6 ms·

Did you ever faced a situation where you or your clients needed more compute power and a cloud scalability would've been more convenient/cheaper?

dijit 7y ago
No, a datacenter holds a seriously large amount of compute. Just a single rack is 38U usable in most cases, depending on density of compute and power availability you can get a good 2,000 CPU cores and a few dozen TiB of DDR4 from a single rack (with something like a DELL MX7000 chassis). And it's incredibly rare you'd be limited to a single rack of course. Cloud has many tangible benefits, but "amount of compute available" is not one of them. Time to acquire compute, though, is. (and, obviously, management of the resources/datacenter operations). Cloud is almost never cheaper, even factoring in salaries. It's just very convenient if you're small enough not to have people providing compute very well internally. (and, internally, people tend to understaff/underfund the teams that would do the same job as cloud operators are doing)
- scarface74 7y ago
  Cloud can often be cheaper than on prem or at a colo if you are both willing to be “cloud native” and change your processes and you have people who actually know what they are doing and not a bunch of “lift and shifters” who are old school netops guide, got one AWS certification and now only know how to click around in the UI and duplicate an on prem infrastructure.
  - hhw 7y ago
    Maybe if your load is unusually extremely erratic. In the vast majority of cases, you could purchase 2-3x more than you need in bare metal hosting resources (with data centre and hardware operations already outsourced), making scaling not an issue, and still see significant cost savings compared to public cloud which is typically 6-7x the cost for equivalent resources.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      If all you care about is running a bunch of VMs yes. But if you’re just running a bunch of VMs and using cloud hosting - you’re doing it wrong. - we don’t want to maintain our own build servers. We just use CodeBuild with one of the prebuilt Docker containers or create a custom one. When we push our code to Github, CodeBuild brings up the Docker container, runs the build and the unit tests and puts the artifacts on S3. - We don’t want to maintain our own messaging, sftp, database, scheduler, load balancer, oath, object storage, servers etc. We don’t have to, AWS does that. - We don’t want to manage our own app and web servers. We just use Lambda and Fargate and give AWS a zip file/docker container and it runs it for us. - We need to run a temporary stress test environment or want to do a quick proof of concept, we create s Cloud Formation template, spin up the entire environment, run our tests with different configurations and kill it. When we want to spin it up again, we just run the template. We don’t have to pay for a staff of people to babysit our infrastructure between our business support contract with AWS and the MSP, we can get all of the troubleshooting and busy work support as needed. I’m a software engineer/architect by title, but if you look at my resume from another angle, I would be qualified to be an AWS architect. I just don’t enjoy the infrastructure side that much.
      - dijit 7y ago
        >I just don’t enjoy the infrastructure side that much. That's fair, that's totally your right. However, you're talking about absolute cost and unfortunately you're examples weave through true and false quite frenetically. > - we don’t want to maintain our own build servers. We just use CodeBuild with one of the prebuilt Docker containers or create a custom one. When we push our code to Github, CodeBuild brings up the Docker container, runs the build and the unit tests and puts the artifacts on S3. Like all things business, "want" and "cost" are different, in this case, depending on your size of course, it could easily be cheaper to have a dedicated "build engineer" maintaining a build farm. This is how the majority of people do it. (I work in the video games industry, it's _MUCH_ cheaper to do it this way for us) > - We don’t want to maintain our own messaging, sftp, database, scheduler, load balancer, oath, object storage, servers etc. We don’t have to, AWS does that. Again, those are "wants", TCO can be much lower when out of the cloud. But again, depends on scale. (as in, lower scale is cheaper on cloud, not larger scale). > - We don’t want to manage our own app and web servers. We just use Lambda and Fargate and give AWS a zip file/docker container and it runs it for us. I mean, 1 sysadmin can automate/orchestrate literally thousands of webservers. >- We need to run a temporary stress test environment or want to do a quick proof of concept, we create s Cloud Formation template, spin up the entire environment, run our tests with different configurations and kill it. When we want to spin it up again, we just run the template. Yes, this is a real strength of cloud. > We don’t have to pay for a staff of people to babysit our infrastructure between our business support contract with AWS and the MSP, we can get all of the troubleshooting and busy work support as needed. Yes, but you are paying "overhead" for all of that, and not having talented engineers on your payroll who understand your business critical systems is, in my opinion, foolish. I've dealt with vendor support and it's incredibly hit and miss, and it's much more "miss" when you're a smaller customer to the vendor. Of course, this is anecdotal.

dijit 7y ago

No, a datacenter holds a seriously large amount of compute. Just a single rack is 38U usable in most cases, depending on density of compute and power availability you can get a good 2,000 CPU cores and a few dozen TiB of DDR4 from a single rack (with something like a DELL MX7000 chassis). And it's incredibly rare you'd be limited to a single rack of course. Cloud has many tangible benefits, but "amount of compute available" is not one of them. Time to acquire compute, though, is. (and, obviously, management of the resources/datacenter operations). Cloud is almost never cheaper, even factoring in salaries. It's just very convenient if you're small enough not to have people providing compute very well internally. (and, internally, people tend to understaff/underfund the teams that would do the same job as cloud operators are doing)

scarface74 7y ago
Cloud can often be cheaper than on prem or at a colo if you are both willing to be “cloud native” and change your processes and you have people who actually know what they are doing and not a bunch of “lift and shifters” who are old school netops guide, got one AWS certification and now only know how to click around in the UI and duplicate an on prem infrastructure.
- hhw 7y ago
  Maybe if your load is unusually extremely erratic. In the vast majority of cases, you could purchase 2-3x more than you need in bare metal hosting resources (with data centre and hardware operations already outsourced), making scaling not an issue, and still see significant cost savings compared to public cloud which is typically 6-7x the cost for equivalent resources.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If all you care about is running a bunch of VMs yes. But if you’re just running a bunch of VMs and using cloud hosting - you’re doing it wrong. - we don’t want to maintain our own build servers. We just use CodeBuild with one of the prebuilt Docker containers or create a custom one. When we push our code to Github, CodeBuild brings up the Docker container, runs the build and the unit tests and puts the artifacts on S3. - We don’t want to maintain our own messaging, sftp, database, scheduler, load balancer, oath, object storage, servers etc. We don’t have to, AWS does that. - We don’t want to manage our own app and web servers. We just use Lambda and Fargate and give AWS a zip file/docker container and it runs it for us. - We need to run a temporary stress test environment or want to do a quick proof of concept, we create s Cloud Formation template, spin up the entire environment, run our tests with different configurations and kill it. When we want to spin it up again, we just run the template. We don’t have to pay for a staff of people to babysit our infrastructure between our business support contract with AWS and the MSP, we can get all of the troubleshooting and busy work support as needed. I’m a software engineer/architect by title, but if you look at my resume from another angle, I would be qualified to be an AWS architect. I just don’t enjoy the infrastructure side that much.
    - dijit 7y ago
      >I just don’t enjoy the infrastructure side that much. That's fair, that's totally your right. However, you're talking about absolute cost and unfortunately you're examples weave through true and false quite frenetically. > - we don’t want to maintain our own build servers. We just use CodeBuild with one of the prebuilt Docker containers or create a custom one. When we push our code to Github, CodeBuild brings up the Docker container, runs the build and the unit tests and puts the artifacts on S3. Like all things business, "want" and "cost" are different, in this case, depending on your size of course, it could easily be cheaper to have a dedicated "build engineer" maintaining a build farm. This is how the majority of people do it. (I work in the video games industry, it's _MUCH_ cheaper to do it this way for us) > - We don’t want to maintain our own messaging, sftp, database, scheduler, load balancer, oath, object storage, servers etc. We don’t have to, AWS does that. Again, those are "wants", TCO can be much lower when out of the cloud. But again, depends on scale. (as in, lower scale is cheaper on cloud, not larger scale). > - We don’t want to manage our own app and web servers. We just use Lambda and Fargate and give AWS a zip file/docker container and it runs it for us. I mean, 1 sysadmin can automate/orchestrate literally thousands of webservers. >- We need to run a temporary stress test environment or want to do a quick proof of concept, we create s Cloud Formation template, spin up the entire environment, run our tests with different configurations and kill it. When we want to spin it up again, we just run the template. Yes, this is a real strength of cloud. > We don’t have to pay for a staff of people to babysit our infrastructure between our business support contract with AWS and the MSP, we can get all of the troubleshooting and busy work support as needed. Yes, but you are paying "overhead" for all of that, and not having talented engineers on your payroll who understand your business critical systems is, in my opinion, foolish. I've dealt with vendor support and it's incredibly hit and miss, and it's much more "miss" when you're a smaller customer to the vendor. Of course, this is anecdotal.