6 ms·

It's not just managing the complexities of managing the bare metal, although that's certainly a huge component of it. There's some other huge arguments against

by waprin 6y ago

It's not just managing the complexities of managing the bare metal, although that's certainly a huge component of it. There's some other huge arguments against running your own datacenters. One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need them is huge. I think that's been obvious for a long time, but what I've seen less obvious to the business analysts is the impact of more advanced cloud services. The direction of cloud computing is managed services where they run your databases, container platforms, etc for you. Trying to run a huge Cassandra cluster or Kubernetes cluster takes up a ton of expensive labor's time and there's a good chance the cloud providers are a lot better at it than you. Sure, cloud services tend to be really expensive, and besides cost, there's also concern about things like vendor lock-in, IP protection/data privacy, and ability to tweak the small details of your platform. But cloud platforms in 2020 have a lot more features than in 2010 and in 2030 will have even more. The direction is pretty obvious. Running your own datacenters will be about as common as running your own power plant.

rualca 6y ago
> One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need them is huge. A 75 million dollar price tag is also huge. Bothering about the operational impact of a VM or a request sent to a function-as-a-service might be a significant operational issue if your whole team can be moved around with a small sports utility vehicle. Once you've grow over the point where your monthly cloud pricetag eclipses your company's paycheck budget, operating your own hardware is a no-brainer. > But cloud platforms in 2020 have a lot more features (...) That really doesn't matter at all, does it? I mean, cloud providers are already repackaging FLOSS services as their Serverless offering. And besides pursuing the latest fad, how many of those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth? It's always great if we can get others to do the work for us, but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services... Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money.
- marta_morena_28 6y ago
  > 75 million dollar price tag is also huge. Is it? Over the two years they saved, this is about the salary for 100 engineers. Can you replace and maintain all the cloud aspects that AWS provides you with (I mean the ones you actually use) with 100 engineers? Maybe, if they are good engineers (which is kinda implied by the 300k salary tag in the calculation). If it's worth it, remains to be seen. Definitely nothing for any medium sized company. Dropbox is huge and has a relatively simple, highly optimized use-case, for which cloud perhaps doesn't offer too much. This is NOT the norm. For most companies, no matter the size, building their own cloud is a no go. > those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth? Don't use Google Cloud then ;). > but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services... Do you have any data on backing this up? This "absurd premium" includes the salaries of engineers to develop it, maintain it, do DevOps, keep the hardware/data centers, do marketing, etc. etc. There is of course a margin, these companies aren't doing it as a social service... That margin is highly variable from service to service and also between cloud providers. Some may not have a margin at all, others may run at a loss. There is not easy "uh everything is overpriced". Most companies will have a VERY hard time providing the offering at the price of large cloud providers. And the simple "back of the envelope" calculations often miss all the work & cost that needs to be done, but you don't know about... > Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money. Yeah, if your company is really big, then yes. If your revenue is below 100 million, there isn't even room for any discussion on this: Don't run your own cloud, it's not gonna work. Most of the "cons" I see are about misunderstandings of the offerings and failure to navigate the pricing models and picking the cheapest offerings that do the job. If you fail to do even that, how on earth are you going to run your own cloud?
  - acoard 6y ago
    >Definitely nothing for any medium sized company. I work at a medium sized company. Depends on who you count, but let's say around ~30 devs. Recently we basically did just this, and it's been a great success. We haven't fully migrated and still use AWS for prod, but have seen substantial savings already. We spent $2k on servers, Dell r720s. We bought a UPS and mount, and racked them in our office. I installed OpenShift 4 on it, which is Red Hat's Kubernetes offering with a nice web GUI, and setup a few terabytes of NFS to automatically provision storage. To be fair, installing OpenShift for the first time took a while, around 3 weeks. Since then it's been smooth. We still use AWS, but our usage has gone down dramatically. We are still only migrating dev and test environments, leaving prod in AWS (we don't want to be responsible for uptime SLAs, and clients pay prod hosting costs). Some of these projects are CPU heavy, machine learning and computer vision projects too. They're not just simple web-apps. I'm not privy to our entire AWS budget, but I know that one project which we migrated saved over $500/mo. After installation, maintenance has taken barely any time. Around 10-20% of my time is dedicated to OpenShift cluster maintenance. The rest I do normal project work. I often go weeks without having to touch anything, and the most common task I do is onboard new users. We've had 2 outages in over 6mo, one was an expiring cert and one was an airflow issue on the rack. I've learnt a lot and am certainly not an expert. These were the firs rack servers I'd ever worked with personally, although I had been researching used models for home use for a while (shoutout to /r/Homelab). In fact, I had such success doing this that I personally bought a Dell r720 and have used it to selfhost a bunch of stuff at home. A co-worker of mine hosts his self hosted lab on AWS. Things like Plex, private photo storage, a few other toys, etc. He says he pays $300/mo, which seems insane to me, but I guess people streaming 4K plex adds up. The used r720 server I bought was $1,500CAD and has way more horsepower than he's paying for. (There are also electricity costs I haven't factored in here, as I'm trying to control for other changes in my power bill. Might be $100/mo at most.)

by waprin 6y ago

rualca 6y ago

> One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need them is huge. A 75 million dollar price tag is also huge. Bothering about the operational impact of a VM or a request sent to a function-as-a-service might be a significant operational issue if your whole team can be moved around with a small sports utility vehicle. Once you've grow over the point where your monthly cloud pricetag eclipses your company's paycheck budget, operating your own hardware is a no-brainer. > But cloud platforms in 2020 have a lot more features (...) That really doesn't matter at all, does it? I mean, cloud providers are already repackaging FLOSS services as their Serverless offering. And besides pursuing the latest fad, how many of those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth? It's always great if we can get others to do the work for us, but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services... Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money.

marta_morena_28 6y ago
> 75 million dollar price tag is also huge. Is it? Over the two years they saved, this is about the salary for 100 engineers. Can you replace and maintain all the cloud aspects that AWS provides you with (I mean the ones you actually use) with 100 engineers? Maybe, if they are good engineers (which is kinda implied by the 300k salary tag in the calculation). If it's worth it, remains to be seen. Definitely nothing for any medium sized company. Dropbox is huge and has a relatively simple, highly optimized use-case, for which cloud perhaps doesn't offer too much. This is NOT the norm. For most companies, no matter the size, building their own cloud is a no go. > those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth? Don't use Google Cloud then ;). > but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services... Do you have any data on backing this up? This "absurd premium" includes the salaries of engineers to develop it, maintain it, do DevOps, keep the hardware/data centers, do marketing, etc. etc. There is of course a margin, these companies aren't doing it as a social service... That margin is highly variable from service to service and also between cloud providers. Some may not have a margin at all, others may run at a loss. There is not easy "uh everything is overpriced". Most companies will have a VERY hard time providing the offering at the price of large cloud providers. And the simple "back of the envelope" calculations often miss all the work & cost that needs to be done, but you don't know about... > Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money. Yeah, if your company is really big, then yes. If your revenue is below 100 million, there isn't even room for any discussion on this: Don't run your own cloud, it's not gonna work. Most of the "cons" I see are about misunderstandings of the offerings and failure to navigate the pricing models and picking the cheapest offerings that do the job. If you fail to do even that, how on earth are you going to run your own cloud?
- acoard 6y ago
  >Definitely nothing for any medium sized company. I work at a medium sized company. Depends on who you count, but let's say around ~30 devs. Recently we basically did just this, and it's been a great success. We haven't fully migrated and still use AWS for prod, but have seen substantial savings already. We spent $2k on servers, Dell r720s. We bought a UPS and mount, and racked them in our office. I installed OpenShift 4 on it, which is Red Hat's Kubernetes offering with a nice web GUI, and setup a few terabytes of NFS to automatically provision storage. To be fair, installing OpenShift for the first time took a while, around 3 weeks. Since then it's been smooth. We still use AWS, but our usage has gone down dramatically. We are still only migrating dev and test environments, leaving prod in AWS (we don't want to be responsible for uptime SLAs, and clients pay prod hosting costs). Some of these projects are CPU heavy, machine learning and computer vision projects too. They're not just simple web-apps. I'm not privy to our entire AWS budget, but I know that one project which we migrated saved over $500/mo. After installation, maintenance has taken barely any time. Around 10-20% of my time is dedicated to OpenShift cluster maintenance. The rest I do normal project work. I often go weeks without having to touch anything, and the most common task I do is onboard new users. We've had 2 outages in over 6mo, one was an expiring cert and one was an airflow issue on the rack. I've learnt a lot and am certainly not an expert. These were the firs rack servers I'd ever worked with personally, although I had been researching used models for home use for a while (shoutout to /r/Homelab). In fact, I had such success doing this that I personally bought a Dell r720 and have used it to selfhost a bunch of stuff at home. A co-worker of mine hosts his self hosted lab on AWS. Things like Plex, private photo storage, a few other toys, etc. He says he pays $300/mo, which seems insane to me, but I guess people streaming 4K plex adds up. The used r720 server I bought was $1,500CAD and has way more horsepower than he's paying for. (There are also electricity costs I haven't factored in here, as I'm trying to control for other changes in my power bill. Might be $100/mo at most.)