6 ms·

I hope some of the old hardware makes it to ebay, but it looks like many of the form factors are proprietary.

jacquesm 10y ago
What do you intend to do with it? I've found that almost any kind of short lived experiment I can do cheaper on AWS than doing it with hardware that I own. If it is longer running then it might become viable to own the hardware.
- archimedespi 10y ago
  eh, owning hardware is fun and a great learning experience
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Owning is passive, it's what you do with it that matters.
- hueving 10y ago
  It's sad to me this is becoming the status quo. Using other massively centralized companies for compute resources is a sad future. It's bad for privacy, it's bad for diversity to protect against SPOFs, it's bad for general computing hardware (vendors primarily target the giants), it's bad for users via vendor lock-in, and it's bad for open source projects in the infrastructure space. I think hackers justify it to themselves by pretending it's a commodity like electricity, but it's far from that. If my utility goes out, I can turn on generator and get exactly the same electricity. If Amazon goes out I have to build again on another cloud from a (hopefully recent) backup or just sit dead (like the recent s3 outage). Sorry about the rant, but is there anything that would get you to stop giving the keys to the kingdom to Amazon?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Hardware is a means to an end. I've got plenty of it but at the end of the day what you do with it should be balanced by what it costs. For companies that have instances running long term it can very well be cost effective to own the hardware. My email server, web server and DNS server are on my own hardware with a co-location facility that I trust. But for experimental stuff where you need to spin up a hundred machines for an hour or two you just can't beat the cloud (and that's my only use case for the cloud, though I can see others go much further). I don't like the monoculture any more than you do, but to see this as me having given the 'keys to the kingdown to Amazon' is several steps too far.
    - hueving 10y ago
      I misinterpreted what you meant by a "short lived experiment". I took that to basically mean any project when you're starting out. My apologies. Whenever I'm experimenting I rarely need a burst of 100 instances, it's usually 1 or 2 instances to run things and I prefer to run them on my own hardware.
  - dpark 10y ago
    > I think hackers justify it to themselves by pretending it's a commodity like electricity, but it's far from that. If my utility goes out, I can turn on generator and get exactly the same electricity. If Amazon goes out I have to build again on another cloud from a (hopefully recent) backup or just sit dead (like the recent s3 outage). What's your use case? Are you just futzing around at home? Sure, use a server in your bedroom. Who cares? Are you delivering a service to other people? Then owning hardware is probably a bad idea. If it's in your house, your users are hosed if you lose power or your internet cuts out. Putting it in a DC just means you're handing the same keys to someone else, but your self-managed hardware is definitely going to be less reliable than Amazon's infrastructure. Owning hardware is a bad deal for everyone involved unless you're big enough to build your own HADR infrastructure.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      My raspberry pi at home has had in the past 3 years less downtime than aws. Local datacenters in the city had even less. I'm not sure where AWS is supposed to get that famous reliability from, but it's not in uptime. (I can't comment on storage reliability, because I only write a few terabytes of data a month — but otherwise, there's RAID 5 or other RAID setups to ensure data staying valid) AWS has its advantages in its immense scalability within of seconds, it has its advantages in convenience. But its uptime isn't much better than most home connections. Home statistics: Power downtime since 2006 is 29 minutes. Internet downtime since 2006 is 6 hours in 2014, 2 times 30 minutes each in 2016. This is on a 100/40 DSL line nowadays (the downtimes were, except for one, when switching ISPs), without any universal power supply, battery or generator. For comparison, this is equivalent to a downtime of 99.99% — the same as AWS advertises, but better than what they delivered in this or the last year.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        You probably do not get how this works. Let me try to explain: when you talk about the uptime of your raspberry pi you are looking at a single, very simple instance of a computer. It's really easy to get an insane uptime out of a single machine. Here's one for you: > uptime 02:52:56 up 714 days, 16:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Which is pretty average for a small, underutilized server. Essentially the uptime here is a function of how reliable the power supply is. But that's not what AWS is offering. They offer a far more complex solution which by the very nature of its complexity will have more issues than your - and mine - simple computers. The utility lies in the fact that if you tried to imitate the level of complexity and flexibility that AWS offers that you'd likely not even get close to their uptimes. So you're comparing apples and oranges, or more accurately, apples and peas.
  - raz32dust 10y ago
    I feel you. But I think the lock-in problem can be solved if we can have some standardization of cloud services such that you can always move to another provider. That has to start with some big company developing an abstraction layer and open sourcing it, and then we can go from there. I think Netflix has a switch from Amazon to GCP; I hope be they'll standardize it and open source it.
    - cowardlydragon 10y ago
      Chef, puppet, etc, and other Apache projects all offer this already. It's like leveraging Oracle specific database features. Your a fool to do so.
    - jacques_chester 10y ago
      > That has to start with some big company developing an abstraction layer and open sourcing it, and then we can go from there. I work for a company (Pivotal) that's had such a product -- Pivotal Cloud Foundry -- for several years. It creates an abstraction layer for apps or container images, your choice. Deploy with BOSH to raw metal, OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure or GCP. BOSH creates an abstraction layer over the IaaS. We're also the main driving force behind Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Services; the latter is in part a generalisation and integration of Netflix OSS. We cooperate a lot with Google and Microsoft. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cloud-foundry-on-gcp https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cloud-foundry-on-gcp
  - PascLeRasc 10y ago
    I agree, it is sad that heavy computing/data is being centralized around corporations. I really get a lot out of being able to see and touch my hardware. To me that's worth the additional cost. I love my little 100TB Synology box and it feels weird now sitting at my desk without its soft fan hum.
ssttoo 10y ago
s/proprietary/opensource/ http://www.opencompute.org/ http://www.opencompute.org/ :)
rb2k_ 10y ago
A lot of them already are: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=open+compute+server http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=open+compute+server
- nananonymous 10y ago
  If facebook is just now announcing their upgrade should we expect these prices to go down?
  - wmf 10y ago
    This is the Nth generation. Facebook has been continuously decommissioning old servers for years already.
- scurvy 10y ago
  That's all regular Quanta gear. No idea if it was owned by FB or another OCP adopter. OCP is popular with mineral companies.

What do you intend to do with it? I've found that almost any kind of short lived experiment I can do cheaper on AWS than doing it with hardware that I own. If it is longer running then it might become viable to own the hardware.

archimedespi 10y ago
eh, owning hardware is fun and a great learning experience
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Owning is passive, it's what you do with it that matters.
hueving 10y ago
It's sad to me this is becoming the status quo. Using other massively centralized companies for compute resources is a sad future. It's bad for privacy, it's bad for diversity to protect against SPOFs, it's bad for general computing hardware (vendors primarily target the giants), it's bad for users via vendor lock-in, and it's bad for open source projects in the infrastructure space. I think hackers justify it to themselves by pretending it's a commodity like electricity, but it's far from that. If my utility goes out, I can turn on generator and get exactly the same electricity. If Amazon goes out I have to build again on another cloud from a (hopefully recent) backup or just sit dead (like the recent s3 outage). Sorry about the rant, but is there anything that would get you to stop giving the keys to the kingdom to Amazon?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Hardware is a means to an end. I've got plenty of it but at the end of the day what you do with it should be balanced by what it costs. For companies that have instances running long term it can very well be cost effective to own the hardware. My email server, web server and DNS server are on my own hardware with a co-location facility that I trust. But for experimental stuff where you need to spin up a hundred machines for an hour or two you just can't beat the cloud (and that's my only use case for the cloud, though I can see others go much further). I don't like the monoculture any more than you do, but to see this as me having given the 'keys to the kingdown to Amazon' is several steps too far.
  - hueving 10y ago
    I misinterpreted what you meant by a "short lived experiment". I took that to basically mean any project when you're starting out. My apologies. Whenever I'm experimenting I rarely need a burst of 100 instances, it's usually 1 or 2 instances to run things and I prefer to run them on my own hardware.
- dpark 10y ago
  > I think hackers justify it to themselves by pretending it's a commodity like electricity, but it's far from that. If my utility goes out, I can turn on generator and get exactly the same electricity. If Amazon goes out I have to build again on another cloud from a (hopefully recent) backup or just sit dead (like the recent s3 outage). What's your use case? Are you just futzing around at home? Sure, use a server in your bedroom. Who cares? Are you delivering a service to other people? Then owning hardware is probably a bad idea. If it's in your house, your users are hosed if you lose power or your internet cuts out. Putting it in a DC just means you're handing the same keys to someone else, but your self-managed hardware is definitely going to be less reliable than Amazon's infrastructure. Owning hardware is a bad deal for everyone involved unless you're big enough to build your own HADR infrastructure.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    My raspberry pi at home has had in the past 3 years less downtime than aws. Local datacenters in the city had even less. I'm not sure where AWS is supposed to get that famous reliability from, but it's not in uptime. (I can't comment on storage reliability, because I only write a few terabytes of data a month — but otherwise, there's RAID 5 or other RAID setups to ensure data staying valid) AWS has its advantages in its immense scalability within of seconds, it has its advantages in convenience. But its uptime isn't much better than most home connections. Home statistics: Power downtime since 2006 is 29 minutes. Internet downtime since 2006 is 6 hours in 2014, 2 times 30 minutes each in 2016. This is on a 100/40 DSL line nowadays (the downtimes were, except for one, when switching ISPs), without any universal power supply, battery or generator. For comparison, this is equivalent to a downtime of 99.99% — the same as AWS advertises, but better than what they delivered in this or the last year.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      You probably do not get how this works. Let me try to explain: when you talk about the uptime of your raspberry pi you are looking at a single, very simple instance of a computer. It's really easy to get an insane uptime out of a single machine. Here's one for you: > uptime 02:52:56 up 714 days, 16:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Which is pretty average for a small, underutilized server. Essentially the uptime here is a function of how reliable the power supply is. But that's not what AWS is offering. They offer a far more complex solution which by the very nature of its complexity will have more issues than your - and mine - simple computers. The utility lies in the fact that if you tried to imitate the level of complexity and flexibility that AWS offers that you'd likely not even get close to their uptimes. So you're comparing apples and oranges, or more accurately, apples and peas.
- raz32dust 10y ago
  I feel you. But I think the lock-in problem can be solved if we can have some standardization of cloud services such that you can always move to another provider. That has to start with some big company developing an abstraction layer and open sourcing it, and then we can go from there. I think Netflix has a switch from Amazon to GCP; I hope be they'll standardize it and open source it.
  - cowardlydragon 10y ago
    Chef, puppet, etc, and other Apache projects all offer this already. It's like leveraging Oracle specific database features. Your a fool to do so.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    > That has to start with some big company developing an abstraction layer and open sourcing it, and then we can go from there. I work for a company (Pivotal) that's had such a product -- Pivotal Cloud Foundry -- for several years. It creates an abstraction layer for apps or container images, your choice. Deploy with BOSH to raw metal, OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure or GCP. BOSH creates an abstraction layer over the IaaS. We're also the main driving force behind Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Services; the latter is in part a generalisation and integration of Netflix OSS. We cooperate a lot with Google and Microsoft. For example: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cloud-foundry-on-gcp https://cloud.google.com/solutions/cloud-foundry-on-gcp
- PascLeRasc 10y ago
  I agree, it is sad that heavy computing/data is being centralized around corporations. I really get a lot out of being able to see and touch my hardware. To me that's worth the additional cost. I love my little 100TB Synology box and it feels weird now sitting at my desk without its soft fan hum.

ssttoo 10y ago

s/proprietary/opensource/ http://www.opencompute.org/ http://www.opencompute.org/ :)

rb2k_ 10y ago

A lot of them already are: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=open+compute+server http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=open+compute+server

nananonymous 10y ago
If facebook is just now announcing their upgrade should we expect these prices to go down?
- wmf 10y ago
  This is the Nth generation. Facebook has been continuously decommissioning old servers for years already.
scurvy 10y ago
That's all regular Quanta gear. No idea if it was owned by FB or another OCP adopter. OCP is popular with mineral companies.