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It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of

by zrm 7y ago

It'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.

eloff 7y ago
I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
- zrm 7y ago
  > With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
  - eloff 7y ago
    Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. With respect to changing workloads, I wasn't thinking so much about scale, which I think isn't that hard to plan for, but more about changing requirements. If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.
    - zrm 7y ago
      > Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. True, though all the physical hardware stuff is pretty straight forward, to the point that anybody competent could figure it out in real time just by looking at the pictures in the manual. Configuring a hypervisor is the main thing you actually have to learn, and that's a fundamentally similar skillset to systems administration for the guests. Or for that matter the cloud vendor's provisioning interface. It's just different tooling. > If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. I see what you're saying. My point would be that the hardware cost is now so low that it doesn't really matter. You may not be able to predict whether 8 cores will be enough, but the Epyc 7452 at $2025 has 32. 256GB more server memory is below $1000. Enterprise SSDs are below $200/TB. 10Gbps network ports are below $100/port. If you don't know what you need you could spec the thing to be able to handle anything you might reasonably want to throw at it and still not be spending all that much money, even ignoring the possibility of upgrading the hardware as needed. > Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it. Right. And the cloud advantage when you're starting out is directly proportional to the cost of the hardware you might need to buy in the alternative at a time when you're not sure you'll actually need it. But as the cost per unit performance of the hardware comes down, that advantage is evaporating.

by zrm 7y ago

eloff 7y ago

I think it's always been vastly cheaper for the hardware. But it gets more complex when you look at the TCO. With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. Although now probably everyone is running their own mini cloud with kubernetes, even in the cloud - and that should make it relatively cheap. Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.

zrm 7y ago
> With the in house server you need at least two, in case one fails. That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years. > Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure. If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment. > And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice. Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server. Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
- eloff 7y ago
  Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. With respect to changing workloads, I wasn't thinking so much about scale, which I think isn't that hard to plan for, but more about changing requirements. If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.
  - zrm 7y ago
    > Certainly if you have someone already on the payroll who can take responsibility for the hardware part time, that makes it a lot cheaper. That's a different skill set though, so it's not true for every company. True, though all the physical hardware stuff is pretty straight forward, to the point that anybody competent could figure it out in real time just by looking at the pictures in the manual. Configuring a hypervisor is the main thing you actually have to learn, and that's a fundamentally similar skillset to systems administration for the guests. Or for that matter the cloud vendor's provisioning interface. It's just different tooling. > If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound. I see what you're saying. My point would be that the hardware cost is now so low that it doesn't really matter. You may not be able to predict whether 8 cores will be enough, but the Epyc 7452 at $2025 has 32. 256GB more server memory is below $1000. Enterprise SSDs are below $200/TB. 10Gbps network ports are below $100/port. If you don't know what you need you could spec the thing to be able to handle anything you might reasonably want to throw at it and still not be spending all that much money, even ignoring the possibility of upgrading the hardware as needed. > Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it. Right. And the cloud advantage when you're starting out is directly proportional to the cost of the hardware you might need to buy in the alternative at a time when you're not sure you'll actually need it. But as the cost per unit performance of the hardware comes down, that advantage is evaporating.