3 ms·

> For a small shop without much (or any) operational support, AWS can save money, complexity and effort. Small shops, in my experience, have more time and labo

> For a small shop without much (or any) operational support, AWS can save money, complexity and effort. Small shops, in my experience, have more time and labor available than money. > by the time you start to outgrow the capacity of amazon hosted services, you're generally past the point where it's worth it to host your own. That's one of my points. There is no such point. The bigger you become, the more money you'll save by doing it yourself. Read the Dropbox migration story: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastructure/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastr... Also, if this were true, then why aren't Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba ... hosting their infrastructure on cloud providers (even their own) ? I assure you at such scales, money becomes a very strong argument. And yet all are choosing to not do this, as far as I'm aware. The bigger your scale, the stronger the argument becomes to not use cloud. > And while bare metal may be cheaper, when you own bare metal, you own it 24x7 - you can't scale your infrastructure 3X to handle daytime peak load, or scale it 10X for a day to handle end of quarter processing then scale it back down the next day and stop paying for all of that hardware. Can I make a slightly sarcastic remark ? This cloud scaling is only useful if your credit card can handle 50x the charges. (there was an article to the tune of "cloud: when will we get to the first $500 page refresh ?", but I can't find it right now). But perhaps better put, since it's cheaper to own and manage 10x the bare metal capacity than it is to cloud rent 1x that capacity, for any non-trivial amount of capacity, this argument does not mean anything. Add to that that 10x the bare metal capacity has lots of advantages, from technical debt ones, like lower lock-in, to financial ones, you actually own the capital. I don't understand the argument you're making very much at all. It's not self-consistent. Half of what you say can only apply to super-small companies, and half could only apply to the very very large. And when you're in either argument, you say you agree with my objections to the other part. That not doing cloud is cheaper for very large customers, and that cloud doesn't matter for the very small. There is a usecase for cloud, but it would never support the cloud providers: if you have a load that suddenly requires 1000x capacity and then doesn't require any capacity for at least a month, then cloud makes sense. So, you're a startup oil driller that needs to crunch through geological survey accoustics, sure, by all means. But if people used cloud only in such cases where it actually makes sense then the companies doing cloud would not be economical ...

thezilch 9y ago
> why aren't Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba ... hosting their infrastructure on cloud They are... they are literally the cloud(s) and their biggest customer. In fact, they are big enough to offer you their ops and expertise for a small fee over baremetal. Many cloud consumers are literally using up the overhead existing in these businesses' hardware that would otherwise be sitting around. It can be done cheaper, sure but not without giving up opportunity time and work you may just not want to deal with. I certainly am over having to manage supplier relationships or having to wake someone I don't know or find difficult to converse with to bounce a router or kick a generator.
Johnny555 9y ago
Small shops, in my experience, have more time and labor available than money When a developer costs the company $100+/hour, it's hard to justify paying him/her to manage a database when you can pay AWS $50/month to do it.... and AWS will almost always do it better than a developer will do in his/her spare time. The bigger your scale, the stronger the argument becomes to not use cloud. Sure, very large companies may find it more cost effective to own their own hardware and datacenters, but there's a huge number of comapnies where self-hosting makes no sense. I know someone at a company that pays nearly $1M/month to AWS -- the company has about 50 developers and 2 ops staff to manage the entire compute infrastructure, their server count varies throughout the day depending on customer demand from around 1000 overnight to 8000 servers during peak daytime usage. Their peak lasts from 6am - 6pm, so most servers would be unused for 12 hours a day. They've got about a petabyte of storage in AWS S3. But, since you're focused on pricing for bare metal vs AWS, let's look at some pricing that's loosely based on a company I used to work for. (this company took data from customers, ran monthly processing and returned aggregated data to customers,so nearly all bandwidth was inbound) A Dell R530 with a 20 Thread CPU, 4x16GB RAM and 4TB SSD disk (RAID-1 so 2TB usable) is around $8500, or around $275/month for a 3 year lease. You can rent 1U in a reliable coloc for $200 (including network port + basic firewall services), so you're looking at $575/month. This is roughly equivalent to 4 m4.xlarge's ($0.086/hour each at 3 year reserved pricing) and 2TB SSD EBS disk ($200/month) or around $450/month. Add in a TB of outbound data for $100, so that's $550/month. Sounds pretty comparable... oh, but you want redundancy, if your machine (or data center) goes up in flames, you don't want to lose your service, so add in another hardware server + fees, so you're paying over $1000/month. Depending on your need for redundancy, with Amazon you may be fine with an ASG with health check that restarts your server if it fails. Or you can spread your servers across data centers. Or you keep cold spares in another AZ or region that you launch once a day to sync disks so you're only paying for 5 minutes/day of usage) So that covers base load. So now, at the end of the month your customers have been sending you data, and they expect you to process it and send aggregated reports back to them within 3 days of the end of the month. You don't have enough spare CPU/memory on your existing servers (even if you use your spare server) to do this month-end processing with existing hardware, so you spin up 4 i3.8xlarge's (32 core, 244GB CPU, 8TB local SSD) at $2.50/hour for 32 hours, or $320 for all 4. Each of those is bigger than the R530's you're using, but let's say pricing is the same, so you're paying another $1000/month to lease servers you're only using 2 days a month. And now your service grows and you want to expand capacity. If you own the servers, you need to buy new ones and pay someone to rack and configure them and migrate your applications. While with AWS you just do a quick stop/start and suddenly you're running on a bigger server. This cloud scaling is only useful if your credit card can handle 50x the charges If you can't pay for your infrastructure it doesn't matter whether you're on cloud servers or not.

thezilch 9y ago

> why aren't Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba ... hosting their infrastructure on cloud They are... they are literally the cloud(s) and their biggest customer. In fact, they are big enough to offer you their ops and expertise for a small fee over baremetal. Many cloud consumers are literally using up the overhead existing in these businesses' hardware that would otherwise be sitting around. It can be done cheaper, sure but not without giving up opportunity time and work you may just not want to deal with. I certainly am over having to manage supplier relationships or having to wake someone I don't know or find difficult to converse with to bounce a router or kick a generator.

Johnny555 9y ago

Small shops, in my experience, have more time and labor available than money When a developer costs the company $100+/hour, it's hard to justify paying him/her to manage a database when you can pay AWS $50/month to do it.... and AWS will almost always do it better than a developer will do in his/her spare time. The bigger your scale, the stronger the argument becomes to not use cloud. Sure, very large companies may find it more cost effective to own their own hardware and datacenters, but there's a huge number of comapnies where self-hosting makes no sense. I know someone at a company that pays nearly $1M/month to AWS -- the company has about 50 developers and 2 ops staff to manage the entire compute infrastructure, their server count varies throughout the day depending on customer demand from around 1000 overnight to 8000 servers during peak daytime usage. Their peak lasts from 6am - 6pm, so most servers would be unused for 12 hours a day. They've got about a petabyte of storage in AWS S3. But, since you're focused on pricing for bare metal vs AWS, let's look at some pricing that's loosely based on a company I used to work for. (this company took data from customers, ran monthly processing and returned aggregated data to customers,so nearly all bandwidth was inbound) A Dell R530 with a 20 Thread CPU, 4x16GB RAM and 4TB SSD disk (RAID-1 so 2TB usable) is around $8500, or around $275/month for a 3 year lease. You can rent 1U in a reliable coloc for $200 (including network port + basic firewall services), so you're looking at $575/month. This is roughly equivalent to 4 m4.xlarge's ($0.086/hour each at 3 year reserved pricing) and 2TB SSD EBS disk ($200/month) or around $450/month. Add in a TB of outbound data for $100, so that's $550/month. Sounds pretty comparable... oh, but you want redundancy, if your machine (or data center) goes up in flames, you don't want to lose your service, so add in another hardware server + fees, so you're paying over $1000/month. Depending on your need for redundancy, with Amazon you may be fine with an ASG with health check that restarts your server if it fails. Or you can spread your servers across data centers. Or you keep cold spares in another AZ or region that you launch once a day to sync disks so you're only paying for 5 minutes/day of usage) So that covers base load. So now, at the end of the month your customers have been sending you data, and they expect you to process it and send aggregated reports back to them within 3 days of the end of the month. You don't have enough spare CPU/memory on your existing servers (even if you use your spare server) to do this month-end processing with existing hardware, so you spin up 4 i3.8xlarge's (32 core, 244GB CPU, 8TB local SSD) at $2.50/hour for 32 hours, or $320 for all 4. Each of those is bigger than the R530's you're using, but let's say pricing is the same, so you're paying another $1000/month to lease servers you're only using 2 days a month. And now your service grows and you want to expand capacity. If you own the servers, you need to buy new ones and pay someone to rack and configure them and migrate your applications. While with AWS you just do a quick stop/start and suddenly you're running on a bigger server. This cloud scaling is only useful if your credit card can handle 50x the charges If you can't pay for your infrastructure it doesn't matter whether you're on cloud servers or not.