4 ms·

I presume every business who doesn't run all their services on their own servers inside their own building is also just a billing dispute away from downtime. An

I presume every business who doesn't run all their services on their own servers inside their own building is also just a billing dispute away from downtime. And even then if you don't pay your bandwidth bill you'll still go dark.

Retric 10y ago
At a minimum using two hosting providers creates redundancy in both location, networks, and billing disputes.
- setq 10y ago
  Exactly. Also it reduces portability risk. Consider if you implement SQS and SES using their native APIs then Amazon shaft you, where do you go? The answer is rewriting everything as AMQP and basic SMTP services, which until you're done, you're down.
tobltobs 10y ago
No, if you don't use AWS or GCloud specific services you usually can move your business from one bare metal provider to the next without problems.
- jedberg 10y ago
  Oh boy. I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Last time I did it in 2007 it took weeks of planning, and the time before that in 1999 it was months of planning. You don't just get up and move. You still have a ton of data to worry about.
  - setq 10y ago
    Avoiding this is the best approach. Buy two cages in different DCs :)
    - godzillabrennus 10y ago
      Active / Active Failover between two facilities is something everyone wants until they realize how expensive it all is.
      - setq 10y ago
        It is expensive. Unless your product makes a ton of cash.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        Depends on the problem domain and if they thought about having active/active from the start. There are some rare stuff where active/active almost come out of the box.
  - camus2 10y ago
    > Oh boy. I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Last time I did it in 2007 it took weeks of planning, and the time before that in 1999 it was months of planning. That's nothing compared to a business that chooses to use a specific component that cannot be migrated from one host to another. If your architecture is truly distributed then migration is painless, because your system is designed around it.
    - la6470 10y ago
      Yeah try being distributed with your own D.Cs . Having two asynchronous replicated DR site is not a truly distributed architecture... it's something from 1998
    - la6470 10y ago
      Yeah try being distributed with your own D.Cs . Having two asynchronous replicated DR site is not a truly distributed architecture... it's something from 1998
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    9 years is a very long time. If disaster struck, are you saying it would take you weeks to get your site up and running again? These days we actually can spin the whole lot up in hours if not minutes.
    - jedberg 10y ago
      > If disaster struck, are you saying it would take you weeks to get your site up and running again? No, because I'm smart enough not to use bare metal. :) But if I were running a full bare metal datacenter, then yes, it would. Because I would either need to procure a whole bunch more bare metal or I'd have to move what I've got somewhere else.
      - xchaotic 10y ago
        When was the last time that hte entire data centre went out? One, two servers, maybe a whole rack, but an entire dc out for good, more like a few hours downitme
        jedberg 10y ago
        Read the OP I was responding to. Their initial comment was about having to bail out of your provider, and their claim was that bailing out of your provider is easier when you're on bare metal, so I countered that that isn't true at all.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Please don't do this. It may be that their system was simply easier to move. We've moved from DO to a local DC earlier this year and it really wasn't a problem, because (1) we didn't have that much data, and (2) we can take a couple of hours of scheduled downtime. And frankly, I suspect that our situation is closer to the norm than yours. How many companies outside the Fortune 500 really have humongous quantities of data?
    - jedberg 10y ago
      > How many companies outside the Fortune 500 really have humongous quantities of data? Well, just doing the reddit data in 2009 took many days to move, and that was with a planned migration. And that was just text. Nowadays with tons of monitoring and telemetry data and historical data, most companies probably have more than that. Remember, the premise was that bare metal is better than the cloud because it's easier to move, and my counter was that, no, that's not at all true.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Well, now you've lost me, because according to [1] the data was under 2TB (uncompressed) even as of 2015, so why did it take many days to move? I feel like there's something I'm missing. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_every_publicly_available_reddit_comment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_eve...
        jedberg 10y ago
        You can't just cp live data. You have to migrate it with indexes and rebuild on the fly. If you're willing to take a downtime, sure you can do it in a few days. But you still need servers to move it to. Where do those new servers come from? Are you going to buy a whole new set of servers? How long does that take? My point is that moving one datacenter to another isn't easy and there is a lot of things to think about. My point was that being in the cloud or not is barely relevant. Also that dataset isn't close to complete. It was a lot more data than that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

Retric 10y ago

At a minimum using two hosting providers creates redundancy in both location, networks, and billing disputes.

setq 10y ago
Exactly. Also it reduces portability risk. Consider if you implement SQS and SES using their native APIs then Amazon shaft you, where do you go? The answer is rewriting everything as AMQP and basic SMTP services, which until you're done, you're down.

tobltobs 10y ago

No, if you don't use AWS or GCloud specific services you usually can move your business from one bare metal provider to the next without problems.

jedberg 10y ago
Oh boy. I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Last time I did it in 2007 it took weeks of planning, and the time before that in 1999 it was months of planning. You don't just get up and move. You still have a ton of data to worry about.
- setq 10y ago
  Avoiding this is the best approach. Buy two cages in different DCs :)
  - godzillabrennus 10y ago
    Active / Active Failover between two facilities is something everyone wants until they realize how expensive it all is.
    - setq 10y ago
      It is expensive. Unless your product makes a ton of cash.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      Depends on the problem domain and if they thought about having active/active from the start. There are some rare stuff where active/active almost come out of the box.
- camus2 10y ago
  > Oh boy. I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Last time I did it in 2007 it took weeks of planning, and the time before that in 1999 it was months of planning. That's nothing compared to a business that chooses to use a specific component that cannot be migrated from one host to another. If your architecture is truly distributed then migration is painless, because your system is designed around it.
  - la6470 10y ago
    Yeah try being distributed with your own D.Cs . Having two asynchronous replicated DR site is not a truly distributed architecture... it's something from 1998
  - la6470 10y ago
    Yeah try being distributed with your own D.Cs . Having two asynchronous replicated DR site is not a truly distributed architecture... it's something from 1998
- mattmanser 10y ago
  9 years is a very long time. If disaster struck, are you saying it would take you weeks to get your site up and running again? These days we actually can spin the whole lot up in hours if not minutes.
  - jedberg 10y ago
    > If disaster struck, are you saying it would take you weeks to get your site up and running again? No, because I'm smart enough not to use bare metal. :) But if I were running a full bare metal datacenter, then yes, it would. Because I would either need to procure a whole bunch more bare metal or I'd have to move what I've got somewhere else.
    - xchaotic 10y ago
      When was the last time that hte entire data centre went out? One, two servers, maybe a whole rack, but an entire dc out for good, more like a few hours downitme
      - jedberg 10y ago
        Read the OP I was responding to. Their initial comment was about having to bail out of your provider, and their claim was that bailing out of your provider is easier when you're on bare metal, so I countered that that isn't true at all.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I take it you've never actually moved datacenters before? Please don't do this. It may be that their system was simply easier to move. We've moved from DO to a local DC earlier this year and it really wasn't a problem, because (1) we didn't have that much data, and (2) we can take a couple of hours of scheduled downtime. And frankly, I suspect that our situation is closer to the norm than yours. How many companies outside the Fortune 500 really have humongous quantities of data?
  - jedberg 10y ago
    > How many companies outside the Fortune 500 really have humongous quantities of data? Well, just doing the reddit data in 2009 took many days to move, and that was with a planned migration. And that was just text. Nowadays with tons of monitoring and telemetry data and historical data, most companies probably have more than that. Remember, the premise was that bare metal is better than the cloud because it's easier to move, and my counter was that, no, that's not at all true.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Well, now you've lost me, because according to [1] the data was under 2TB (uncompressed) even as of 2015, so why did it take many days to move? I feel like there's something I'm missing. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_every_publicly_available_reddit_comment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3bxlg7/i_have_eve...
      - jedberg 10y ago
        You can't just cp live data. You have to migrate it with indexes and rebuild on the fly. If you're willing to take a downtime, sure you can do it in a few days. But you still need servers to move it to. Where do those new servers come from? Are you going to buy a whole new set of servers? How long does that take? My point is that moving one datacenter to another isn't easy and there is a lot of things to think about. My point was that being in the cloud or not is barely relevant. Also that dataset isn't close to complete. It was a lot more data than that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]