Is that true in anyone's experience? Every once in a while somebody posts about their competing bare-metal system and it looks like a lot of people have managed to cut their server costs by 99% (based on the numbers they post) by avoiding the cloud as a service
Honestly curious
I suspect it depends on a lot of things -- the complexity of the project, its architecture, the development, maintenance and management practices. For a few years, me and a colleague used to manage a 30+ server setup without needing more than 8-10 hours a month. But we managed to pull it off not because of where the servers were, but because we chose a good and stable tech stack, we had the knowledge and experience required to manage it efficiently, and no one decreed that we shall henceforth move everything to the cloud because it cuts costs.
Given the same situation -- right stack, right experience, useful management practices -- I'm 100% sure you can pull off the same thing in the cloud, at least as far as efficiently managing the whole setup is concerned.
But IMHO the idea that cloud services give you all of that for free is snake oil. As soon as you need more than a virtual machine running a web server or whatever, what you end up with is exactly what you build. If what you build is crap, it's gonna run like crap, and you're going to need a crapload of money to keep it running, and two craploads of money to fix it.
People just want to run their selects, man.
IMHO cloud services are only really logical options for new startups or ventures. Existing IT shops that are already heavily invested in infrastructure ops will NOT readily move to the cloud unless there's an obvious attempt at power-grab or subvert the IT/Ops fiefdom.
>>People just want to run their selects, man.<<
I read that in the "Dude's" voice. :-)
And also:
That JOIN really tied the tables together.
- "Magazine" in the sidebar just shows "No internet connection" (which is wrong) when clicking on it.
- Why can't the app remember my Filter settings? I'm only interested in digital 2D when on the "Browse" screen, but I have to apply the filter every single time I open the app.
- On Browse selected, click on Search, type in anything (e.g. Blender), then "View All Projects." Scroll through the first "page" (so that results show up that weren't on the screen before). Now these results begin to show up duplicated later when continuing scrolling (I assume pagination and/or the RecyclerView is implemented incorrectly).
- The app doesn't seem to cache images. Click on any project. Let the image load. Hit back. Click the same project again. The image needs to load again.
Looking at it again, some UI elements feel kind of uncanny which makes me think that the app isn't full native. There are some other small things that make the app look a little bit unpolished which I think a site like ArtStation doesn't deserve.
It is a little bit more complex now - e.g. I added on-the-fly image resizing routines. But the core concepts of caching on multiple pops, being able the purge, etc. no it is not fancy tech by any stretch of the imagination.
As I have said here before; many people are abusing AWS (etc) touting this reason, but in many cases it is used with the 'we have infinite resources' (no constraints) so literally nothing is optimised and as well the case at hand is often something that would most likely not require much work on bare metal either. So for that price difference, you secure against that chance that you maybe have to fork out $2.5k ah let's splurge, let's say $25k, in those 10+ years for server management/problems etc. Of all the bare metal we have running 10+ years, only one thing breaks and that is not bare metal but an old fashioned VPS. The rest has never had any issues. That's luck, I know, but even if it would have broken, it cost to fix would've been vastly less than 25k/10years. Let alone 50k/mo.
Sure there are plenty of exceptions, but I dare say literally most companies, by far, don't need setups like that. But then again; let them set them up; usually they make things so needlessly complex, expensive and slow that I get hired to fix it somewhere in those 10 years (yes, fixing! in the cloud! as far as 'not needing to hire a team to manage it for you').
Servers run on electricity, not sysadmin powered hamster wheels.
We run a dozen bare metal servers and I see the difference what it takes to spin up a new VM vs. set up a new physical server. There's planning, OS installation (we use preseed images but we weren't able to automate everything), sometimes the redundant network setup doesn't play well with what the switches expect (so you need to call the datacenter).
Still, it works out in favor of the bare metal servers. But I'm looking forward to a bit bigger scale to justify a MaaS tool to avoid this gruntwork.
6 years ago, I worked for a company in the mobile space. This was around the time of the Candy Crush boom, and our traffic and processing/storage needs doubled roughly every six months. Our primary data center was rented space co-located near our urban office. For a while, our sysadmins could simply drive over and rack more servers. We reached a point where our cages were full, and the data center was not willing rent us adjacent space. We were now looking at a very large project to stand up additional capacity elsewhere to augment what we had (with pretty serious implications on the architecture of the whole system beyond the hardware) or move the whole operation to a larger space.
This problem ended up hamstringing the business for many months, as many of our decisions were affected by concern about hitting the scale ceiling. We also devoted significant engineering/sysadmin resources to dealing with this problem instead of building new features to grow the business. If the company had chosen a cloud provider or even VPS, it would have been less critical to try to guess how much capacity we'd need a few years down the road to avoid the physical ceiling we dealt with.
The only difference is if you own the gear or not. If you do own it, then it is CAPEX, and the gear goes on the balance sheet and you can only depreciate it according to the schedules ( in some cases immediately 100% but most of companies blow through that number really quickly ).
In all other cases it is OPEX.
The rule of thumb is that all OPEX can be used to offset the revenue, which is god sent to most companies that aren't printing gobs of money.
So if you make some money and you are past 100% deduction thresholds, when owning gear beefs up the balance sheets and at best slightly decreases taxes while spending money on OPEX significantly decreases taxes.
And we'd need to have staff to manage the physical servers, run our network infrastructure, etc.
We've been through the numbers many times and the cloud always wins, even when compared to running our own servers for base load and have some hybrid cloud that lets us expand into AWS for peak loads. (which saves some dollars in servers, but that doesn't make up for the added complexity).
And nearly for "free", we have a cold standby site that has a replica of our hot data (a small portion of our full dataset), so if there was a full region outage, we could be back up in running in 30 minutes with reduced functionality.
On the other hand, for stuff like CI jobs, batch processing or anything else which doesn't depend on tight synchronization with the other location, you can mix and match.
The main advantage of cloud is the flexibility, treat resources as ephemeral, being able to click a button and get more/less resources. You don’t need to wait for a server to ship and be installed in a dc, if you don’t know what specs you need just twiddle the dials until you get something that performs as you want. It allows you to deploy / release quicker and easier.
It’s possible to architect so the cloud is cheaper but almost never happens. Optimising is intensive, often it’s called over engineering by pm’s/product owners. Costs normally start out low, blow up as products ramp out feature after feature and teams start onboarding, if performance is an issue it’s easier to increase an instance size instead of profile and change architecture. Only when the person paying the bill says this is to much does architecture and other optimisations happen, sometimes at a point when it’s hard to retrofit.
You absolutely do need an experienced team to operate any significant cloud deployment, or misunderstanding the cost model will kill you.
Good cloud people cost more than good conventional sysadmins.
Unless cloud is simply an excuse to kill off a really, really complacent in-house entrenched IT dept, it will not save anyone anything cash-wise.
These are the facts.
Even if a department spins up 500 servers for some executive's sacred cow when the project goes bust it's trivial to tear down the whole thing without requiring semi trucks.
The other very important thing is inventory auditing. Managing inventory in 10 datacenters built and populated by 100 teams over 30 years is a nightmare. Cloud provides a mechanism to build the coveted "single pane of glass" which large companies need desperately.
Clearly in the example above, you can afford to hire two sys admins to manage the bare metal servers (you can probably afford more, but 2 is the minimum that gives some peace of mind)
We had an application that was a glorified quiz engine and our customers would mass enrol and mass take the quizzes so the scaling that was offered by Azure made it a no brainer for us, specially as given the nature of our customers, quizzes would only take place during working hours, so we'd scale right down for half the day and scale up and out at peak times.
Total costs were about 1/2 of what we estimated for bare metal
Be on-call. You need the sysadmins to be available to fix issues when they happen, even if the fixing itself takes little time.
> ... university lab ...
I developed a few web sites for universities, and they were hosted by the university. You really have to hope nothing breaks on Friday afternoon, or you have to wait until Monday morning to get it fixed...
You don’t remember correctly. There are multiple and to my knowledge there hasn’t been just one in at least the past ten years.
Buying and provisioning disks before space runs out is a small part of a DBA's job, and a modest constant-size task compared to predicting how fast space is running out.
In terms of your general point: it really depends on your business. In my last job there were 4 DBAs out of 12 total IT staff and they were constantly busy. In my current job there are no DBAs in a much larger team and yet no requirement to need one either. The two businesses produce vastly different products.
For more continuous workloads, you can overprovision on bare metal more cheaply to deal with the spikes.
Back when I worked at BT the unix developers all went on the basic sysadmin course from sun as part of their induction.
As an aside, this is one of the other reasons company directors like the cloud -- or serverless specifically: it absolves responsibility for hardening host infrastructure. Except it doesn't because you then need to manage AWS IAM policies, cloud watch logs and security groups instead of UNIX user groups, syslog and iptables (to name a few arbitrary examples). But that reality is often not given as part of the cloud migration sales pitch.
SD was the employer Of Bruce Schinner for a few years BTW
But for a system that is invisible from customers, like our logging system here, I don't care that much about timely maintenance.
As an employee I am also happy if my company pays more, so I don't have to be awaken in the middle of the night.
As a small business owner with limited resources and liquidity waking up once a month for 50K savings looks like a good deal.
"If you need to get up at 3AM to keep services running, you're doing something wrong."
You can make sure that most of the services in *NIX world to take care of itself while you're away without using any fancy SaaS or PaaS offering.
Heck, even you can do failovers with heartbeatd. Even with a serial cable if you feel fancy.
Bonus: This is the first thing I try to teach anyone in system administration and software engineering. "Do your work with good quality, so you don't have to wake up at 3AM".
[0] https://github.blog/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-analysis/
I'm not also advocating that "complete, complex automation" is the definitive answer to this problem. On the contrary, I advocate "incremental automation" which, solves a single problem in a single step. If well documented, it works much better and reliably in the long run & can be maintained with ease.
Quoting John Gall:
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
So I'd rather pay amazon.
But you're still going to get woken up at 3am sometimes. Things break, in unexpected ways. Maybe the hot spare didn't actually work when a raid set started rebuilding onto it. Maybe third party software did something unexpected. Or maybe something broke and your failover didn't actually work because of subtle configuration drift since the last test.
Normally all plausible scenarios are tested and systems are well tortured before putting into production.
It also helps that our majority of servers are cattle, not pets. So a missing cattle can wait until morning. Also all "pet" servers have active and tested failover, so they can wait until morning too.
We once had a problem with a power outage when our generators failed to kick in, so we lost the whole datacenter. Even in this case we can return to all-operational in 2hrs or less.
I forgot to add: We use installations from well tested templates, so installations have no wiggle-room configuration wise. If something is working, we can replicate that pretty reliably.
But you probably don't yank power on critical things mid-load after making a trivial change. Excessive testing breeds its own risks.
But it's really, really easy to gank up a trivial change now and then.
In the past 10 years, I've been woken up three times. One was from third-party software having a certificate that we didn't know about expiring; one was from a very important RAID set degrading and failing to auto-rebuild to the hotspare (it was RAID-10, so didn't want to leave it with a single copy of one stripe any longer than necessary); and one was from a bad "trivial change" that actually wasn't. I don't see how you can get to a rate much lower than this if you are running critical, 24x7 infrastructure.
I'm new at Linux and system administration. I'm using Linux just for 20 years and managing systems for 13 years.
Sure you can have an orchestration tool "Make sure everything is running, and respond to failures", but that's yet another tool that can break, be misconfigured, etc.
I just turn off the phone until I get up. That way I don't have to get up at 3 AM, I don't even know they were down until five hours later. :)
As a small business owner I run my own apps on Digital Ocean, which to me offers very nice balance between features, reliability and price.
The fact is that cloud is expensive, and outside a few use cases (such as extreme horizontal scalability, aka elasticity, or machine learning) the costs just don't work out well.
And then of course every "cloud" is full of about a billion hidden gotchas ("well the marketing page says that'll work, but on Tuesdays in February it won't, so use this instead, but only if you're writing your logic in JavaScript because the tools for the other allegedly-supported SDKs are broken in weird ways half the time, so instead use this other thing, unless you're a Libra, then...") none of which knowledge transfers between "clouds", and each has a pile of dumb names to memorize and a ton of other per se useless, but necessary, knowledge you've gotta pick up, just to rub salt in the wound.
I like to watch Neil Patel's seo videos on Facebook occasionally and he mentioned for one service he runs he spends over 100k a month on hosting. It blows my mind because he could buy a top end server with dozens of processors and terabytes of ram, co-locate it and at least host some things on it or even turn it into your own cloud hosting server.
Even if a person bought 2 over-the-top servers for 30k each, paid around $2,500 a month for hosting it would save huge money.
If I look into the AWS dashboard today, I feel totally overwhelmed, while running my own servers with LXC containers on it feels effortless. I guess for many it's the other way round.
Don't really know what I'm missing, but I'm happy about the old school skillset I have, allows me to have a fraction of the infrastructure costs I would have otherwise for what I'm running.
If we assume $20K fringe benefits, that $50K / month is $600K annually, which gets you 5 $100K/year sysadmins.
Add to that we threw out plans to do things like virtualization on our owned hardware, and that engineering headcount has consistently grown faster than revenue, it's not clear there are any savings to be had there at our scale.
I'm one of the programmers, and the past few months I filled the role of devops/deployment engineering for our new website.
One great example is Sentry, I love Sentry, and it's been invaluable for us. It saves the web developers a crapload of time. Now Sentry has a self hosted option, and that's what we're currently using.
Now I know little about Sentry's internals, and frankly I don't really care. But sometimes it breaks, or we want it to be updated etc. Sentry offers hosting at 25$/mo, and would mean we don't have to worry about it at all, stability, upgrades, scale, are all handled by them.
25$ a month is less than 1 hour of my time. All it has to do is save me 1 hour a month to easily pay for itself.
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Another example is that I just spent a large amount of time trying to setup a HA Postgres cluster. This meant I had to dive into the internals of postgres, how our orchestrator (patroni) works, setting up consul to manage the state, etc. This has taken a significant amount of time (several weeks) - it's easy to get a POC working, but actually ironing the bugs out is a different story.
Also nobody else on the team fully understands it's setup, so if it breaks, welp....
All this to say, for us a hosted DB option would likely have been cheaper (compared to my time and pay) and would have better uptime and support then us rolling our own solution.
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We don't have any central log store, and I really wish we did. Similar situation here, I could spend a month or two configuring and tuning Elastic Search, or we could just pay for a hosted option.
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Tl;dr - I'm a developer at a small company and have spent little time doing application development the past few months because of all the time that has been required to setup the infrastructure for our application.
I can give you a real life example.
Years ago I did work for this company that built flight simulators for the government. Millions of dollars rolling through their company. One day I get called up by this company and the woman is panicking because their website went down.
Well, come to find out, the entire site was running on a server sitting in an office of their building and the electricity went out due to a winter storm. To say that I was floored is an understatement. I started asking questions.
Well, when I did, the "sys admin" (and I'm putting that in quotes...) started talking to the owner of this company and it was ultimately decided that I couldn't be trusted.
Fast forward a few years and around august of last year this company contacts me again for more work. They apparently scored another huge government contract, built a new facility to be able to house actual government planes so they can strip them down and turn them into flight simulators and so forth.
While I'm at the facility I learn that they're running all their software off of a server sitting in the building. Now, this isn't completely unreasonable, especially for government work. But I again started asking questions.
- Is it environmentally controlled.
- Do you have a generator?
- Do you have multiple lines in case your ISP goes down (which 100% will happen at some point)
- Do you have backups?
- ARE YOU EXERCISING THOSE BACKUPS AT LEAST ONCE/QUARTER?
When this got back to the "sys admin", he was livid. I also found out that they didn't have the source code for the latest changes I made, despite me pushing said source code to a private git server this "sys admin" had stood up. Said virtual server apparently got removed when they moved facilities, but despite this the guy accused me of pushing it to my private github repo based purely on the fact that I stated in no uncertain terms that I had pushed that to the git repo.
But this software was a part of the government contract.
I just sent out an email the next day thanking them for the opportunity, but that I would have to pass on it.
My point is this.
They're an engineering company, that's where their expertise lies. But due to the nature of what they're doing, they were forced into the software side of things. They hired an incompetent.
Companies like these are probably better off throwing money at the problem and putting it in the cloud. The skill level required to successfully run something in the cloud and not completely lose everything is much lower. That's not to say there isn't skill involved, but you don't have to hire someone who may or may not decide to run your software that's involved in a multi-million dollar contract in a closet in your building.
> Companies like these are probably better off throwing money at the problem and putting it in the cloud. __THE SKILL LEVEL REQUIRED__ to successfully run something in the cloud __AND NOT COMPLETELY LOSE EVERYTHING__ is much lower. That's not to say there isn't skill involved, but you don't have to hire someone who may or may not decide to run your software that's involved in a multi-million dollar contract in a closet in your building.
Too many weasel words.