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There is so much more overhead with bare metal. There's an entire other side of building a web server that devs, thankfully, never have to see. OpenCompute [1]

There is so much more overhead with bare metal. There's an entire other side of building a web server that devs, thankfully, never have to see. OpenCompute [1] aims to standardize what that process looks like. To think that you can run bare metal, and do better than industry standards is naive IMO. In the end, if you're worrying more about anything than business logic, you're not really delivering value -- you're solving engineering problems. You can sacrifice that control and solving problems for greater abstractions, i.e. serverless, fargate, etc. Unless you have some extreme security requirements (which most don't) you probably don't have a good reason to run bare metal. [1] - http://www.opencompute.org/ http://www.opencompute.org/

geofft 9y ago
Cloud providers have to make money, though. You're doing more with bare metal, yes, but you're not doing much more (especially compared to learning how to use a cloud infrastructure effectively), and the cost may not be worthwhile. Generally, the cost of buying and running one server in a datacenter and staffing the ops team needed to keep the hardware running is cheaper than paying for a 24/7 server of comparable specs in the cloud. And if you're already running in a datacenter, it's extremely not obvious that the cost of moving your workload ever will be net profitable. Of course, if you don't need comparable specs to an entire physical server (I do a lot of personal stuff on a t2.micro!) or don't need the same capacity 24/7, the math is very different. The cloud is definitely cost-effective for elastic workloads.
- olingern 9y ago
  > Generally, the cost of buying and running one server in a datacenter and staffing the ops team needed to keep the hardware running is cheaper than paying for a 24/7 server of comparable specs in the cloud I would disagree here. You can run the metrics for your stack, but it's likely cheaper on AWS. https://awstcocalculator.com/ https://awstcocalculator.com/ If you don't need to compute something but twice a day, or just certain times -- you can pay pennies on the dollar for a serverless function. There's no need for an entire server for things like this.
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chomp 9y ago
I think you're generalizing too much. The overhead for bare metal only exists for certain use cases and apps. We run about 3 cages (~4k pieces of hardware total) for about a tenth of the cost of what we've priced out as AWS/GCP. This includes DC staff to swap/provision hardware, leases, capex, and our bandwidth contracts.
- deleted 9y ago
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geofft 9y ago

Cloud providers have to make money, though. You're doing more with bare metal, yes, but you're not doing much more (especially compared to learning how to use a cloud infrastructure effectively), and the cost may not be worthwhile. Generally, the cost of buying and running one server in a datacenter and staffing the ops team needed to keep the hardware running is cheaper than paying for a 24/7 server of comparable specs in the cloud. And if you're already running in a datacenter, it's extremely not obvious that the cost of moving your workload ever will be net profitable. Of course, if you don't need comparable specs to an entire physical server (I do a lot of personal stuff on a t2.micro!) or don't need the same capacity 24/7, the math is very different. The cloud is definitely cost-effective for elastic workloads.

olingern 9y ago
> Generally, the cost of buying and running one server in a datacenter and staffing the ops team needed to keep the hardware running is cheaper than paying for a 24/7 server of comparable specs in the cloud I would disagree here. You can run the metrics for your stack, but it's likely cheaper on AWS. https://awstcocalculator.com/ https://awstcocalculator.com/ If you don't need to compute something but twice a day, or just certain times -- you can pay pennies on the dollar for a serverless function. There's no need for an entire server for things like this.
- deleted 9y ago
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chomp 9y ago

I think you're generalizing too much. The overhead for bare metal only exists for certain use cases and apps. We run about 3 cages (~4k pieces of hardware total) for about a tenth of the cost of what we've priced out as AWS/GCP. This includes DC staff to swap/provision hardware, leases, capex, and our bandwidth contracts.

deleted 9y ago
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