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If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail bas

by harryh 7y ago

If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.

zelly 7y ago
The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'
- cure 7y ago
  I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.
- Youden 7y ago
  There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure". Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies. So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP). And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
Despegar 7y ago
Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-turns-to-cloud-hardware-to-outrun-microsoft-and-google https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...
- Daishiman 7y ago
  How many FTE's worth of savings are you incurring with the enormous overhead of colocated server maintenance?
jabart 7y ago
Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for less than my hourly bill rate at this point.
- juped 7y ago
  I don't know what your company is but knowing it's sensibly renting rack space rather than jumping on the cloud bandwagon because it's the path of least resistance would give me confidence if I were a potential customer.

by harryh 7y ago

zelly 7y ago

The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill

jethro_tell 7y ago
It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'
cure 7y ago
I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.
Youden 7y ago
There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure". Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies. So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP). And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.

Despegar 7y ago

Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-turns-to-cloud-hardware-to-outrun-microsoft-and-google https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...

Daishiman 7y ago
How many FTE's worth of savings are you incurring with the enormous overhead of colocated server maintenance?

jabart 7y ago

Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for less than my hourly bill rate at this point.

juped 7y ago
I don't know what your company is but knowing it's sensibly renting rack space rather than jumping on the cloud bandwagon because it's the path of least resistance would give me confidence if I were a potential customer.