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I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying someth
by c2h5oh 5y ago
I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month.
IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.
- papito 5y agoLOL. Priceless. Having these skills is very valuable. Us old farts used to do a lot with what today would be called "bootstrapped". Scarcity is no longer a "problem", except that it is. Scarcity keeps you sharp, efficient, on the edge - where you need to be. It's also - cheaper.
- c2h5oh 5y agoWho would have guessed having local, low latency, high iops drives would be better than VM using iSCSI-attached drive for storage, right? ;-)
- dilyevsky 5y agoTbf iscsi and especially it’s future demise - nvmeof can be made quite fast. The problem that in gp2/3, gce-pd cases it’s probably not some native storage but another layer of software-based distributed store which makes stuff slow/expensive
- bushbaba 5y agoBut also less prone to single drive failures. And easily auto expanding storage sizes. Everything is a trade off.
- dilyevsky 5y agoExcept people end up running systems on them that have their own replication built in like kafka, cockroach etc. In all those cases you’d be better off with your node just hard crashing if disk goes bad rather than the latency penalty that inevitably follows the failover
- papito 5y agoI actually don't suggest that people get off the cloud. My gripe is with the devil may care attitude toward costs. I am still very cost-conscious about it (even those most business aren't). Newer engineers just don't think of it as a factor. Push a button, get a load balancer. It all adds up. Your AWS bill is directly proportional to the number of developers, because they all spin up cloud toys they are fond of.
- MonaroVXR 5y agoAs a young person I agree with you.
- akireu 5y agoIt's 2022 and we're about to rediscover something we know for 40 years already: mainframes are freaking expensive.
- nix23 5y agoYou misread something, it's 2022 and we discover that mainframes can be cheaper then a AWS-cloud-machine-park ;)
- southerntofu 5y agoI thought AWS was the mainframe in the parent comment?!
- nix23 5y agoPlease educate yourself what a mainframe is.
- southerntofu 5y agoI've briefly encountered mainframes in the 90s. I thought it was a perfect analogy to AWS where "intelligence" is in the center and we're just piping stuff over the network for AWS to compute. I don't understand how selfhosted/self-provisioned servers is supposedly comparable to a mainframe, on the contrary. > It's 2022 and we're about to rediscover something we know for 40 years already: mainframes are freaking expensive. My interpretation: AWS is freaking expensive, AWS is in the center performing all computations; AWS is the mainframe we can well do without.
- nix23 5y agoIt's a wrong analogy, but i also misunderstood you. Sorry for not understood your comment, but not-sorry for using the term mainframe wrong ;)
- akireu 5y agoOf course AWS is the mainframe in this analogy! It's a huge throughput- and reliability-optimized overhyped crazy expensive server that you hire someone else to run for you. It's designed the same way, with dedicated storage, compute and backplane servers. Even the discourse is the same to the 80s: "why we have to rent a $$$ monster when a $ commodity server outperforms it". How is this not obvious is beyond me.
- viraptor 5y agoHere's what the bare metal server didn't come with: API access for managing configuration, version updates/rollbacks, and ACL. A solution for unlimited scheduled snapshots without affecting performance. Close to immediate replacement of identical setup within seconds of failure. API-managed VPC/VPN built in. No underlying OS management. (Probably forgot a few...) I get that going bare metal is a good solution for some, but comparing costs this way without a lot of caveats is meaningless.
- _xnmw 5y agoUsing cloud-managed backups can lull you into a false sense of security. I've heard enough of horror stories of the snapshot/restore mechanism failing for some reason, especially on certain edge-cases when you use huge amounts of data. What then? All your cloud marketing magic becomes a liability.
- c2h5oh 5y agoOf course there are a lot of benefits of using hosted databases. I like hosted databases and use them for both work and personal projects. What I have a problem with is: - the premium over bare metal is just silly - maximum vertical scaling being a rather small fraction of what you could get with bare metal - when you pay for a hot standby you can't use it as a read only replica (true for AWS and GCP, idk about Azure and others)
- viraptor 5y ago> when you pay for a hot standby you can't use it as a read only replica (true for AWS I'm not sure what you mean here. At least for MySQL you can have an instance configured as replica + read-only and used for reads. Aurora makes that automatic / transparent too with a separate read endpoint.
- milesvp 5y agoA hot standby is not a read replica. It's a set of servers running in a different Availability zone mirroring current prod, that is configured to automatically fail over to if the primary is offline. It's been a few years since I personally set this up in AWS, but at the time, those servers were completely unavailable to me, and basically doubled the cost of my production servers. The fact that a hot standby is usually in some sort of read-replica state prior to failing over is a technical detail that AWS sort of tries to abstract away I think.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoJust out of curiousity but what did you get out of it? I mean if they get to pick it, get the responsibility of AWS on you, but do you also get to get paid those money after saving them money? I mean the way I see it, is that 16k/month don't only pay for the hardware, but also to keep headaches away and to have someone to blame
- c2h5oh 5y agoIIRC I got to move some heavy analytics queries, which could not be ran on a read only replica (rollups) and without hearing the word budget once. Main db remained on RDS.
- belter 5y agoNot a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.
- aparks517 5y agoAround here, you'd spread the work of one new server to folks you've already got or spread the cost of new hires to a large number of servers. I think it's also worth considering that many outfits wouldn't get good value from the 24/365 coverage you propose and don't care to pay for it.
- wang_li 5y agoOr you'd hire an MSP. Having a full time employee is a greater level of service than anyone here is getting from a cloud provider. Lots of folks can get by with an admin who stops in once or twice a week, or remotes in and takes care of the daily tasks on largely a part-time basis.
- tester756 5y agowhy you'd need 3 admins watching it 24/7? ____________ That's how I've seen it working in datacenter: cheapest junior admins (450$/month) were having night shifts and if something broke, then they were calling an engineer
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- bcrosby95 5y ago> a $200/month bare metal server For 1 bare metal server? You do know these things run on electricity, right?
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoI’ve picked up a second hand Dell R720 last year. Best purchase in years. It cost me €1500 for 48 cores and 192GB RAM.
- christophilus 5y agoI want one. What’s it done to your electricity bill, though?
- kirubakaran 5y agoR820s idle at ~200W and consume ~500W at 100% CPU load on all 80 virtual cores.
- christophilus 5y agoSo, if we say it draws around 350W, that makes it around $32 /mo power (rough calculation based on a 12.5cent (US) kWh rate, right? Not bad for all that beef.
- superleo2020 5y agoAnd for Western Europe readers as a comparison... UK <Apr2022 = £50.96 ($68 USD), £0.2022 price cap rate UK >=Apr2022 = £76.16 ($102 USD) £0.3022 likely new price cap rate Thus the reason r/homelab users in Europe tend not to have Craigslist blade servers of any sort!
- axiolite 5y agoIf you want to use 4Kn drives, SSDs (w/trim), or easily switch between RAID and HBA modes, I would recomend an R730 with H730 controller instead. They're available on eBay with 128GB of RAM for just over $1,000 USD. If you don't want those features, an R720 is a good choice, and around half the price. Idle power consumption of an R730 with no drives is typically about 85W, though higher-end CPUs drive that up a bit. The older R720s are a bit higher in the 100W range. When the extended warranties expire, high-spec 2nd hand equipment floods the market.
- hammersec 5y agoYeah but for the 16k a month they have someone they can sue for damages and costs if there is a serious issue. You're more likely to win a payout against a massive bluechip than a teeny weeny IT outfit or your own sysadmins.