Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

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It is astonishing as to how marketers from the three big clouds have successfully convinced people that there is no middle ground between operating your data center and using one of their cloud services.

Here's what you do:

1. Buy two servers equipped with a large amount of storage. There are many providers[1][2] that offer this. (You could technically do it with one, but two allows you to have high availability and prevent data loss in case of accidents, imagine `rm -rf *`.)

2. Use Minio to set up erasure-coded storage on one of the servers, and replicate objects[3] to the other server.

4. Use Cloudflare (because of their open source sponsorship program[4]) to serve the objects from the primary server, and when performing maintenance tasks, fall back to the secondary.

You could also serve objects directly out of the primary/secondary, but using Cloudflare takes care of low-effort DDoS attacks by hiding the origin, and provides some caching which helps prevent hitting the egress limits of the server provider.

[1] https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vstorage.php

[2] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver

[3] https://blog.min.io/active-active-replication/

[4] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-new-oss-sponsorships-...

Or a couple SX servers from Hetzner

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx

(You would need 4 SX294s for half a petabyte with 2x replication)

And put ceph on them which gives you an S3-compatible API:

https://docs.ceph.com/en/quincy/radosgw/index.html

It's not trivial to set up but once you do it's much cheaper than AWS. It's even cheaper if you can find the machines in the server auction. There are some 150 TB machines on there right now for 174 euro/month.

While I totally agree you can easily handle this with Ceph, I would never do it with 2x replication on spinning rust. You can maybe do 2x replication with SSDs if you really know what you're doing and you have data replicated on multiple Ceph clusters.

Also, your math does not quite add up if you want to store 425TiB. You'd be filling up the Ceph cluster to 95% which would be impossible (you'll start losing OSDs way before that).

If this was me, I would definitely do this on Ceph, but I would opt for a more traditional erasure coding setup of 8+3. For that, you'd need 12x SX134s as a minimum starting point.

I suppose you could start with an EC profile of 2+2 or 4+2...

I do have a serious question on Hetzner:

Do they offer any private networking options? That page only lists a single 1 Gbit connection. I don't think that would work well with Ceph. It's doable, sure, but I wouldn't want to support such a cluster, not with 160TB raw per box.

> Do they offer any private networking options?

Doesn't seem like it for their dedicated servers, not 100% sure though.

Their docs indicate that upgrading the 1Gbit ethernet link to 10GBe is an available option:

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...

You can upgrade them to 10gb NICs.

Internal networking in simple case provided via VLANs on that 1gbit interface via their vSwitch.

Extending with additional NICs should be possible from what I've read but not used myself.

Yes, perfectly doable, but the expertise and time needed to do it (without fatal mistakes) and keep it running 365 days a year is non-negligible. Doing this by unpaid volunteers is more than challenging.

Not for the people behind NixOS. If it is challenging then that would cause me to re-calibrate my opinion of the project as a whole.

This is, in my opinion, a falacy perpetuated by the marketing departments of "big cloud". Don't forget that pre-2006 there was no S3, and we managed just fine. They are not challenging skills to learn, the zeitgeist has just convinced itself they are not worth learning

It's condescending to think that someone can't reasonably choose to pay for a service they are capable of doing.

Cooking isn't hard either but I still go to restaurants, and don't go around laughing at patrons telling them that they never bothered to learn how to cook if they are there.

Eating in the restaurant once in a while is fine. Lage range of choices delivered quickly. But is it sustainable? Price higher, usually less healthy and not tailored to special needs.

In any case one does it professional IT done right is costly but cheaper than e.g. IT without offsite backup in case of a disaster.

Do you eat every meal at a restaurant though? That would not be sustainable. To roll with your analogy it would be like the hospitality sector persuading the majority to ditch home meals entirely

The problem was your assumption which is condescending. I gave you an analogy to make it clearer. Taking the analogy in the second paragraph apart doesn't change the point in the first - it was simply to help illustrate it, but it stands on its own.

It's not condescending at all. You are saying they could reasonably pay for it, but they quite obviously cannot (hence the existence of this whole post). What I'm principally challenging is the assumption that this required effort is substantial. I'm making the point that it is not, certainly (in my view) compared to the effort to run an entire operating system project and all of the ancillaries that come with that. This is an area they have chosen to pay for that (again, in my view) they don't need to. They have gone to great lengths to architect a system that allows deep pinning of very specific versions, it's not a stretch to think about the architecture required to deliver that. Instead they have stopped that line of thinking at [insert S3 here] rather than carry on solving. A direct consequence of that now is a $9k/m hole they need to fill in their budget. I'm being critical, sure, but not condescending. Overall, it frustrates me seeing opinions that operating infrastructure is difficult and therefore must automatically be avoided. In this particular example avoiding operating said infrastructure potentially is putting the project in the red and at risk, but nowhere on the NixOS call for help does it suggest they have considered operating this themselves. And there in is the crux of my point. The zeitgeist has turned against operating infrastructure, and yet is frequently caught out by the cost of this decision.

> They are not challenging skills to learn, the zeitgeist has just convinced itself they are not worth learning

Next time you see someone paying for something you think it's easy to learn, that the "zeitgeist told them not to learn", go up to them and say what I quoted and you'll see real fast if it's condescending or not.

This is a silly thread.

The difference in situations here is literally that on the one hand large corporations have spent money to market the idea that their services are essential because the alternative is incredibly difficult. On the other hand, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, "Big Restaurant" etc have not spent large quantities of money trying to persuade the populace that cooking at home is incredibly difficult. It's possible to sell someone a convenience without also telling that person that it's the only real option and this is what the person you're replying to is highlighting.

It's not condescending, it's the reality of the situation. Yes in the examples you've described it would be condescending but in the situation we're actually talking about there are actually large numbers of people who genuinely believe (as a result of successful marketing campaigns) that the equivalent to cooking your own meals at home is incredibly dangerous, difficult, expensive and error prone.

> On the other hand, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, "Big Restaurant" etc have not spent large quantities of money trying to persuade the populace that cooking at home is incredibly difficult

They haven't because it's a ridiculous proposition. The same way cloud providers would be laughed out of the room if they tried to say the same thing and they didn't actually have a better product with trade-offs that are genuinely better for some use cases. The fact that you believe that everyone using cloud products is either too lazy to learn or has been fooled by marketing because they can't think for themselves, unlike you who see the light, is the condescending part. Mind you, on the face of overwhelming data showing most companies have, or are moving large parts of their infrastructure to the cloud, so everyone else are dummies either too lazy or too stupid to see what you can see.

> The fact that you believe that everyone using cloud products is either too lazy to learn or has been fooled by marketing because they can't think for themselves,

I never said anyone was too lazy, just misinformed about the benefits, and it's a more far fetched statement to claim that marketing doesn't work than it is to state that it does work.

As evidenced by some people in this thread claiming that not using S3 would be basically impossible (despite a large number of popular distributions literally doing exactly that) there are clearly plenty of people who have fallen for the marketing.

Moreover, you're the one implying that falling for marketing is something only people who can't think for themselves do, that's also not what I'm saying. I think everyone is susceptible to marketing, and in this case, clearly a lot of intelligent people who are otherwise capable of thinking for themselves have fallen for this blindspot.

I think you are the one being condescending here.

The original post did not come off as condescending to me, but instead just highlighted how BigCorp cloud marketing departments have an incentive to sell developers on “infrastructure is tough, just pay us”. (I say this as a consumer of AWS services and fan of their products).

“Assume good faith”[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reading back over that, I'm not seeing the condescending bit?

Who managed just fine? IT-based services very a minor fraction of what they are today. And IT departments in some random company were much bigger.

> And IT departments in some random company were much bigger.

Not sure about that. There appear to be just as many people in IT, it's just that they're not that technical anymore, mostly producing policy documents and pushing tickets around. The actual work is outsourced to the cloud, SaaS products and outside consultants (for duct taping the mishmash of SaaS products together). But that may be just my lacking understanding of my strange little part of the globe.

We do this at work, albeit much larger scale than this and I'm the only one who spends any time on upgrades, replacing failed disks and so on. Honestly, apart from upgrades every 3-ish months I don't spend any time at all on this, it's all chugging along without intervention.

Things don't fail as much as they used to, at least not from using something mature as minio and of course hardware can fail as they do specifically spinning rust, which is non trivial to replace if you have hot-swap capable servers in the first place.

I don't possess any decade worth expertise in either minio or running this kind of setup so personally I believe you are exaggerating that this is even worth calling challenge at all.

But that's just my take :)

So I’m sure you’d be more than happy to volunteer your services to NixOS and be responsible for the setup, including when there are issues (which will inevitably happen regardless of tools and technologies used), right?

It’s so easy, after all.

I'd volunteer to do it, if they paid for hardware, colo and transportation for initial install. After things settle down, it takes no more than half an hour or so every month.

Pretending to know how much work something is when it's not your area of expertise is a bit silly.

Actually, yes, it is easy, after all :)

The money that are paid as the exorbitant AWS egress fees could be used to pay a competent SRE to handle that. I don't think that running the package mirror would require a full-time dedicated paid position. Initial setup, maybe some heavy restructuring operations as storage requirements grow, maybe some firefighting, but not the daily operation.

In the olden days you’d find someone to donate you a server and have a few volunteers around the world mirror it.

It still happens. You need storage a TB or two with unlimited (or at least very high) traffic? That's not an issue. Even I could help being a mirror from home. But I wouldn't be surprised if there would be some free tiers already from cloud provider.

Half PB is a bit more than that, and I guess it is expected to grow... in 2023 it is not realistic to throw such storage around for free (+mirrors). It will be realistic in a few years considering that the storage prices have been in free fall for the past 30 years, but that time hasn't came yet.

(As a maybe interesting comparison, Debian's mirror is around half TB: https://people.debian.org/~koster/www/mirror/size )

The falling cost of storage is at least partly the reason hosting a few thousand packages takes up hundreds of TB. "Storage is practically free" from the perspective of each of those projects. By the time .5 PB is a trivial cost, they'll need 50 PB.

Yeah, that too.

Yeah NixOS has done some technical choices to require tons of data downloads, even if there is little modification of the content of the packages. Regularly my computer has 10 Gb worth of downloads because some high level package got upgraded and even if it's dynamically linked, the lower level packages still get re-downloaded from cache.nixos.org. It doesn't matter because storage is free right?

You do all of this and you still don't have nearly the availability or durability of data you get from S3, nor people on call to fix it once anything happens to it.

It's like comparing leasing a Mercedes-Benz with full service and all inclusive insurance to building your own bicycle. Some people don't need the car, sure, but it's not the same thing.

But they're complaining about the cost of leasing the Mercedes, so they need to lower their expectations if they want a cheaper solution.

Although having to spend some time to attain good enough availability/durability is not a big deal when the rush to launch was over long ago. Unlike in your example, you can turn the bicycle into a car.

The usecase is a cache. http://cache.nixos.org/

All it needs to do is to get you the data faster than the compilation itself - most of the time - to be useful.

I also wonder at the original thinking, given the use case. Cache usually has high ratio of download to upload and doesn't need high reliability. S3 doesn't excel at the costs of fetching the data from it, at all.

It also “caches” the source code downloads, many of which are no longer available from the URL listed in the repository, if anywhere at all.

It only seems like that to people who don't know any better.

Do you ACTUALLY think you can communicate with people at Amazon who truly know what's going on? If so, why do we see countless stories about people who have problems with Amazon, Google, et cetera, who can't communicate with them? Do you know of some special, magic way to get the skilled people to talk with you that the rest of us don't?

You act like being able to call Amazon, even if you could get someone on the line who knows something, is somehow better than having even just one good systems administrator. All of your ridiculous assumptions go right out the window when you have a sysadmin build, test and deploy your own hardware that you (via your sysadmin) have complete control over.

Security? You can't secure Amazon. You literally can't. If you wanted to, you'd have to buy the company, then you'd have to evaluate your whole S3 staff. If you hire a systems administrator, you have to vet your systems administrator and anyone else who has admin access, not a collection of tens of thousands of employees across the planet, any of whom could be stupid enough to visit the wrong web site using the wrong browser on the same computer as their keys.

Availability? My side projects have better uptime than Amazon.

Durability? Two geographically disparate locations and LTO, plus many mirrors, make things plenty durable.

When you're not a systems administrator, you can be forgiven for not understanding the big picture, but not for acting like you do.

Yes it is very simple, you pay for support. Maybe I don't know any better, working professionally on top of AWS for almost 10 years and growing usage from a couple of thousands a month to half a million a month (while remaining profitable the whole time). Maybe, just maybe, people disagree with you even if they are informed.

And for the point in question, you don't need to talk to anyone, the point is there's thousands of datacenter, networking, app-level layers of staff all working to make service stable for you without you even knowing. I don't need to talk to anyone if an S3 server, rack, or even full DC goes down.

Honestly, we are an open source project, not a company. If we have the money, of course, we would prefer to spend it there and do better and more with it.

If this is threatening in a serious countenance, our growth and ability to conduct our project. I'm not sure if we need all the 9s of durability of S3, given that people already lost all their buckets on S3.

We do not have the money to store 5x or 6x the contents of the cache.

So we much prefer to have control, and we have enough skills to run all that shit easily, the problem is that the skilled people are in rare availability and are usually working on harder problems than running that. So ultimately, this is a balance problem.

Disclaimer: NixOS developer, 23.05 Release Manager.

On the technical side, garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) does multi master replication by default, so is probably better for this use case. Still with S3 API.

I have a few projects running off of a self-hosted garage instance, it’s very nice software.

You really don't need al that mess, just a bunch of mirrors around the world.

I mean, you make S3 look easy compared to that

That's the business model.

If `minio server /mnt/sd[abcd]1` and the occasional `apt-get upgrade` and changeover of DNS records is so much work, maybe you should just spend 100x for S3.

Seriously, there is a large amount of comments of people who seem terrified of this or throw out "but but updates and failing hardware". We run multi PB storage on prem at work and it's just fine. Not some massive team running it.

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