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Comment by ekovarski | Hacker News Reader

... isn't that the hardest part, predicting workload, for many companies. Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc.

If you can predict workload then you could also reduce your cloud bills, in theory, by moving spinning up/down instances.

Many are going the cloud route because the cost of entry is much easier to start developing but eventually, yes, the cost skyrockets and you do end up paying for putting little forethought into the real workload requirements.

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> Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc.

One senior sysadmin/infrastructure engineer with on-prem experience is enough to scale up your colo presence. You can either assemble your own servers or custom order and have them shipped directly to the colo. Remote console and power management (PDUs) is a solved problem. Out of band management, also solved. Virtualization, solved. Push your VM snapshots, content, artifacts, and database backups into your object store of choice for offsite backups. Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services.

EDIT: k8s arguably makes this easier than in the past. You want to run on your own cluster? You can. You need to burst your containers to spot instances in someone else's cloud? You can.

All the problems you consider solved are only solved if you have the tooling from AWS/Google or half solved if you have VMWare.

With physical hardware, the sysadmin will spend a lot of his time fighting the hardware supplier and the colo to get hardware in place and running, then reinvent the tooling. Any trip to the facility is half a day lost.

Many organizations run their own hardware successfully without the tooling I mention. There are problems, just different problems from cloud with significant cost savings realized. Why would you be fighting your hardware supplier or your colo? I have never had a hardware vendor "fight me", and only once had challenging negotiations with a colo provider.

Have you never lost half a day of getting work done because Amazon's EC2 API was failing to launch new instances? I have! [1]

To simply hand wave away hosting your own hardware as infeasible and more costly (especially when it's been proven to be more costly) is unproductive at best.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity... (HN search of "AWS Outage")

The cost savings have never been proven. If anything, they're proven to be miscalculated every time someones gives his numbers.

Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place.

DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that.

I've had the API down about 4 times in a year, always for specific types of instance, if I remember the count well. Never more than a few hours. It's nothing in comparison to the weeks it takes to ship and setup physical hardware.

"Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place."

There are plenty of companies with their own datacenters of hundreds or even thousands of machines. Yes, these companies usually have deep pockets and their own dedicated staff to take care of these servers. This is how it was done before AWS existed, and is likely to continue long after AWS ceases to exist.

And that’s just the point. AWS lets you not only cut down on “dedicated” staff. You can also share a lot of the staff you do need by using a Managed Service Provider.

> DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that.

You need to get a Dell sales rep you deal with everytime you order. You'll get better pricing too.

Funny, I managed to run a globally-dispersed on-prem system with over 300 individual physical machines (well, blades in racks) with one other guy no problem for many years. I was dealing with four different hosting providers doing remote hands and never had any issues whatsoever.

About the most complicated tooling we had was Anaconda.

I think I lost three hard drives in that time and all three were hotswapped with zero downtime under warranty. No other failures. And that's not an outlier - I've been doing this 25+ years and the hardware failure rate has been pretty consistently low.

Well, you're either incredibly lucky or you have zero monitoring and failures have no impact.

I couldn't imagine having to manage 300 physical servers in a team of two. The hardware, OS and networking alone are more than a full time job with 24/7 oncall expectations. In fact that's why I don't do this anymore.

Pretty sure my current company had more failed hard drives this month than you all these years. I remember a shipment of servers once with more dead motherboards than that.

I bought all brand-new Dell blade servers so that's probably the main reason it was fine. IP-based kickstart boot, anaconda provisioning, it only took one person to monitor a server's setup.

The point is that managing on-prem equipment is the easiest its ever been. When I started the ratio of admin to box was 1:50, now it's easily 1:300.

Similar experience here roughly, albeit mine is at a smaller scale.

The key phrase in your post is 'doing this 25+ years'.

What you're providing is the /confidence/ that you can do it. Most outfits nowadays probably have no one who has that.

I think there's a sliding scale with cloud services.

At the ultra-small scale (1 person company), it's arguably cheaper to run from a single server you bought.

Mid-sized companies (~2-1000 people) probably benefit the most from cloud computing because they need fewer dedicated salaried employees to manage them.

Beyond ~1000 employees however, you're going to need that expertise regardless of whether you use cloud or on-prem. And the markup of those thousands of cloud machines will start to become significant. You'll need to do a cost/benefit analysis and I can see it going in either direction.

The cloud's cost savings are not in your 300 individual machines. In fact, I'd bet that your 300 machines are much cheaper than the equivalent on AWS.

Rather, the cost savings come from the salaries of you and the "one other guy" you mentioned. If cloud hardware can bring your staff of 2 down to 1, then the cost savings are huge. More-so if they can bring it down to 0 and have devs manage the hosted infrastructure. Each of your salaries is likely near or higher than the cost of running all those machines.

In my experience with cloud - pushing 8 years now - it's a total fallacy that you can just run without admins. Every time I've come in to clean up a giant mess left by "devops" who were actually just devs who knew nothing about administration of servers I've found massive amounts of waste, duplication, zero optimizations and poorly operating systems that even a intermediate admin would have helped to mitigate. One place, just doing a bit of tuning and moving a few services on-prem resulted in a $200K/year savings.

Developers and Administrators have different priorities and I can count on one hand the number of true "DevOps" people I know - the rest are either decent admins and poor devs or decent devs but poor admins. The idea is nice but the reality isn't quite what its made out to be.

It's a fallacy to save money on personnel. The time saved by not managing low level hardware will be assigned to other tasks. The savings are actually done on instance costs and flexibility.

Physical instances have too much over provisioning and zero flexibility. You can easily be paying for an order of magnitude above the actually used capacity. (This can be helped with VmWare virtualization instead of bare metal but the amount of new companies using VmWare is shrinking and licenses are expensive.)

Whereas with the cloud, you can half any instance CPU/memory to save half the money. There is even build in monitoring to analyze usage. There is little waste.

> Physical instances have too much over provisioning and zero flexibility. You can easily be paying for an order of magnitude above the actually used capacity.

The cost of the hardware is not the issue.

Paying for 600 machines when you actually need 300 probably "wastes" $50-80k/year in over-provisioned hardware. Hiring a skilled admin to figure out what's going on, optimize the network, and reduce those 600 machines down to 300 probably costs at least $150k/yr in their salary+benefits. The cloud does not decrease the cost of the hardware (it's actually more expensive), but it allows you to reduce the number of admins managing it. That's the cost savings.

Given the above example, what would any reasonable general manager do: hire someone to make things more efficient, or just pay for the over-provisioning?

You're hopefully kidding when you say that the costs of the hardware is not an issue. Server grade hardware costs an arm.

600 servers at $10k each, that's $6M upfront. Then another $6M within 3-5 years to renew them.

Of course in that example you'd pay someone, even multiple people in fact, to make things more efficient.

Computing power on AWS costs 3x+ as much as the naively calculated cost of buying and running servers. Of course there are situations where running your own servers actually is cheaper. You are arguing the impossibility of something people are doing right now, so...?!

"Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services."

That remote hands service is usually very limited. Datacenter staff usually don't have the time or the skills to do detailed troubleshooting, setup, or maintenance. Maybe they'll swap out a disk for you, power cycle a server, or turn a knob on a KVM switch. If you want more, you'll have probably have to buy in to managed service, which they'll do on their own hardware and with their own setup, where you'll be paying closer to AWS prices.

Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply.

> Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply.

Wikimedia is serving Wikipedia (ranked #5 for Internet traffic) with ~550 servers out of Dallas, TX and Ashburn, VA for about $4 million/year in tech costs. OpenStreetMap infra is ~$120k-$150k/year (albeit with volunteers and some donated hosting capacity). Do you need Amazon to do better?

I am not trying to be a "stick in the mud". I am trying to save you money.

aws is only a few cents an hour, i dont get why wikipedia doesnt switch over unless they are pocketing the differece.

Because Wikipedia doesn’t want to waste money.

“A few cents an hour”. It’s a 30% markup over physical hardware, not to mention extortionate bandwidth pricing.

You might be surprised at what offering them (the “hands”) a packet of well-written runbooks and a bottle of scotch for the holidays will get you.

I work at a company that runs out of 11 datacenters around the world. We don't have issues with availability and redundancy

There is a lot more that AWS does for you than host a bunch of VMs...

Many use cases doesn't require what AWS provides besides storage and compute primitives. If your use case must use Amazon, use Amazon. If not, consider more efficient alternatives.

I don't mention AWS in my comment, not sure why you thought I was comparing the two.

Even then if you can just get rid of one support person you can save enough to buy a lot of from AWS just taking into account the management you don’t have to do - if you automate.

Servers are cheap enough so buying a few and keeping on standby is no brainer and they are good for 5 years generally.

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