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This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessmen

by mbesto 10y ago

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

praneshp 10y ago
Hey, you are a liar. He is very sure that the cloud saving money has always been a damn lie! To hell with your data. /s
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  what data?
  - praneshp 10y ago
    "I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings.". My attempted joke wouldn't make sense outside of this context
neurostimulant 10y ago
Care to share more details? On paper, the cost differences between renting/colocating traditional dedicated servers and using cloud service with similar performance/capacity is huge, so it's pretty unusual to actually save money by migrating to cloud. I'd love to hear where the savings actually come from.
- tetha 10y ago
  My company has done some research on that, in the webscale bubble. It is wrong to think of the divide as "Cloud" vs "Bare Metal" in a VM for server thing. Disregarding up-front investment, you're comparing rented VMs in the cloud with bare metal boxes, datacenter costs, and most important, manpower. At a small scale, you're paying the cloud less than 2 or 3 competent admins with datacenter and networking experience cost for salary. In that situation, you're saving money, because you're saving the hardware ops team. You're paying more dollars per iop, core and GB of ram, but the alternate method of obtaining these resources has more surrounding costs than "ze cloud". On the other hand, once you're shoveling several hundred kilo-dollars per month to a cloud provider, it makes sense to throw a million or 10 at dell and hire those operators, because it will save money within a year or two. This only makes sense if you need the resources, but if you need those resources, it helps being more efficient.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    Cloud may save from hardware/driver issues - by providing an already tested environment, that doesn't (normally) trip on some weirdness in, say, network drivers. But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical memory still available, it doesn't matter whenever one's in the cloud or not. I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      > I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not. And that's why cloud will win every single time, forever, on all metrics. Because the cloud requires less engineers to achieve the same work, as it takes care of the low level hardware work.
      - drdaeman 10y ago
        How that's different from hosting provider engineers taking care of setting up a dedicated server and even pre-installing a tested OS image? They also usually handle all the hardware-related issues you may encounter. That used to work well before the "cloud" era, and still does.
    - tetha 10y ago
      This is why I said hardware op. If you use some VM-based cloud infrastructure you will still need a bunch of good system/linux admins to make your application work on the linux in the cloud. Without these, you're toast. Bare metal requires you to have both good system and linux admins, and on top of that, good hardware admins, networks and datacenter hands. These are different skill sets. So again: If you do the bare metal thing right at the scale it pays for itself, you'll probably end up paying both the skillset for the cloud deployment, and add the hardware skillset on top.
problems 10y ago
Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do the job there, but just for that I'm at $620/mo. Then let's add bandwidth, 10TB out at $0.01/GB = $100/mo. Now for disk I have to use EBS which runs (let's say st1 will do the job) 0.045/GB/mo*3TB = $135/mo. And that's before any IO. So to move from bare metal to amazon I go from $1.5k upfront + $90/mo to a total of $855/mo on Amazon. I can buy a new server every few months for the same cost of hosting that at Amazon - unless I'm severely missing something. Maybe it's worth if it you're a very small installation or one with very unpredictable traffic? But I just don't see it.
- morgante 10y ago
  You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Also, most businesses don't have demand that steady. Nor is it advisable in a cloud architecture to rely on a single large server.
  - problems 10y ago
    Yeah, but I'm just trying to ballpark it. I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones. Most of it does need to remain online at all times including several large databases. Just running my logstash server alone eats 8 GB of RAM and 200+ GB of disk. In bandwidth and storage alone I'm past the cost of the server - so even if I could split this up and keep it mostly offline it still wouldn't be close to worth it unless I'm missing something more significant? > You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Do you mean swapping the drives about once every 3 years with free DC remote hands? Operational costs there are almost nothing - maybe 10 hours a year of my time. Surely much less than it would take to get everything running on a cloud architecture. And that cloud architecture would still require some level of maintenance and monitoring I'm sure.
    - 10y ago

by mbesto 10y ago

praneshp 10y ago

Hey, you are a liar. He is very sure that the cloud saving money has always been a damn lie! To hell with your data. /s

throwaway2048 10y ago
what data?
- praneshp 10y ago
  "I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings.". My attempted joke wouldn't make sense outside of this context

neurostimulant 10y ago

Care to share more details? On paper, the cost differences between renting/colocating traditional dedicated servers and using cloud service with similar performance/capacity is huge, so it's pretty unusual to actually save money by migrating to cloud. I'd love to hear where the savings actually come from.

tetha 10y ago
My company has done some research on that, in the webscale bubble. It is wrong to think of the divide as "Cloud" vs "Bare Metal" in a VM for server thing. Disregarding up-front investment, you're comparing rented VMs in the cloud with bare metal boxes, datacenter costs, and most important, manpower. At a small scale, you're paying the cloud less than 2 or 3 competent admins with datacenter and networking experience cost for salary. In that situation, you're saving money, because you're saving the hardware ops team. You're paying more dollars per iop, core and GB of ram, but the alternate method of obtaining these resources has more surrounding costs than "ze cloud". On the other hand, once you're shoveling several hundred kilo-dollars per month to a cloud provider, it makes sense to throw a million or 10 at dell and hire those operators, because it will save money within a year or two. This only makes sense if you need the resources, but if you need those resources, it helps being more efficient.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  Cloud may save from hardware/driver issues - by providing an already tested environment, that doesn't (normally) trip on some weirdness in, say, network drivers. But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical memory still available, it doesn't matter whenever one's in the cloud or not. I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    > I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not. And that's why cloud will win every single time, forever, on all metrics. Because the cloud requires less engineers to achieve the same work, as it takes care of the low level hardware work.
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      How that's different from hosting provider engineers taking care of setting up a dedicated server and even pre-installing a tested OS image? They also usually handle all the hardware-related issues you may encounter. That used to work well before the "cloud" era, and still does.
  - tetha 10y ago
    This is why I said hardware op. If you use some VM-based cloud infrastructure you will still need a bunch of good system/linux admins to make your application work on the linux in the cloud. Without these, you're toast. Bare metal requires you to have both good system and linux admins, and on top of that, good hardware admins, networks and datacenter hands. These are different skill sets. So again: If you do the bare metal thing right at the scale it pays for itself, you'll probably end up paying both the skillset for the cloud deployment, and add the hardware skillset on top.

problems 10y ago

Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do the job there, but just for that I'm at $620/mo. Then let's add bandwidth, 10TB out at $0.01/GB = $100/mo. Now for disk I have to use EBS which runs (let's say st1 will do the job) 0.045/GB/mo*3TB = $135/mo. And that's before any IO. So to move from bare metal to amazon I go from $1.5k upfront + $90/mo to a total of $855/mo on Amazon. I can buy a new server every few months for the same cost of hosting that at Amazon - unless I'm severely missing something. Maybe it's worth if it you're a very small installation or one with very unpredictable traffic? But I just don't see it.

morgante 10y ago
You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Also, most businesses don't have demand that steady. Nor is it advisable in a cloud architecture to rely on a single large server.
- problems 10y ago
  Yeah, but I'm just trying to ballpark it. I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones. Most of it does need to remain online at all times including several large databases. Just running my logstash server alone eats 8 GB of RAM and 200+ GB of disk. In bandwidth and storage alone I'm past the cost of the server - so even if I could split this up and keep it mostly offline it still wouldn't be close to worth it unless I'm missing something more significant? > You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Do you mean swapping the drives about once every 3 years with free DC remote hands? Operational costs there are almost nothing - maybe 10 hours a year of my time. Surely much less than it would take to get everything running on a cloud architecture. And that cloud architecture would still require some level of maintenance and monitoring I'm sure.
  - 10y ago