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You can, right now on eBay, get a machine with many high powered cores and 256GB of RAM, for under $3k USD. Then, you can colocate it for $200 per month or les

You can, right now on eBay, get a machine with many high powered cores and 256GB of RAM, for under $3k USD. Then, you can colocate it for $200 per month or less, with a huge amount of bandwidth included. And $200 is not the much-cheaper colos that are out there, so it is on the high side. HA? Buy a second one and mirror in a different DC. HA config via this method: $6k servers + $2k disk + $400/month colo. First year: $12,800 (still cheaper than AWS). Second and third year: $4800 per year. AWS is not the solution for every task.

deleted 8y ago
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Tehchops 8y ago
>AWS is not the solution for every task. For self-hosting/personal stuff? Sure, EC2 is not cost effective. But you've just described a pretty powerful server for self-hosting, and you've left out a decent chunk of context around the considerations that go in to deploying HA, web-facing architecture.
- parliament32 8y ago
  >considerations that go in to deploying HA, web-facing architecture Easier than AWS, that's for sure. Getting HA to actually work in AWS is a nightmare of proprietary configuration and obscure documentation. Hardware-in-a-DC HA has been around approximately forever, and there is far more documentation available on the hundreds of ways to get it working rock-solid... all without vendor lock-in.
  - Tehchops 8y ago
    >Easier than AWS, that's for sure You finding it hard != is hard >Getting HA to actually work in AWS is a nightmare of proprietary configuration and obscure documentation Strange. I have no problem with it. Most of my peers don't either. There is waaay worse documentation than AWS. >Hardware-in-a-DC HA has been around approximately forever, and there is far more documentation available on the hundreds of ways to get it working rock-solid... all without vendor lock-in. If you could point me to all this documentation you speak of that guarantees a "rock-solid" co-lo experience...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - apple4ever 8y ago
      Actually it is hard. Most of your peers and yourself may be familiar with the quirks, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard. AWS's docs are terrible. Others being worse does't change that fact. As for rock solid colo docs- there is this thing called Google. And in fact you barely need that. It's real easy to set up.
      - Tehchops 8y ago
        >Actually it is hard. Most of your peers and yourself may be familiar with the quirks, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard. AWS's docs are terrible. Others being worse does't change that fact. I think you've confused what "facts" are... Doesn't matter. I guess some people are just destined to remain rack 'n stack sysadmins. Fine, more money and less competition for jobs then. >As for rock solid colo docs- there is this thing called Google. And in fact you barely need that. It's real easy to set up. I think you misunderstood my point. I know there are a thousand-and-one guides for setting up Nagios and Postfix and sticking HAProxy in front of it, but my point was that no amount of documentation can abstract away the actual pain points of dealing with co-los, including their owners, staff, and all the fun little problems that crop up with dealing with them. For when it actually matters beyond a dollar value, I trust AWS engineers a lot more than I do HPE/Equinix etc...
        indigodaddy 8y ago
        Seems you've gone a bit personal here.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  I can't speak to that, aside from pointing out that the authors of the article themselves had to work on the HA aspects of it. It didn't come "for free" with the AWS account.
ra1n85 8y ago
It is cheaper, but less flexible. Any cost effective solutions for dealing with bursty demand for compute and networking that aren't AWS?
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  I don't have any visibility into their load. However 16+ cores and 256GB RAM combined with RAIDed SSDs should be able to handle quite a bit of traffic. It's my opinion that memory bandwidth is a contributing factor to how well interpreted languages (Discourse runs on Ruby) perform. Since the hardware is dedicated, all available memory bandwidth can be used; on AWS you (may) share memory bandwidth between all VMs on the physical hardware.
urda 8y ago
Do you have a colo recommendation? It's been years since I had a colo'd server, but I've been thinking about it getting one again soon.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  It depends how much you want to spend. WholesaleInternet.com I have used for their dedicated servers, but they also have inexpensive colo. The guys at HandyNetworks.com currently have some colo of mine, they have good quality hands-on help (their office is right beside their colo); they are more expensive however. Check with WebHostingTalk.com and look for good reviews. Warning: always deal with either the owner/tenant of the colo or no more than 1 step removed; you don't want to be renting space from a reseller of a reseller: if someone in the chain goes under and hasn't paid for a few months, it will be a nightmare for billing and you may have trouble getting your hardware either turned on, or returned.
stevekemp 8y ago
I'm all for doing things "by hand", but this solution introduces a single point of failure. If the colo company has networking issues you'll lose all your traffic. And of course doing HA / load-balancing across data-centers is hard. Ideally you'd use haproxy to route traffic to two distinct backends - but if the proxy is down your traffic gets lost. Simpler solutions are possible, but to do it properly would require your own IP ranges/BGP etc. (Some people use static sites and use DNS for failover, but I think we all agree that's a terrible solution.)
- apple4ever 8y ago
  That's why you get one with multiple networks. AWS has had many outages too- more than a colo would have.
h1d 8y ago
Letting go of a concern of hardware failure is a reduction in cost.
jdietrich 8y ago
That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. You're paying a premium for a reliable, flexible, scalable set of products that aren't easily replicated by a box in a rack. For businesses with healthy margins, there's a clear tradeoff between cloud costs and opportunity costs. If you've got SLAs to honour and a lot of high-RoI engineering tasks in the queue, throwing a bunch of cloud resources at the problem might make perfect sense. AWS isn't the solution for every task, but that doesn't make it a bad solution. The obvious parallel would be with Discourse's business model. Their product is completely free and open source, so there's nothing stopping you from running their software on a DO droplet, a colocated server or a Raspberry Pi attached to your home router. They have plenty of customers who are happy to pay $100/$300/POA for a managed deployment.
- apple4ever 8y ago
  > That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. Exactly but many people don't need that.

deleted 8y ago

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Tehchops 8y ago

>AWS is not the solution for every task. For self-hosting/personal stuff? Sure, EC2 is not cost effective. But you've just described a pretty powerful server for self-hosting, and you've left out a decent chunk of context around the considerations that go in to deploying HA, web-facing architecture.

parliament32 8y ago
>considerations that go in to deploying HA, web-facing architecture Easier than AWS, that's for sure. Getting HA to actually work in AWS is a nightmare of proprietary configuration and obscure documentation. Hardware-in-a-DC HA has been around approximately forever, and there is far more documentation available on the hundreds of ways to get it working rock-solid... all without vendor lock-in.
- Tehchops 8y ago
  >Easier than AWS, that's for sure You finding it hard != is hard >Getting HA to actually work in AWS is a nightmare of proprietary configuration and obscure documentation Strange. I have no problem with it. Most of my peers don't either. There is waaay worse documentation than AWS. >Hardware-in-a-DC HA has been around approximately forever, and there is far more documentation available on the hundreds of ways to get it working rock-solid... all without vendor lock-in. If you could point me to all this documentation you speak of that guarantees a "rock-solid" co-lo experience...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - apple4ever 8y ago
    Actually it is hard. Most of your peers and yourself may be familiar with the quirks, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard. AWS's docs are terrible. Others being worse does't change that fact. As for rock solid colo docs- there is this thing called Google. And in fact you barely need that. It's real easy to set up.
    - Tehchops 8y ago
      >Actually it is hard. Most of your peers and yourself may be familiar with the quirks, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard. AWS's docs are terrible. Others being worse does't change that fact. I think you've confused what "facts" are... Doesn't matter. I guess some people are just destined to remain rack 'n stack sysadmins. Fine, more money and less competition for jobs then. >As for rock solid colo docs- there is this thing called Google. And in fact you barely need that. It's real easy to set up. I think you misunderstood my point. I know there are a thousand-and-one guides for setting up Nagios and Postfix and sticking HAProxy in front of it, but my point was that no amount of documentation can abstract away the actual pain points of dealing with co-los, including their owners, staff, and all the fun little problems that crop up with dealing with them. For when it actually matters beyond a dollar value, I trust AWS engineers a lot more than I do HPE/Equinix etc...
      - indigodaddy 8y ago
        Seems you've gone a bit personal here.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I can't speak to that, aside from pointing out that the authors of the article themselves had to work on the HA aspects of it. It didn't come "for free" with the AWS account.

ra1n85 8y ago

It is cheaper, but less flexible. Any cost effective solutions for dealing with bursty demand for compute and networking that aren't AWS?

patrickg_zill 8y ago
I don't have any visibility into their load. However 16+ cores and 256GB RAM combined with RAIDed SSDs should be able to handle quite a bit of traffic. It's my opinion that memory bandwidth is a contributing factor to how well interpreted languages (Discourse runs on Ruby) perform. Since the hardware is dedicated, all available memory bandwidth can be used; on AWS you (may) share memory bandwidth between all VMs on the physical hardware.

urda 8y ago

Do you have a colo recommendation? It's been years since I had a colo'd server, but I've been thinking about it getting one again soon.

patrickg_zill 8y ago
It depends how much you want to spend. WholesaleInternet.com I have used for their dedicated servers, but they also have inexpensive colo. The guys at HandyNetworks.com currently have some colo of mine, they have good quality hands-on help (their office is right beside their colo); they are more expensive however. Check with WebHostingTalk.com and look for good reviews. Warning: always deal with either the owner/tenant of the colo or no more than 1 step removed; you don't want to be renting space from a reseller of a reseller: if someone in the chain goes under and hasn't paid for a few months, it will be a nightmare for billing and you may have trouble getting your hardware either turned on, or returned.

stevekemp 8y ago

I'm all for doing things "by hand", but this solution introduces a single point of failure. If the colo company has networking issues you'll lose all your traffic. And of course doing HA / load-balancing across data-centers is hard. Ideally you'd use haproxy to route traffic to two distinct backends - but if the proxy is down your traffic gets lost. Simpler solutions are possible, but to do it properly would require your own IP ranges/BGP etc. (Some people use static sites and use DNS for failover, but I think we all agree that's a terrible solution.)

apple4ever 8y ago
That's why you get one with multiple networks. AWS has had many outages too- more than a colo would have.

h1d 8y ago

Letting go of a concern of hardware failure is a reduction in cost.

jdietrich 8y ago

That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. You're paying a premium for a reliable, flexible, scalable set of products that aren't easily replicated by a box in a rack. For businesses with healthy margins, there's a clear tradeoff between cloud costs and opportunity costs. If you've got SLAs to honour and a lot of high-RoI engineering tasks in the queue, throwing a bunch of cloud resources at the problem might make perfect sense. AWS isn't the solution for every task, but that doesn't make it a bad solution. The obvious parallel would be with Discourse's business model. Their product is completely free and open source, so there's nothing stopping you from running their software on a DO droplet, a colocated server or a Raspberry Pi attached to your home router. They have plenty of customers who are happy to pay $100/$300/POA for a managed deployment.

apple4ever 8y ago
> That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. Exactly but many people don't need that.