4 ms·

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), i

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.

omegalulw 5y ago
The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Like, not in an even remotely IT-related industry, and their headquarters is in a city with no significant tech community. Places that scream "working here will not improve your resume". I'm a major cloud skeptic, but there's a certain class of giant enterprisey companies that are never going to be able to attract good IT talent, and if they "just throw money" at the hiring problem they'll be innundated with slick imposters. I think cloudy stuff lets those companies outsource a large chunk of something they'll never be good at. The cavalcade of Microsoft/Cisco certifications were an earlier decade's attempt at solving the same problem.
  - dx034 5y ago
    I believe renting dedicated servers is often overlooked. You pay someone else to install hardware, ensure network connections and be on-site for hardware swaps etc but still have the maximum degree of flexibility. Even larger companies can work well with that model, traffic also tends to be cheap enough that you can spread across different vendors to avoid lock-in. And in that case, your sysadmins can sit wherever they want, no need to be physically close to the servers. Also, as there's much less knowledge to be a dedicated server provider, competition is strong and prices are comparably low.
    - pooper 5y ago
      I don't have first hand knowledge but my understanding is large companies have procurement departments and they get over half off sticker price for Azure. My guess is this is why the sticker price needs to be overinflated because people in procurement need to show that they are doing their jobs. Also it is a major pain point getting anything done with IT operations. Like the Oracle database server that half the department relies on stops responding on a Friday morning and it takes all day to determine the hard disk is full and fix it. I had never before worked at a company where this happened multiple times. Or operations saying they were unable to restore a windows server hosting a database server and now everyone has to scramble to update their connection strings because operations somehow cannot use the same domain name for the new machine.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        It's true there are huge rebates to be had if you're big enough, which is one thing smaller companies should bear in mind when they look at big company X using cloud provider Y as justification for thinking Y must be cheap. If you're Netflix, cloud is probably not that much more expensive than owning your own servers. Maybe even cheaper. But you're not getting Netflix prices. But even if you're small fry you should however start regularly talking to your provider and go through a regular cost-cutting exercise and talk to them about how you're looking at provider Z and have been asked to cost out managed servers and on prem options.... You won't need to get very big before that starts paying off. If your competition is doing this and you're not, and hosting costs starts becoming a big part of your cost base, you won't be able to compete. Long term I think we're going to see disruption here to the point of startups failing because of competitors copying their idea but being better at driving down hosting costs by not being afraid of going to dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions (hybrids are my favourite - if your stack can be deployed semi-transparently both on dedicated servers and cloud you can go much closer to the wire on your dedicated servers by being prepared to spin up cloud instances to take care of spikes; ironically having the ability to spin up cloud instances makes relying on cloud services even less cost-effective) I'd also expect to see more "hybrid" cloud offerings with companies offering you operations-as-a-service by giving you a virtual cloud type interface where they don't actually own a cloud service themselves but helps you abstract away cheaper hosting providers. You can already find plenty of people who'll e.g. run Kubernetes setups for you, so taking the step to do more cost-optimization on the backend is natural (and I'm sure there are people who'd do this for you today - if I was still doing contracting I certainly would be offering that - and maybe someone is already wrapping it up as a service offering; I haven't kept up on that market)
  - llampx 5y ago
    > I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Companies that have made a name for themselves by outsourcing to the cheapest IT contractor that will promise them the moon and fill the seats with barely warm bodies? I was one of those bodies so I know exactly why they can't attract talent - they don't bother, and don't reward it. They treat IT as a cost center and are surprised when they get disrupted. The only good options in those companies are to work on the business side or worst case as a project/product/program manager interfacing with the warm fungible contractor bodies. Many Enterprises are only alive because of inertia and goodwill from earlier decades.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianN 5y ago
  There is a size where on prem would be much cheaper on paper, but internal red tape for access to internal resources is such that teams are unnecessarily slowed down. For example I once worked at a place where it took several months to get an additional on-prem box to speed up our CI pipeline. Of course you can also add that amount of red tape to a cloud solution, but in my experience it's easier to get approval for an additional EC2 box.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    We used to have an internal (and external) cloudfoundry instance. That was pretty nice as far as on-prem deployment options. It’s just a shame they were permanently out of database servers with SSD storage, and for some reason couldn’t provision more for over a year.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    On-prem and AWS/GCS/Azure aren't the only options. There are smaller cloud providers, rented VMs, rented dedicated servers and rented colocation space.
    - oblio 5y ago
      For larger companies, frequently they are. You need to use already approved vendors.
  - carlivar 5y ago
    Yes, this is the awkward phase of on-prem. Some companies stay there forever. Good companies will continue innovating and treat the time to resolution of your request as a KPI to reduce down to days, minutes, or even seconds.
- throw8932894 5y ago
  Not really, on site makes sense for Facebook or Google. Or for extra privacy. Mid-sized companies can get cracking deals (like 10% cost) on major cloud providers.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    On prem rarely makes sense any more other than at that kind of huge scale or for privacy, sure. But that's because dedicated hosting operates on really thin margins and has become really cheap. You have to get to massive scale before cloud providers will give you big enough discount to start approaching the kind of costs you can get that way with a decently engineered system. Not least because cloud providers themselves provides a weapon: Set up your system so it can scale up using a cloud provider to handle traffic spikes and you can load those dedicated servers much more heavily than you could otherwise risk. The biggest issue, though, is how few people are aware they can negotiate with their cloud provider. I've seen so many places just pay the sticker price without even trying to get discounts. (Conversely, I once got a contract to do zero-downtime migrations first from AWS to Google Cloud and then to Hetzner so a startup could launch on AWS and spend the huge amount of free credits they'd been given there, then migrate to Google Cloud to do the same, and then finally move to Hetzner once they had to actually start paying; relative to what they'd have to start paying if they'd stayed on either AWS or Google after their credits ran out the cost of having me do the extra setup to handle that was covered with ~2-3 months of their savings)
- k8sToGo 5y ago
  No thanks. In our case we would then need to hire DBA etc. I prefer to have as many managed (in this case by AWS) services as possible.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Once you scale you'll need DBAs anyway to do things AWS won't do for you,or developers with the same skills, like figuring out why your developers are writing queries that kills the production database because they didn't test with data sufficiently similar etc.. I used to manage about 100 Postgres instances alongside ca ~1000 VMs total spread across colocated servers and managed hosting in several countries. The time I spent spent on the type of DBA tasks that e.g. AWS RDS automates away from you was measured in minutes per month after I'd spent a few days automating backups and log shipping and failover. I kept being asked to price out a migration to AWS, and we kept coming up with 2x-3x the cost. Part of the reason was that we could pick and choose servers that fit our workload in a way we couldn't with AWS, and partly the absolutely insane bandwidth prices AWS offered. I use AWS. I like AWS for the convenience. But it's a luxury that is ok when you're either small or really high margin, and you're paying massively over the odds for that luxury. The reason these services get away with being so expensive is that people massively overestimate the complexity and don't bother actually getting quotes from people or companies to manage these services for them. When I was doing consulting my biggest challenge in offering up alternatives to AWS was that people were so convinced AWS was cheap that even when presenting them with hard data they often didn't believe it. For me it was a mixed bag - I tended to make more money off the clients who stayed on AWS as they usually needed more help to keep an AWS setup running than those I migrated to managed hosting setups, despite paying more for the hosting too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

omegalulw 5y ago

The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.

octoberfranklin 5y ago
I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Like, not in an even remotely IT-related industry, and their headquarters is in a city with no significant tech community. Places that scream "working here will not improve your resume". I'm a major cloud skeptic, but there's a certain class of giant enterprisey companies that are never going to be able to attract good IT talent, and if they "just throw money" at the hiring problem they'll be innundated with slick imposters. I think cloudy stuff lets those companies outsource a large chunk of something they'll never be good at. The cavalcade of Microsoft/Cisco certifications were an earlier decade's attempt at solving the same problem.
- dx034 5y ago
  I believe renting dedicated servers is often overlooked. You pay someone else to install hardware, ensure network connections and be on-site for hardware swaps etc but still have the maximum degree of flexibility. Even larger companies can work well with that model, traffic also tends to be cheap enough that you can spread across different vendors to avoid lock-in. And in that case, your sysadmins can sit wherever they want, no need to be physically close to the servers. Also, as there's much less knowledge to be a dedicated server provider, competition is strong and prices are comparably low.
  - pooper 5y ago
    I don't have first hand knowledge but my understanding is large companies have procurement departments and they get over half off sticker price for Azure. My guess is this is why the sticker price needs to be overinflated because people in procurement need to show that they are doing their jobs. Also it is a major pain point getting anything done with IT operations. Like the Oracle database server that half the department relies on stops responding on a Friday morning and it takes all day to determine the hard disk is full and fix it. I had never before worked at a company where this happened multiple times. Or operations saying they were unable to restore a windows server hosting a database server and now everyone has to scramble to update their connection strings because operations somehow cannot use the same domain name for the new machine.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      It's true there are huge rebates to be had if you're big enough, which is one thing smaller companies should bear in mind when they look at big company X using cloud provider Y as justification for thinking Y must be cheap. If you're Netflix, cloud is probably not that much more expensive than owning your own servers. Maybe even cheaper. But you're not getting Netflix prices. But even if you're small fry you should however start regularly talking to your provider and go through a regular cost-cutting exercise and talk to them about how you're looking at provider Z and have been asked to cost out managed servers and on prem options.... You won't need to get very big before that starts paying off. If your competition is doing this and you're not, and hosting costs starts becoming a big part of your cost base, you won't be able to compete. Long term I think we're going to see disruption here to the point of startups failing because of competitors copying their idea but being better at driving down hosting costs by not being afraid of going to dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions (hybrids are my favourite - if your stack can be deployed semi-transparently both on dedicated servers and cloud you can go much closer to the wire on your dedicated servers by being prepared to spin up cloud instances to take care of spikes; ironically having the ability to spin up cloud instances makes relying on cloud services even less cost-effective) I'd also expect to see more "hybrid" cloud offerings with companies offering you operations-as-a-service by giving you a virtual cloud type interface where they don't actually own a cloud service themselves but helps you abstract away cheaper hosting providers. You can already find plenty of people who'll e.g. run Kubernetes setups for you, so taking the step to do more cost-optimization on the backend is natural (and I'm sure there are people who'd do this for you today - if I was still doing contracting I certainly would be offering that - and maybe someone is already wrapping it up as a service offering; I haven't kept up on that market)
- llampx 5y ago
  > I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Companies that have made a name for themselves by outsourcing to the cheapest IT contractor that will promise them the moon and fill the seats with barely warm bodies? I was one of those bodies so I know exactly why they can't attract talent - they don't bother, and don't reward it. They treat IT as a cost center and are surprised when they get disrupted. The only good options in those companies are to work on the business side or worst case as a project/product/program manager interfacing with the warm fungible contractor bodies. Many Enterprises are only alive because of inertia and goodwill from earlier decades.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adrianN 5y ago
There is a size where on prem would be much cheaper on paper, but internal red tape for access to internal resources is such that teams are unnecessarily slowed down. For example I once worked at a place where it took several months to get an additional on-prem box to speed up our CI pipeline. Of course you can also add that amount of red tape to a cloud solution, but in my experience it's easier to get approval for an additional EC2 box.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  We used to have an internal (and external) cloudfoundry instance. That was pretty nice as far as on-prem deployment options. It’s just a shame they were permanently out of database servers with SSD storage, and for some reason couldn’t provision more for over a year.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  On-prem and AWS/GCS/Azure aren't the only options. There are smaller cloud providers, rented VMs, rented dedicated servers and rented colocation space.
  - oblio 5y ago
    For larger companies, frequently they are. You need to use already approved vendors.
- carlivar 5y ago
  Yes, this is the awkward phase of on-prem. Some companies stay there forever. Good companies will continue innovating and treat the time to resolution of your request as a KPI to reduce down to days, minutes, or even seconds.
throw8932894 5y ago
Not really, on site makes sense for Facebook or Google. Or for extra privacy. Mid-sized companies can get cracking deals (like 10% cost) on major cloud providers.
- vidarh 5y ago
  On prem rarely makes sense any more other than at that kind of huge scale or for privacy, sure. But that's because dedicated hosting operates on really thin margins and has become really cheap. You have to get to massive scale before cloud providers will give you big enough discount to start approaching the kind of costs you can get that way with a decently engineered system. Not least because cloud providers themselves provides a weapon: Set up your system so it can scale up using a cloud provider to handle traffic spikes and you can load those dedicated servers much more heavily than you could otherwise risk. The biggest issue, though, is how few people are aware they can negotiate with their cloud provider. I've seen so many places just pay the sticker price without even trying to get discounts. (Conversely, I once got a contract to do zero-downtime migrations first from AWS to Google Cloud and then to Hetzner so a startup could launch on AWS and spend the huge amount of free credits they'd been given there, then migrate to Google Cloud to do the same, and then finally move to Hetzner once they had to actually start paying; relative to what they'd have to start paying if they'd stayed on either AWS or Google after their credits ran out the cost of having me do the extra setup to handle that was covered with ~2-3 months of their savings)
k8sToGo 5y ago
No thanks. In our case we would then need to hire DBA etc. I prefer to have as many managed (in this case by AWS) services as possible.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Once you scale you'll need DBAs anyway to do things AWS won't do for you,or developers with the same skills, like figuring out why your developers are writing queries that kills the production database because they didn't test with data sufficiently similar etc.. I used to manage about 100 Postgres instances alongside ca ~1000 VMs total spread across colocated servers and managed hosting in several countries. The time I spent spent on the type of DBA tasks that e.g. AWS RDS automates away from you was measured in minutes per month after I'd spent a few days automating backups and log shipping and failover. I kept being asked to price out a migration to AWS, and we kept coming up with 2x-3x the cost. Part of the reason was that we could pick and choose servers that fit our workload in a way we couldn't with AWS, and partly the absolutely insane bandwidth prices AWS offered. I use AWS. I like AWS for the convenience. But it's a luxury that is ok when you're either small or really high margin, and you're paying massively over the odds for that luxury. The reason these services get away with being so expensive is that people massively overestimate the complexity and don't bother actually getting quotes from people or companies to manage these services for them. When I was doing consulting my biggest challenge in offering up alternatives to AWS was that people were so convinced AWS was cheap that even when presenting them with hard data they often didn't believe it. For me it was a mixed bag - I tended to make more money off the clients who stayed on AWS as they usually needed more help to keep an AWS setup running than those I migrated to managed hosting setups, despite paying more for the hosting too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]