3 ms·

Ask HN: Any companies successfully using dedicated servers instead of cloud?

9 points by sergiotapia 6y ago

Curious to read about companies that opted to go dedicated instead of cloud like aws/gcp/azure.

aynyc 6y ago
In finance, all the companies I've worked for/with run their critical infra on-prem. The only exception is my current company which needs cloud infr because of the size of data.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Also in finance. We've moved the vast majority of stuff to the cloud in the past couple years, including most critical infrastructure. There are a few things that they might not move, like highly secret models and the like. Prior to two years ago, we were basically all on-prem.
simplecto 6y ago
King, the makers of candy crush among other games. candy crush is the most popular mobile franchise with hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Mostly on prem. However they are moving workloads to cloud these days.
vmarchaud 6y ago
I'm working at a company that does realtime content generation for emails/website, generally those are images but we are trying to do video now. The big problem we have are the cost of bandwith, specially for video (we are speaking about ~20MB video send to 1M users over 2-3h, you can eyeball it at ~2k$ just for the bandwith). So we decided to migrate to dedicated servers (still ongoing), better performance for a fraction of the cost (you can find 80e/month servers with 12cpu/64G ram at OVH for example) and no bandwith cost. We already had experience with running bare metal infra (hashicorp stack), currently evaluating how to deploy it (currently using GKE). Althrough it should be straight forward since its mostly stateless workload, we it need to be able scale x10 in less than 1h sometimes so we might throw an node autoscaler that provision from cloud.
aynyc 6y ago
My knowledge might be outdated now, but Bloomberg empire is/was on-prem.
aprdm 6y ago
The Visual Effects industry is mostly on-prems. Compute, storage, memory and bandwidth are all very expensive.
pickle-wizard 6y ago
My current company is on prem. The reason is cost. Our workload requires lots of big machines, and is fairly inelastic. When we do need more machines, we know months ahead of time. We recently just started the process of refreshing all the hardware. We looked at cloud again just to cover our bases. It is still cheaper to lease the hardware and pay for colo and a couple of people to manage the hardware, then to pay for the cloud.
atmosx 6y ago
Skroutz[1], a Greek price comparison website, uses a bare metal infrastructure[2] and has a strong engineering culture[3]. Skroutz is a success story in Greece and looks pretty solid. [1]: https://www.skroutz.gr/ https://www.skroutz.gr/ [2]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/skroutz-infrastructure-2015/ https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/skroutz-infrastructure-2... [3]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/uncovering-a-24-year-old-bug-in-the-linux-kernel/ https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/uncovering-a-24-year-old...

9 points by sergiotapia 6y ago

Curious to read about companies that opted to go dedicated instead of cloud like aws/gcp/azure.

In finance, all the companies I've worked for/with run their critical infra on-prem. The only exception is my current company which needs cloud infr because of the size of data.

giantg2 6y ago
Also in finance. We've moved the vast majority of stuff to the cloud in the past couple years, including most critical infrastructure. There are a few things that they might not move, like highly secret models and the like. Prior to two years ago, we were basically all on-prem.

simplecto 6y ago

King, the makers of candy crush among other games. candy crush is the most popular mobile franchise with hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Mostly on prem. However they are moving workloads to cloud these days.

vmarchaud 6y ago

I'm working at a company that does realtime content generation for emails/website, generally those are images but we are trying to do video now. The big problem we have are the cost of bandwith, specially for video (we are speaking about ~20MB video send to 1M users over 2-3h, you can eyeball it at ~2k$ just for the bandwith). So we decided to migrate to dedicated servers (still ongoing), better performance for a fraction of the cost (you can find 80e/month servers with 12cpu/64G ram at OVH for example) and no bandwith cost. We already had experience with running bare metal infra (hashicorp stack), currently evaluating how to deploy it (currently using GKE). Althrough it should be straight forward since its mostly stateless workload, we it need to be able scale x10 in less than 1h sometimes so we might throw an node autoscaler that provision from cloud.

aynyc 6y ago

My knowledge might be outdated now, but Bloomberg empire is/was on-prem.

aprdm 6y ago

The Visual Effects industry is mostly on-prems. Compute, storage, memory and bandwidth are all very expensive.

pickle-wizard 6y ago

My current company is on prem. The reason is cost. Our workload requires lots of big machines, and is fairly inelastic. When we do need more machines, we know months ahead of time. We recently just started the process of refreshing all the hardware. We looked at cloud again just to cover our bases. It is still cheaper to lease the hardware and pay for colo and a couple of people to manage the hardware, then to pay for the cloud.

atmosx 6y ago

Skroutz[1], a Greek price comparison website, uses a bare metal infrastructure[2] and has a strong engineering culture[3]. Skroutz is a success story in Greece and looks pretty solid. [1]: https://www.skroutz.gr/ https://www.skroutz.gr/ [2]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/skroutz-infrastructure-2015/ https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/skroutz-infrastructure-2... [3]: https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/uncovering-a-24-year-old-bug-in-the-linux-kernel/ https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/uncovering-a-24-year-old...