3 ms·

These posts always make it like "cloud is better vs building datacenters on mars". There are middlegrounds, like colocation & dedicated servers. If you get ded

These posts always make it like "cloud is better vs building datacenters on mars". There are middlegrounds, like colocation & dedicated servers. If you get dedicated servers 4x cheaper than cloud-shared-vps with remote-hdd, then you can overprovision. Especially now that hardware is getting bigger you need even less space (assuming your software scales vertically). And they ALWAYS make it like the next hour you will have 10x requests and your database will autoscale that quickly.

kthejoker2 8y ago
As this post makes clear, it's not the things you can control in a dedicated/colo environment you should be worried about. You can always hand them more dollars for more storage and compute. You can never hand them enough dollars to get their SLAs/latency on par with the cloud. There will be outages. There will be delays. There will be scale problems. There And you'll have to address these somewhere else, either in your tech stack, your operating model, or your PR department. Paying a 2-5% TCO premium to have a throat to choke, 5 9s redundancy, GDPR compliance, and the law of large numbers on your side of the court is a pretty fair trade.
- ddorian43 8y ago
  Change the TCO to 2x-5x then you're right. Good luck with the throat choking. Also what does GDPR have to do with renting vps in cloud ?
hpkuarg 8y ago
Agreed. It's disingenuous of the article OP to: - only parenthetically mention colocation, as if it isn't absolutely normal to rent a rack/cage/suite as needed from an existing DC operator (which in addition would make datacenter rent an OpEx and actual server equipment be amortized over 2-3 years, not the 10 for real property) - somehow present "intercontinental traffic" as something both necessary and tremendously expensive, as if all the major public clouds aren't charging 10x what the market rates for bandwidth are - imply that "the cloud" is immune to outages, as if GCP didn't have multiple major global- or region-wide outages over the past few years I mean, I understand why most companies don't go on-prem despite all that, but this series of tweets is borderline FUD.
- kemitche 8y ago
  I'm not sure the article OP is being disingenuous. It's a thread _specifically_ about Lyft's costs - and Lyft is clearly at a scale where they would NOT be colocating.
  - Slartie 8y ago
    Of course they would. They are a taxi service, not a Dropbox or YouTube. They do neither have obscene demand for storage, nor for bandwidth, they need some servers tracking their users coordinates, running a "who is nearest" search in case someone wants a ride, some GPS navigation/pathfinding during the ride and some billing code after it. If you don't blow this up to stupid proportions, that should be able to run on modern hardware in a few racks at a colo for millions of users per day, especially since you can neatly shard the load geographically, thus distributing load (and rented racks) over multiple DCs, ideally with failover in place for emergencies. The only thing they really need to merge is the billing data at the end, but handling billing data of a global userbase of tens or hundreds of millions of users in a single system is a solved problem nowadays and does not even constitute a case worthy of the overused "big data" moniker.
  - ADefenestrator 8y ago
    Colo can mean "rent a suite from DRT in one location and a building in another" in addition to space in a rack. Lyft's probably around that size (and it's a good idea to do some colo to gain experience before trying to build out your own anyways)

kthejoker2 8y ago

As this post makes clear, it's not the things you can control in a dedicated/colo environment you should be worried about. You can always hand them more dollars for more storage and compute. You can never hand them enough dollars to get their SLAs/latency on par with the cloud. There will be outages. There will be delays. There will be scale problems. There And you'll have to address these somewhere else, either in your tech stack, your operating model, or your PR department. Paying a 2-5% TCO premium to have a throat to choke, 5 9s redundancy, GDPR compliance, and the law of large numbers on your side of the court is a pretty fair trade.

ddorian43 8y ago
Change the TCO to 2x-5x then you're right. Good luck with the throat choking. Also what does GDPR have to do with renting vps in cloud ?

hpkuarg 8y ago

Agreed. It's disingenuous of the article OP to: - only parenthetically mention colocation, as if it isn't absolutely normal to rent a rack/cage/suite as needed from an existing DC operator (which in addition would make datacenter rent an OpEx and actual server equipment be amortized over 2-3 years, not the 10 for real property) - somehow present "intercontinental traffic" as something both necessary and tremendously expensive, as if all the major public clouds aren't charging 10x what the market rates for bandwidth are - imply that "the cloud" is immune to outages, as if GCP didn't have multiple major global- or region-wide outages over the past few years I mean, I understand why most companies don't go on-prem despite all that, but this series of tweets is borderline FUD.

kemitche 8y ago
I'm not sure the article OP is being disingenuous. It's a thread _specifically_ about Lyft's costs - and Lyft is clearly at a scale where they would NOT be colocating.
- Slartie 8y ago
  Of course they would. They are a taxi service, not a Dropbox or YouTube. They do neither have obscene demand for storage, nor for bandwidth, they need some servers tracking their users coordinates, running a "who is nearest" search in case someone wants a ride, some GPS navigation/pathfinding during the ride and some billing code after it. If you don't blow this up to stupid proportions, that should be able to run on modern hardware in a few racks at a colo for millions of users per day, especially since you can neatly shard the load geographically, thus distributing load (and rented racks) over multiple DCs, ideally with failover in place for emergencies. The only thing they really need to merge is the billing data at the end, but handling billing data of a global userbase of tens or hundreds of millions of users in a single system is a solved problem nowadays and does not even constitute a case worthy of the overused "big data" moniker.
- ADefenestrator 8y ago
  Colo can mean "rent a suite from DRT in one location and a building in another" in addition to space in a rack. Lyft's probably around that size (and it's a good idea to do some colo to gain experience before trying to build out your own anyways)