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"Why I like to run my own hardware for $100, Alex" You can patch various tiers of servers at your own leisure, depending on threat levels and exposure. Measure
by scurvy 9y ago
"Why I like to run my own hardware for $100, Alex"
You can patch various tiers of servers at your own leisure, depending on threat levels and exposure. Measure the impact, capacity plan, etc. Rather than it being forced on you across all tiers because cloud.
- amazingman 9y agoYou forgot to type 5 or 6 zeros there.
- gnosek 9y agohttps://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ Granted, that's the bottom of the barrel (single disk, no IPKVM etc.), but $100 keeps you running for over a year. Better servers are easily available as well, usually a couple of times cheaper than AWS. Is this a US thing? Based on HN only, I'd never know there's anything between the public cloud and racks of own hardware that you have to wire up and maintain. I have a bunch of quad core 32 GB machines with dual 480GB SSDs for less than $100/month each (and that's a rather expensive provider with great support, you'll cut the price almost in half with e.g. SoYouStart). Yes, AWS is convenient, but it's far from the only thing in the world.
- scurvy 9y agoHN types are enamored with the scale and size that is necessary to run the massive framework for their blogs.
- user5994461 9y agoHN has a lot of professionals. They can't run a business on a refurbished server without ECC and without RAID and without dual power supplies. Saying that they should run on kumsufi is like explaining to a wholesale company that they should use motorbikes instead of trucks, because motorbikes are cheaper.
- late2part 9y agoAWS Advocates Eventual Consistency, and I believe offers less than 3 nines guaranteed uptime on many products. We've been taught to build distributed system with unreliable componens and temporaral JIT eventual consistency. Of course we can run production cloud-scale operations on unreliable systems. And single power supplies without ECC or RAID is pretty low on my list of things that cause outages. Most big hadoop/cassandra shops are running without raid and without redundant power.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- user5994461 9y agohadoop/cassandra are replicated to multiple nodes by the software. That's a terrible argument for not using any raid in regular setups.
- late2part 9y agoI suspect your and my definition of regular setups is different. My regular setups are stateless and automatically installed and configured.
- user5994461 9y agoLucky you, never having to deal with any database or storage.
- gnosek 9y agoOf course. I'm not telling anybody to run on kimsufi, like I'm not running kimsufi myself, but on brand-new Supermicro machines that check all your boxes. Kimsufi is still dedicated hardware (however low-end) that costs 1 figure instead of 5/6. For normal server-grade hardware it's just 5x cheaper than AWS, not 20x.
- 9y ago
- amazingman 9y agoYeah, and AWS has a free tier. $0/month is better than $100/month, right?
- lykr0n 9y agoIf you know what you are doing, it is leaps and bounds cheaper to run your own hardware (co-located, rented from soneone else). The only issue is latency on scaling out (hours), but if you are halfway decent with trend lines you can preempt this.
- xiaodown 9y agoThat's not the only issue; there's also a lot of compliance issues that having a hosting company can take care of. There's whole sections of PCI and HIPPA compliance that you can just write off as "not our problem, talk to AWS".
- scurvy 9y agoPCI compliance had little to do with where you're hosted, but how you're hosted and what you do with data. AWS is not a magical PCI compliance button.
- 013a 9y agoTheoretically, it isn't. In actuality, and in our experience, there are a lot of compliance standards where just saying "we're on AWS" gets you 90% of the way toward acceptance. Its mostly buzzword compliance.
- scurvy 9y agoThat's just not true. Most of PCI compliance is documenting practices and operations. Have you even completed all various levels of compliance? Or have you just done one level?
- amazingman 9y agoAnd what if the delta between your upper and lower daily “trend lines” is measured in millions of requests per hour? Per second? We can leave off weekly/seasonal trends for now, and keep it nice and easy for you. The utter lack of imagination that I see on HN when people are judging others’ technical decisions is kind of hilarious.
- scurvy 9y agoIt was a Jeopardy! reference. Sorry if it didn't come through.
- stephengillie 9y agoIt's very easy for a single admin with a single machine to provide 4 nines to a small group with a small load. But this usually scales exponentially.
- scurvy 9y agoJust because you can't do it doesn't make it impossible. A small team of 4-5 good ops people can scale a network of many thousand nodes, petabytes of storage, and terabits of network throughput. Tech stuff isn't hard. The biggest problem is the lack of capacity planning and project communication in tech today. Nimble startup is a euphemism for pure anarchy and chaos. No one wants to plan anything any more.
- user5994461 9y agoThe same infra could be managed by a single guy if it were in the cloud.
- scurvy 9y agoNo, because that "guy" would want a vacation and would suddenly become the most important person in the company. You're running teams of people, not cogs. Once you realize that, you'll also realize that cloud services are like 5-6x the total cost. Cloud services are not efficient or cheap, they're convenient for the unprepared and haphazard management style that VC's love.
- amazingman 9y agoYou should review the difference between CapEx and OpEx, and specifically focus on why companies might prefer to pay “5-6x the total cost” when that cost comes in the form of OpEx. You may still disagree in the end, but you should come to the conclusion that it is not categorically stupid for some companies to choose to pay much more over time so that they can pay a lot less right now.
- stephengillie 9y ago