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> Can you make your on prem infrastructure go down less than Amazon's? Obviously depends on what you need, but for a small to medium web app that needs a load-

> Can you make your on prem infrastructure go down less than Amazon's? Obviously depends on what you need, but for a small to medium web app that needs a load-balancer, a few app servers, a database and a cache, yes absolutely - all of these have been solved problems for over a decade and aren't rocket science to install & maintain. > Is it worth it? I'd argue that the "worth" would be less about immunity to occasional outages but the continuous savings when it comes to price per performance & not having to pay for bandwidth. > overestimate how important it is for their services to run uninterrupted. Agreed. However when running on-prem, should your service go down and you need it back up, you can do something about it. With the cloud, you have no choice but to wait.

badams2527 5y ago
Human capital side would disagree with that I think. You're assuming the organization which owns this small/medium web app has the personnel already on staff to handle such a thing. If you're outsourcing that, you'd likely have to pay a boatload just for someone to be available for help, let alone the actual tasks themselves. Like you said, if you're on-prem and something goes down, you can do something. But you've gotta have the personnel to actually do something. That said, I think you're spot-on as long as you have the skillset already.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > Human capital side would disagree with that I think I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure. Bare metal infrastructure requires a lot more management at any given scale. I mean, you can run stuff that lets you do part of the management the same as cloud resources, but you also have to then manage that software and manage the hardware.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      Define "a lot". We colocate about 20 servers and on the average month, no one spends any time managing them. At all.
- Retric 5y ago
  You still need to pay someone to manage AWS infrastructure. It’s possible to save money using AWS, but things often get more expensive.
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    Of SMBs I’ve worked with, about 5% had a dedicated AWS engineer
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Maybe non-tech businesses which I’m not very familiar with. But most startups absulutely have a dedicated DevOps engineer.
laumars 5y ago
I have run high availability (HA) systems in prem and your statement vastly understates the difficulty and expense. You need multiple physical links in running to different ISPs because builders working on properties further down the street could accidentally cut through your fibre. Or the ISP themselves could suffer an outage. You need a back up generator and to be a short distance away from a petrol station so you can refuel quickly and regularly when suffering from longer durations of power outages. You absolutely do not want to run out of diesel! You need redundancy of every piece of hardware AND you need to test that failover works as expected because the last thing you need is a core switch to fail and traffic not to route over secondary core switch like expected. You need your multiple air con units and them to be powered off different mains inputs so if the electrics fail on one unit it doesn’t take out the others. I guarantee you that if the air cons will fail, it will be on the hottest day of the year a month amount of portable units will stop your servers from overheating. You need beefy UPS with multiple batteries. Ideally multiple UPSs with each UPS powering a different rail on your racks so that if one UPS fails your hardware is still powered from the other rail. And you need to regularly check the battery status and loads on the UPS. Remember that the back up generator takes a second or two to kick in so you need something to keep the power to the servers and networking hardware to be uninterrupted. And since all your hardware is powered via the UPS, if that dies you still lose power even if the building is powered. And you then need to duplicate all of the above in second location just in case the first location still goes down. By the way, all of the possible failure points I’ve raised above HAVE failed on me when managing HA on prem. The reason people move to the cloud for HA is because rolling your own is like rolling your own encryption: it’s hard, error prone, expensive, and even when you have the right people on the team there’s still a good chance you’ll fuck it up. AWS, for all its faults, does make this side of the job easier.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  That's true for on-prem infrastructure, but is all already handled for you if you rent servers from hosting providers such as OVH/Hetzner or even rent colocation space in an existing DC, and is still cheaper than the cloud equivalent (and as we saw recently, actually more reliable as well).

badams2527 5y ago

Human capital side would disagree with that I think. You're assuming the organization which owns this small/medium web app has the personnel already on staff to handle such a thing. If you're outsourcing that, you'd likely have to pay a boatload just for someone to be available for help, let alone the actual tasks themselves. Like you said, if you're on-prem and something goes down, you can do something. But you've gotta have the personnel to actually do something. That said, I think you're spot-on as long as you have the skillset already.

Nextgrid 5y ago
> Human capital side would disagree with that I think I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure. Bare metal infrastructure requires a lot more management at any given scale. I mean, you can run stuff that lets you do part of the management the same as cloud resources, but you also have to then manage that software and manage the hardware.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Define "a lot". We colocate about 20 servers and on the average month, no one spends any time managing them. At all.
Retric 5y ago
You still need to pay someone to manage AWS infrastructure. It’s possible to save money using AWS, but things often get more expensive.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  Of SMBs I’ve worked with, about 5% had a dedicated AWS engineer
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Maybe non-tech businesses which I’m not very familiar with. But most startups absulutely have a dedicated DevOps engineer.

laumars 5y ago

I have run high availability (HA) systems in prem and your statement vastly understates the difficulty and expense. You need multiple physical links in running to different ISPs because builders working on properties further down the street could accidentally cut through your fibre. Or the ISP themselves could suffer an outage. You need a back up generator and to be a short distance away from a petrol station so you can refuel quickly and regularly when suffering from longer durations of power outages. You absolutely do not want to run out of diesel! You need redundancy of every piece of hardware AND you need to test that failover works as expected because the last thing you need is a core switch to fail and traffic not to route over secondary core switch like expected. You need your multiple air con units and them to be powered off different mains inputs so if the electrics fail on one unit it doesn’t take out the others. I guarantee you that if the air cons will fail, it will be on the hottest day of the year a month amount of portable units will stop your servers from overheating. You need beefy UPS with multiple batteries. Ideally multiple UPSs with each UPS powering a different rail on your racks so that if one UPS fails your hardware is still powered from the other rail. And you need to regularly check the battery status and loads on the UPS. Remember that the back up generator takes a second or two to kick in so you need something to keep the power to the servers and networking hardware to be uninterrupted. And since all your hardware is powered via the UPS, if that dies you still lose power even if the building is powered. And you then need to duplicate all of the above in second location just in case the first location still goes down. By the way, all of the possible failure points I’ve raised above HAVE failed on me when managing HA on prem. The reason people move to the cloud for HA is because rolling your own is like rolling your own encryption: it’s hard, error prone, expensive, and even when you have the right people on the team there’s still a good chance you’ll fuck it up. AWS, for all its faults, does make this side of the job easier.

Nextgrid 5y ago
That's true for on-prem infrastructure, but is all already handled for you if you rent servers from hosting providers such as OVH/Hetzner or even rent colocation space in an existing DC, and is still cheaper than the cloud equivalent (and as we saw recently, actually more reliable as well).