring Nix-like constructs to Kubernetes as well, which has been interesting. (https://github.com/clotodex/kix, very much in the "this is fun to think about" phase)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#92

Post by Dormeno »

The company I work for used to have a hybrid where 95% was on-prem, but became closer to 90% in the cloud when it became more expensive to do on-prem because of VMware licensing. There are alternatives to VMware, but not officially supported with our hardware configuration, so the switch requires changing all the hardware, which still drives it higher than the cloud. Almost everything we have is cloud agnostic, and for anything that requires resilience, it sits in two different providers.

Now the company is looking at doing further cost savings as the buildings rented for running on-prem are sitting mostly unused, but also the prices of buildings have gone up in recent years, notably too, so we're likely to be saving money moving into the cloud. This is likely to make the cloud transition permanent.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#93

Post by evertheylen »

> Maintaining a data center is much more about solving real-world challenges. The cloud requires expertise in company-specific APIs and billing systems. A data center requires knowledge of Watts, bits, and FLOPs. I know which one I rather think about.

I find this to be applicable on a smaller scale too! I'd rather setup and debug a beefy Linux VPS via SSH than fiddle with various propietary cloud APIs/interfaces. Doesn't go as low-level as Watts, bits and FLOPs but I still consider knowledge about Linux more valuable than knowing which Azure knobs to turn.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#94

Post by mgaunard »

petesergeant wrote: post #62

One thing I don't really understand here is why they're incurring the costs of having this physically in San Diego, rather than further afield with a full-time server tech essentially living on-prem, especially if their power numbers are correct. Is everyone being able to physically show up on site immediately that much better than a 24/7 pair of remote hands + occasional trips for more team members if needed?

Coolness factor of having a datacenter right in your office.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#95

Post by Lucasoato »

adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#96

Post by mgaunard »

adamcharnock wrote: post #89
mgaunard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're missing 5, what they are doing. There is a world of difference between renting some cabinets in an Equinix datacenter and operating your own.

Fair point! 5 - Datacenter (DC) - Like 4, except also take control of the space/power/HVAC/transit/security side of the equation. Makes sense either at scale, or if you have specific needs. Specific needs could be: specific location, reliability (higher or lower than a DC), resilience (conflict planning). There are actually some really interesting use cases here. For example, reliability: If your company is in a phys…

Personally I haven't seen a scenario where it makes sense beyond a small experimental lab where you value the ability to tinker physically with the hardware regularly.

Offices are usually very expensive real estate in city centers and with very limited cooling capabilities.

Then again the US is a different place, they don't have cities like in Europe (bar NYC).

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#98

Post by adamcharnock »

Lucasoato wrote: post #95
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

You sum it up very neatly. We've heard this from quite a few companies, and that's kind of why we started our ours.

We figured, "Okay, if we can do this well, reliably, and de-risk it; then we can offer that as a service and just split the difference on the cost savings"

(plus we include engineering time proportional to cluster size, and also do the migration on our own dime as part of the de-risking)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#99

Post by swiftcoder »

hbogert wrote: post #9

Datacenters need cool dry air? No, low isn't good perse. I worked in a datacenter which in winters had less than 40%, ram was failing all over the place. Low humidity causes static electricity.

The datacenter is in San Diego - a quick Google confirms that external humidity pretty much never drops below 50% there.

Things would be different in a colder climate where humidity goes --> 0% in the winter

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