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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

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TZubiri

hey, here's a good rule of thumb.

If you share resources, that reduces costs, but increases security risks.

choose whether to share a filesystem, an OS, a kernel, hardware, or just use a dedicated server.

The economics of sharing resources are all in a tiny sliver of the budget spectrum, the shoestring budget range :

0-1$/mo: serverless

1$-5$/mo containers

5$-200$/mo Virtual Machine(s)

200$-1Billion$/month , at least one dedicated server

So if your hourly is worth anywhere upwards of 5$/hr, and your project has any semblance of seriousness, just use a dedicated server, and avoid a whole class of LPE vulnerabilities just to save some $.

Businesses have expenses, let's stop pretending that all of these non dedicated server infrastructures are serious. Shell out 200$/month or stick to hobby status.

No, I don't sell dedicated servers, but I should

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I run 3 servers for 200 EUR, thanks to Hetzner, exactly for this reason (and I’m cheap and I never understood cloud/services like Vercel and Railway as serious alternatives ;-)).

If you can run everything you need on two or three servers, what you describe can work. But it’s still hobby status, basically. The equation changes when the scale gets significantly bigger. Managing a non-trivial hardware fleet requires people, and people cost money.

The reason “managed services” of all kinds, including cloud services, are so widespread in business is because someone else is managing things so that you don’t have to. This is as serious as it gets in business. Managing your own hardware makes very little sense for many, if not most companies.

Own hardware has a weird scaling curve.

It does not make sense for a lot of time and scaling. You need 3+ people maintaining it, you have upfront costs in the hundreds of thousands of euros on the very lower end. If you don't utilize that money spent, sucks to be you. You have planning times in the area of months, not hours, unless you keep capacity you don't use around (rackspace, cabling, power/cooling capacity).

On the other hand, if you have that hardware management running, it's very amazing. Before the AI nuke, We were looking at moving various systems fully bare metal, because it would simplify management on both sides a lot, and a common statement I heard is "We don't deal with systems that small. If we do bare metal container hosting, we don't measure in dozens of gigabytes of memory. Your business case validates that investment. Here is btw three test systems about double your requirement, just old".

Before the AI nonsense (HBM Memory Demand -> RAM & SSD prices), this would result in very competitive hosting costs after some scale, when amortized across 5 years and then tossed into the testing environment until it stops functioning. And these testing environments allow for a lot of experimentation and failover testing.

Though now it's all very different and not clear.

One server is enough for many small businesses. And for large business (like X or Instagram) it is economically more profitable to own their servers. For example, in my country top companies like VK or Yandex own their datacenters and sell cloud services instead of paying for someone's else cloud.

Also if you have several servers you do not need to hire a full-time sysadmin.

> Managing a non-trivial hardware fleet requires people, and people cost money.

People in AWS also cost money and guess who is going to cover this cost?

Suppose that you are a midsize company or a b2b service, so you want to make sure that your service has minimum downtime.

This means that you need sysadmins in close proximity to your hardware to do hardware swapping/troubleshooting. Or you need to engineer your system to not have a SPOF (which is not easy). So you're looking at employing at least 2 engineers near your datacenter.

Really? We basically never go onsight. Ticket in with the colo and they can help.

That really works well while you have a rack or so. Afterwards, you really need people who know all the details of networking and storage. Especially if you're designing something without a SPOF.

What's changing is the scope of things that you can run on that one rack. 15 years ago, I was running clusters of 30 computers to do things that I now can do with 1.

Nope... last time i was on site was when we migrated data centers. a dozen racks.

>own their datacenters and sell cloud services instead of paying for someone's else cloud.

Or because it's cost-effective to slice up your infrastructure and sell off the bits you're not using right now.

No it's not. The poster is advocating replacing technology to share a single system with dedicated, non-shared systems.

Even the most basic business app has an app server and a database server. If they have 6 business apps, they'd have at least 7 dedicated servers (assuming we're allowing a database server to have multiple app databases sharing it)

i dont get this dedicated servers = hobby mentality

you can do a ton with just a couple of dedicated servers with the redundancy you need

Three really, but otherwise yes.

There seems to be some confusion, although one other user interpreted the same thing, I still believe it's a misinterpretation.

I said dedicated servers, I never said anything about owning or managing the hardware. You can rent a dedicated server.

The decision to virtualize and the decision to own the hardware are separate decisions.

It doesn't really make any difference. Managing "dedicated servers" essentially requires the same level of effort as managing hardware.

Nope, I've rented a dedicated server through OVH and I never had to touch a single cable or change a single disk.

I also dealt with owned servers and I had to deal with power outages and gas based generators, internet outages caused by too high trucks taking out a data line, and UPS beeping because their battery life was nearing zero.

So there's a non trivial difference there.

In your context you still "share" with a dedicated server too. It's not your rack, it's not your IPMI/OOB, even on bare metal. Components in the server are running all sorts of their own code.

All of these layers are a form of risk

I'm a bit confused. So you're saying instead of running 20 containers for an app that are 1-4Gi and some odd CPU I should replace them with 20 dedicated servers?

By your own numbers that's 200x+ as expensive.

Really 20 containers is a pretty small app considering 5 app server containers, a DB, a cache, a load balancer, some monitoring/alerting crap 2x for redundancy.

I believe the proposed system is to run the containers on dedicated rented server(s). Instead of having the containers/VMs share underlying CPU/RAM with others.

A dedicated server is a bunch of risk and skilled administration work compared to using a container platform or serverless. Many more people have been pwned by consequences of neglected server administration than managed serverless/container platform VM escapes.

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