Hacker News Reader

Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

If I knew how to setup OpenVZ and create < 10ms latency VPNs across multiple datacenters, then I would be a lot better at ops than I am. While I'm much better at ops now than I was when I co-founded awe.sm, I am still primarily a developer.

Our ops guy is much better than me, but his time is better spent working on higher-stack stuff like deployment automation, monitoring and efficiency tuning than on re-inventing a virtualization stack to save a few thousand dollars every month.

If we were bigger, it would be more worth the time and money spent. But without doing the math, we would have to be quite a lot bigger, I think.

View on HN

I am not trying to be sarcastic, I am just tired of some of the AWS fanboi's (not you) who act as if AWS solves all of your problems immediately for $50 a month.

There are real costs no matter which way you go.

PS, would be very surprised if you had even 45ms latency between AWS-east in Virginia and any of their facilities on the west coast...

I wasn't taking you as sarcastic, nor was I attempting snark in my reply: there are real costs either way, and it's our current judgement that learning how to do a virtualized, distributed stack would be more expensive than getting AWS to do it for us. (But, if I'm being honest, we haven't done any math)

And the < 10ms latency I'm talking about is between zones within us-east; latency to the west coast is a lot worse, but we only have emergency failover capacity in west.

Much of the attraction that I see from people comes from the flexibility. Once you get to any significant size in an organization, it's not unusual for people to have to wait for _months_ to get servers rolled out.

The ability to whip out your credit card, and fire up new servers at AWS in minutes, becomes very attractive in that scenario.

Ghshephard nailed it, as usual.

> If I knew how to setup OpenVZ and create < 10ms latency VPNs across multiple datacenters, then I would be a lot better at ops than I am.

I've got the Nobel Committee for Physics on line 2 should you accomplish that trick for DCs more than 30 km (18.6 mi) distant.

Edit: Nevermind (misplaced decimal).

10 msec * c = ~3000 km or ~1860 miles.

Of course light doesn't travel that fast through glass and there is latency at the hardware on either end. ;)

Units foulup. I'd used 0.10ms, not 10ms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com