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AWS EC2 m5d.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB / 300GB nVME SSD) for a 3 year term is $4,466. That's enough for 3 HP ML10s equivalently configured plus the power to run t

AWS EC2 m5d.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB / 300GB nVME SSD) for a 3 year term is $4,466. That's enough for 3 HP ML10s equivalently configured plus the power to run them for their entire lifetime, which is well over 3 years. You are paying out the nose for the fancy-pants deployment and administrative features that the cloud gives you, and for a lot of use cases, that isn't needed.

aspyct 7y ago
You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  I'm not; for non-production compute workloads, the cost is negligible. Even for production workloads, the 4x premium over base hardware cost is absurd.
  - aspyct 7y ago
    Totally disagree with that. Humans are expensive. Cabling, configuring, training, ordering and replacing hardware, that all takes time. Over a period of 3 years, there's a high chance that you'll end up having, depending on your luck, at least a few dozen days used up by those tasks. Assuming you're not paying peanuts for your contractors, this will easily get to the $10k or over.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      If you disagree, give us your example TCO estimates for all of that vs cloud. I'm sure HN readers would be happy to dissect it.
      - aspyct 7y ago
        Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers, having never been responsible for the budget of those. This is only an estimation considering the pricing I see from the cloud providers, and the rates I know from my fellow contractors. Besides, I'm not exactly trying to win a war here. Simply trying to know under which circumstances it is better to go for on-prem vs public cloud.
        reacharavindh 7y ago
        I too think there is no one winner here. There are some cases where going with an IAAS makes a ton of sense. From the top of my mind, 1. Scale up/down - you can say turn off servers off season/nights and spin up only when needed. 2. Your business is not big enough to hire a person for Ops. 3. You don’t have the space for a server room/ unwilling to take the burden of dealing with a co-location provider and are willing to pay through the nose for that choice. 4. Your devs are okay with doing Ops (managing server resources on AWS is still Ops. You still need sense of firewalls, DNS, backups, updates, change management etc) 5. Ownership vs Operation : if a business is not sure they will sustain that amount of resource needs long enough to buy hardware. Buying reserved instances on Amazon comes to mind as opportunities that could have been better as a co located servers. 6. Geography - At times you need geographical spread (CDN, or multiple office/customer locations) IMO, unless you can find yourself one such justification for the extra costs, you should consider self hosted or atleast collocated servers. At least this is what I tell my friends in the business who seek advice on infrastructure.
        dathinab 7y ago
        If you already have a IT team which needs to handle 100+ Linux&Windows desktops systems, 40+ Laptops, WIFI network switches and firewall for all this as well as a few conference rooms and a few servers for local storage/backups(1) and similar. Then adding a small number servers isn't changing much in the workload for the IT. ;=) (1): Available even if internet is down. ---- Also frequently doing most scientific computing tasks are _much_ cheaper on-premise (if you have space for it). Especially given that some have setups like multiple terabyte of RAM.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Your admins need to known and maintain the systems anyway, no matter if they're in AWS or on premise. Sure, with AWS they might have a bit less work, but that would not necessarily reduce costs, a smallish company still need the same number of admins to cover the shifts and replacements so a switch to cloud would not allow to reduce any employees.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well. I'm not sure where to even to start with this. It's not even wrong ... For hosted and colo servers, you can have "remote hands" unbox, rack and cable your servers. My colo facility, he.net in Calif., does that for free, including IPMI configuration. AWS does not secure your servers. They have a "shared security responsibility" cutout in all their contractual language. So they have private networks, but you're responsible for iptables, application security, etc. Their AMIs aren't even encrypted, ffs. That's right, 99% of AWS customers don't do disk encryption, even if they're required to do so for compliance reasons, because you have to do an extra step yourself to encrypt it with your KMS. (GCP does encrypt.)

aspyct 7y ago

You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
I'm not; for non-production compute workloads, the cost is negligible. Even for production workloads, the 4x premium over base hardware cost is absurd.
- aspyct 7y ago
  Totally disagree with that. Humans are expensive. Cabling, configuring, training, ordering and replacing hardware, that all takes time. Over a period of 3 years, there's a high chance that you'll end up having, depending on your luck, at least a few dozen days used up by those tasks. Assuming you're not paying peanuts for your contractors, this will easily get to the $10k or over.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    If you disagree, give us your example TCO estimates for all of that vs cloud. I'm sure HN readers would be happy to dissect it.
    - aspyct 7y ago
      Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers, having never been responsible for the budget of those. This is only an estimation considering the pricing I see from the cloud providers, and the rates I know from my fellow contractors. Besides, I'm not exactly trying to win a war here. Simply trying to know under which circumstances it is better to go for on-prem vs public cloud.
      - reacharavindh 7y ago
        I too think there is no one winner here. There are some cases where going with an IAAS makes a ton of sense. From the top of my mind, 1. Scale up/down - you can say turn off servers off season/nights and spin up only when needed. 2. Your business is not big enough to hire a person for Ops. 3. You don’t have the space for a server room/ unwilling to take the burden of dealing with a co-location provider and are willing to pay through the nose for that choice. 4. Your devs are okay with doing Ops (managing server resources on AWS is still Ops. You still need sense of firewalls, DNS, backups, updates, change management etc) 5. Ownership vs Operation : if a business is not sure they will sustain that amount of resource needs long enough to buy hardware. Buying reserved instances on Amazon comes to mind as opportunities that could have been better as a co located servers. 6. Geography - At times you need geographical spread (CDN, or multiple office/customer locations) IMO, unless you can find yourself one such justification for the extra costs, you should consider self hosted or atleast collocated servers. At least this is what I tell my friends in the business who seek advice on infrastructure.
      - dathinab 7y ago
        If you already have a IT team which needs to handle 100+ Linux&Windows desktops systems, 40+ Laptops, WIFI network switches and firewall for all this as well as a few conference rooms and a few servers for local storage/backups(1) and similar. Then adding a small number servers isn't changing much in the workload for the IT. ;=) (1): Available even if internet is down. ---- Also frequently doing most scientific computing tasks are _much_ cheaper on-premise (if you have space for it). Especially given that some have setups like multiple terabyte of RAM.
PeterisP 7y ago
Your admins need to known and maintain the systems anyway, no matter if they're in AWS or on premise. Sure, with AWS they might have a bit less work, but that would not necessarily reduce costs, a smallish company still need the same number of admins to cover the shifts and replacements so a switch to cloud would not allow to reduce any employees.
redis_mlc 7y ago
> You're forgetting the human part in this cost. Installing, securing and maintaining the machines costs as well. I'm not sure where to even to start with this. It's not even wrong ... For hosted and colo servers, you can have "remote hands" unbox, rack and cable your servers. My colo facility, he.net in Calif., does that for free, including IPMI configuration. AWS does not secure your servers. They have a "shared security responsibility" cutout in all their contractual language. So they have private networks, but you're responsible for iptables, application security, etc. Their AMIs aren't even encrypted, ffs. That's right, 99% of AWS customers don't do disk encryption, even if they're required to do so for compliance reasons, because you have to do an extra step yourself to encrypt it with your KMS. (GCP does encrypt.)