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... isn't that the hardest part, predicting workload, for many companies. Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands r

... isn't that the hardest part, predicting workload, for many companies. Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc. If you can predict workload then you could also reduce your cloud bills, in theory, by moving spinning up/down instances. Many are going the cloud route because the cost of entry is much easier to start developing but eventually, yes, the cost skyrockets and you do end up paying for putting little forethought into the real workload requirements.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
> Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc. One senior sysadmin/infrastructure engineer with on-prem experience is enough to scale up your colo presence. You can either assemble your own servers or custom order and have them shipped directly to the colo. Remote console and power management (PDUs) is a solved problem. Out of band management, also solved. Virtualization, solved. Push your VM snapshots, content, artifacts, and database backups into your object store of choice for offsite backups. Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services. EDIT: k8s arguably makes this easier than in the past. You want to run on your own cluster? You can. You need to burst your containers to spot instances in someone else's cloud? You can.
- user5994461 8y ago
  All the problems you consider solved are only solved if you have the tooling from AWS/Google or half solved if you have VMWare. With physical hardware, the sysadmin will spend a lot of his time fighting the hardware supplier and the colo to get hardware in place and running, then reinvent the tooling. Any trip to the facility is half a day lost.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Many organizations run their own hardware successfully without the tooling I mention. There are problems, just different problems from cloud with significant cost savings realized. Why would you be fighting your hardware supplier or your colo? I have never had a hardware vendor "fight me", and only once had challenging negotiations with a colo provider. Have you never lost half a day of getting work done because Amazon's EC2 API was failing to launch new instances? I have! [1] To simply hand wave away hosting your own hardware as infeasible and more costly (especially when it's been proven to be more costly) is unproductive at best. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity... (HN search of "AWS Outage")
    - user5994461 8y ago
      The cost savings have never been proven. If anything, they're proven to be miscalculated every time someones gives his numbers. Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place. DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. I've had the API down about 4 times in a year, always for specific types of instance, if I remember the count well. Never more than a few hours. It's nothing in comparison to the weeks it takes to ship and setup physical hardware.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - pmoriarty 8y ago
        "Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place." There are plenty of companies with their own datacenters of hundreds or even thousands of machines. Yes, these companies usually have deep pockets and their own dedicated staff to take care of these servers. This is how it was done before AWS existed, and is likely to continue long after AWS ceases to exist.
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Computing power on AWS costs 3x+ as much as the naively calculated cost of buying and running servers. Of course there are situations where running your own servers actually is cheaper. You are arguing the impossibility of something people are doing right now, so...?!
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services." That remote hands service is usually very limited. Datacenter staff usually don't have the time or the skills to do detailed troubleshooting, setup, or maintenance. Maybe they'll swap out a disk for you, power cycle a server, or turn a knob on a KVM switch. If you want more, you'll have probably have to buy in to managed service, which they'll do on their own hardware and with their own setup, where you'll be paying closer to AWS prices. Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    > Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply. Wikimedia is serving Wikipedia (ranked #5 for Internet traffic) with ~550 servers out of Dallas, TX and Ashburn, VA for about $4 million/year in tech costs. OpenStreetMap infra is ~$120k-$150k/year (albeit with volunteers and some donated hosting capacity). Do you need Amazon to do better? I am not trying to be a "stick in the mud". I am trying to save you money.
    - sgwae 8y ago
      aws is only a few cents an hour, i dont get why wikipedia doesnt switch over unless they are pocketing the differece.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Because Wikipedia doesn’t want to waste money. “A few cents an hour”. It’s a 30% markup over physical hardware, not to mention extortionate bandwidth pricing.
  - alchemism 8y ago
    You might be surprised at what offering them (the “hands”) a packet of well-written runbooks and a bottle of scotch for the holidays will get you.
- scarface74 8y ago
  There is a lot more that AWS does for you than host a bunch of VMs...
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Many use cases doesn't require what AWS provides besides storage and compute primitives. If your use case must use Amazon, use Amazon. If not, consider more efficient alternatives. I don't mention AWS in my comment, not sure why you thought I was comparing the two.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Even then if you can just get rid of one support person you can save enough to buy a lot of from AWS just taking into account the management you don’t have to do - if you automate.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
drieddust 8y ago
Servers are cheap enough so buying a few and keeping on standby is no brainer and they are good for 5 years generally.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

> Scaling up within a colo can be troublesome due to procuring hw, having remote hands rack it, setup, etc. One senior sysadmin/infrastructure engineer with on-prem experience is enough to scale up your colo presence. You can either assemble your own servers or custom order and have them shipped directly to the colo. Remote console and power management (PDUs) is a solved problem. Out of band management, also solved. Virtualization, solved. Push your VM snapshots, content, artifacts, and database backups into your object store of choice for offsite backups. Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services. EDIT: k8s arguably makes this easier than in the past. You want to run on your own cluster? You can. You need to burst your containers to spot instances in someone else's cloud? You can.

user5994461 8y ago
All the problems you consider solved are only solved if you have the tooling from AWS/Google or half solved if you have VMWare. With physical hardware, the sysadmin will spend a lot of his time fighting the hardware supplier and the colo to get hardware in place and running, then reinvent the tooling. Any trip to the facility is half a day lost.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Many organizations run their own hardware successfully without the tooling I mention. There are problems, just different problems from cloud with significant cost savings realized. Why would you be fighting your hardware supplier or your colo? I have never had a hardware vendor "fight me", and only once had challenging negotiations with a colo provider. Have you never lost half a day of getting work done because Amazon's EC2 API was failing to launch new instances? I have! [1] To simply hand wave away hosting your own hardware as infeasible and more costly (especially when it's been proven to be more costly) is unproductive at best. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity... (HN search of "AWS Outage")
  - user5994461 8y ago
    The cost savings have never been proven. If anything, they're proven to be miscalculated every time someones gives his numbers. Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place. DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. I've had the API down about 4 times in a year, always for specific types of instance, if I remember the count well. Never more than a few hours. It's nothing in comparison to the weeks it takes to ship and setup physical hardware.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      "Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place." There are plenty of companies with their own datacenters of hundreds or even thousands of machines. Yes, these companies usually have deep pockets and their own dedicated staff to take care of these servers. This is how it was done before AWS existed, and is likely to continue long after AWS ceases to exist.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Computing power on AWS costs 3x+ as much as the naively calculated cost of buying and running servers. Of course there are situations where running your own servers actually is cheaper. You are arguing the impossibility of something people are doing right now, so...?!
pmoriarty 8y ago
"Ideally, your colo facility is within driving distance of your office if you absolutely need physical access. Otherwise, you pay someone at the colo a few hundred bucks a month for remote hands services." That remote hands service is usually very limited. Datacenter staff usually don't have the time or the skills to do detailed troubleshooting, setup, or maintenance. Maybe they'll swap out a disk for you, power cycle a server, or turn a knob on a KVM switch. If you want more, you'll have probably have to buy in to managed service, which they'll do on their own hardware and with their own setup, where you'll be paying closer to AWS prices. Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > Now if you want the kind of availability and redundancy that AWS offers you, you'll have to have a presence in multiple datacenters around the world, where these sorts of issues and others will multiply. Wikimedia is serving Wikipedia (ranked #5 for Internet traffic) with ~550 servers out of Dallas, TX and Ashburn, VA for about $4 million/year in tech costs. OpenStreetMap infra is ~$120k-$150k/year (albeit with volunteers and some donated hosting capacity). Do you need Amazon to do better? I am not trying to be a "stick in the mud". I am trying to save you money.
  - sgwae 8y ago
    aws is only a few cents an hour, i dont get why wikipedia doesnt switch over unless they are pocketing the differece.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Because Wikipedia doesn’t want to waste money. “A few cents an hour”. It’s a 30% markup over physical hardware, not to mention extortionate bandwidth pricing.
- alchemism 8y ago
  You might be surprised at what offering them (the “hands”) a packet of well-written runbooks and a bottle of scotch for the holidays will get you.
scarface74 8y ago
There is a lot more that AWS does for you than host a bunch of VMs...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Many use cases doesn't require what AWS provides besides storage and compute primitives. If your use case must use Amazon, use Amazon. If not, consider more efficient alternatives. I don't mention AWS in my comment, not sure why you thought I was comparing the two.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Even then if you can just get rid of one support person you can save enough to buy a lot of from AWS just taking into account the management you don’t have to do - if you automate.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

drieddust 8y ago

Servers are cheap enough so buying a few and keeping on standby is no brainer and they are good for 5 years generally.