4 ms·

Not directly, but cost usually it is. Being able to serve the same number of customers with less computational power means reducing your cost.

by clagio 8y ago

pbalau 8y ago
That's a very simplistic view on the issue. Most businesses do not have a constant workload 24/7, which means the ability to scale up and down will save more money than reducing the overhead of not running directly on metal. There is also the cost of having to care about hardware to begin with. Also, in the big picture, having 100 companies doing their own bare metal deployments is not terrible efficient, compared to 1 company doing that and 99 paying the first company for this service. The list could go on, but I think you get my point.
- romeisendcoming 8y ago
  This sounds like classic devops/cloud snake oil. I wonder what industry pays your bills? * The most businesses/always on reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. * What is so difficult about hardware? The cost of forgetting how to deal with it will be much higher in the long run. * Yes, monopolies are healthy.
  - pbalau 8y ago
    > Yes, monopolies are healthy. Seems all 3 major cloud providers, aws, google and azure, are providing facilities to run docker containers. Seems Digital Ocean is getting there too. Hardly a monopoly, init? > What is so difficult about hardware? All of it. This is knowledge my company doesn't have and there is no point in investing in accuiring this knowledge at this time, since we have an easier solution. Not to mention that if we decide going bare metal is the way to go, we can do that later. > The most businesses [...] I think my english is failing me, I don't really understand this paragraph. > This sounds like classic devops/cloud snake oil. I wonder what industry pays your bills? Not the snarky remarks industry...
    - romeisendcoming 8y ago
      Let me assist you with your English by being (over) explicit and adding overt punctuation to outline the objectionable excerpt. -- The '..most businesses/always on..' reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. -- All of hardware is too hard until (evidently) you run out of options from 'ze cloud' and you live in a PC bubble that doesn't like snark. Noted. You sound like a senior SV architect.
barrkel 8y ago
The biggest cost for growth companies is opportunity cost: what they aren't able to sell and deliver because of constraints in their development and operational setup. If you have customers beating down your door to buy your product after you add n+1 feature, you can find investors to eat the extra operational cost without a problem as long as you can build n+1 fast enough that those customers don't go elsewhere. The other element is elastic workload, of course. Having the application dynamically scale across a pool of machines in as tractable a manner as possible at the developer level can be an enormous cost saving all on its own. Instead of allocating machines based on individual high water marks, you can allocate a cluster based on the sum of average usage + as many standard deviations of resource usage to get as many 9s as you need.

Not directly, but cost usually it is. Being able to serve the same number of customers with less computational power means reducing your cost.

by clagio 8y ago

Not directly, but cost usually it is. Being able to serve the same number of customers with less computational power means reducing your cost.

pbalau 8y ago

That's a very simplistic view on the issue. Most businesses do not have a constant workload 24/7, which means the ability to scale up and down will save more money than reducing the overhead of not running directly on metal. There is also the cost of having to care about hardware to begin with. Also, in the big picture, having 100 companies doing their own bare metal deployments is not terrible efficient, compared to 1 company doing that and 99 paying the first company for this service. The list could go on, but I think you get my point.

romeisendcoming 8y ago
This sounds like classic devops/cloud snake oil. I wonder what industry pays your bills? * The most businesses/always on reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. * What is so difficult about hardware? The cost of forgetting how to deal with it will be much higher in the long run. * Yes, monopolies are healthy.
- pbalau 8y ago
  > Yes, monopolies are healthy. Seems all 3 major cloud providers, aws, google and azure, are providing facilities to run docker containers. Seems Digital Ocean is getting there too. Hardly a monopoly, init? > What is so difficult about hardware? All of it. This is knowledge my company doesn't have and there is no point in investing in accuiring this knowledge at this time, since we have an easier solution. Not to mention that if we decide going bare metal is the way to go, we can do that later. > The most businesses [...] I think my english is failing me, I don't really understand this paragraph. > This sounds like classic devops/cloud snake oil. I wonder what industry pays your bills? Not the snarky remarks industry...
  - romeisendcoming 8y ago
    Let me assist you with your English by being (over) explicit and adding overt punctuation to outline the objectionable excerpt. -- The '..most businesses/always on..' reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. -- All of hardware is too hard until (evidently) you run out of options from 'ze cloud' and you live in a PC bubble that doesn't like snark. Noted. You sound like a senior SV architect.

barrkel 8y ago

The biggest cost for growth companies is opportunity cost: what they aren't able to sell and deliver because of constraints in their development and operational setup. If you have customers beating down your door to buy your product after you add n+1 feature, you can find investors to eat the extra operational cost without a problem as long as you can build n+1 fast enough that those customers don't go elsewhere. The other element is elastic workload, of course. Having the application dynamically scale across a pool of machines in as tractable a manner as possible at the developer level can be an enormous cost saving all on its own. Instead of allocating machines based on individual high water marks, you can allocate a cluster based on the sum of average usage + as many standard deviations of resource usage to get as many 9s as you need.