The biggest part that is always missing in such comparisons is the employee salaries. In the calculation they give $354k/year of total cost per year. But now add the cost of staff in SF to operate that thing.
The reality nowadays is: the on-prem staff is covered in the colo fees, which is split between everyone coloing in the location and reasonably affordable. The software-level work above that has massively simplified over the past 15 years, and effectively rivals the volume of work it would take to run workloads in the cloud (do you think managing IAM and Terraform is free?)
No, but I would argue that a SaaS offering, where the whole maintenance of the storage system is maintained for you actually requires less maintenance hours than hosting 30 PB in a colo.
In terraform you define the S3 bucket and run terraform apply. Afterwards the company's credit card is the limit. Setting up and operating 30 PB yourself is an entirely different story.
Every real-world colocation or self-hosting project I've ever been around has underestimate their downtime and rate of problems by at least an order of magnitude. The amount of time lost to driving to the datacenter, waiting for replacement parts to arrive, and scrambling to patch over unexpected failure modes is always much higher than expected.
There is a false sense of security that comes in the early days of the project when you think you've gotten past the big issues and developed a system that's reliable enough. The real test is always 1-2 years later when teams have churned, systems have grown, and the initial enthusiasm for playing with hardware has given way to deep groans whenever the team has to draw straws to see who gets to debug the self-hosted server setup this time or, worse, drive to the datacenter again.
I don't have this experience at all. Our colo handled almost all work. the only time i ever went to the server farm was to build out whole new racks. Even replacing servers the colo handled for us at good cost.
Our reliability came from software not hardware, though of course we had hundreds of spares sitting by, the defense in depth (multiple datacenters, each datacenter having 2 'brains' which could hotswap, each client multiply backed up on 3-4 machines)...
servers going down were fairly common place, servers dying were commonplace. i think once we had a whole rack outage when the switch died, and we flipped it to the backup.
Yes these things can be done and a lot cheaper than paying AWS.
Of course, but building and managing the software stack, managing hundreds of spares across locations, spanning across datacenters, having a hotswap backup system is not a simple engineering endeavor.
The only way to reach this point is to invest a very large amount of time into it. It requires additional headcount or to put other work on pause.
I was trying to address the type of buildout in this article: Small team, single datacenter, gets the job done but comes with tradeoffs.
The other type of self buildout that you describe is ideal when you have a larger team and extra funds to allocate to putting it all together, managing it, and staffing it. However, once you do that it's not fair to exclude the cost of R&D and the ongoing headcount needs.
It's tempting to sweep it under the rug and call it part of the overall engineering R&D budget, but there is no question a large cost associated with what you described as opposed to spinning up an AWS or Cloudflare account and having access to your battle-tested storage system a few minutes later.
I think another big crux here is that there isn't really any notion of cluster-wide downtime, aside from e.g. a full datacenter power outage (which we've had ig, and now have UPSes in each rack kindly provided and installed by our datacenter). On the software/network level the storage isn't really coordinated in any manner, so failures of one machine only reflect as a degradation to the total theoretical bandwidth for training. This means that there's generally no scrambling and we can just schedule maintenance at our leisure. Last time I drew straws for maintenance I clocked a 30min round-trip to walk over and plug a crash cart into each of the 3 problematic machines to reboot and re-intialize and that was it.
Again having it right by the office is super nice, we'll need to really trust our kvm setup before considering anything offsite.
For server issues; again, pretty easy. Just use iKVM/IPMI and iPXE to diagnose a faulty server. Again, using "remote-hands" from the CoLo provider can help fix problems if your staff does not have the skills.
Swapping drives is basically the easiest fix. The issues that cause the most problems are the hard to diagnose ones like the faulty RAM that flips a bit every once in a while or the hard drive controller that triggers an driver bug with weird behavior that doesn’t show up in the logs with anything meaningful.
Ignoring failed hdds week likely mean very little maintenance.
Yes, drives are going to fail. Yes, power supplies are going to burn out. Yes, god, you’re going to get new parts. Yes, you will have to actually talk to vendors.
Big. Deal. This shit is -not- hard.
For the amount of money you save by doing it like that, you should be clamoring to do it yourself. The concern trolling doesn’t make any sort of argument against it, it just makes you look lazy.
I point out to people that AWS is between ten to one hundred times more expensive than a normal server. The response is "but what if I only need it to handle peak load three hours a day?" Then you still come out ahead with your own server.
We have multiple colo cages. We handle enough traffic - terabytes per second - that we'll never move those to cloud. Yet management always wants more cloud. While simultaneously complaining about how we're not making enough money.
But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.
I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.
AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.
I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.
And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.
For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.
I think that anyone with actual experience of operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters would challenge this assumption.
Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.
we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.
the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.
The biggest hurdle is getting a mgmt system in place to alert you when something goes wrong - especially at this size. Grafana, Loki, monit, etc are all good tools to leverage that provide quick fault identification.
I have four racks rather than ten, and less storage but more compute. All purchased new from HP with warranties.
Ordering each year takes a couple of days work. Racking that takes one or two.
Initial setup (seeing differences with a new generation of server etc and customizing Ubuntu autoinstallation) is done in a day.
So that's a week per year for setup.
If we are really unlucky, add another week for a strange failure. (This happened once in the 10 years I've been doing this, a CPU needed replacement by the HP engineer.)
I replaced a couple of drives in July, and a network fibre transceiver in May.