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That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, perso

by pid-1 4y ago

That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no amount of money would make me work in a DC again. I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though.

bluGill 4y ago
To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues to work. Different operations demand different levels of service (I doubt that anyone keeps HVAC techs on staff 24x7, but if the AC is that critical it is mandatory). The only case where the CEO is up at 3am is if the CEO is the owner of the local HVAC service company, not the CEO of the building with the problem. Once you realize that to management the cost is outsourced no matter what the only question is do it with your own people and HR, or outsource it. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but for most companies it isn't their business and so the only reason to do it in house is they can't trust any company they hire.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  Not really. Time to service depends on SLA and redundancy. If you have no redundancy your time to service must be less or equal than your SLA. If you have redundancy it can be longer.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The thing is, the cost for the HVAC 24x7x365 support for a datacenter will be roughly the same for a given location... but it makes a difference if it is you paying the whole bill (=you're self-hosting in your own datacenter), you are splitting the bill with a bunch of other customers indirectly (=you're self-hosting in a colo DC), or if you're splitting the bill with a shitload of other customers (=you're using some service on one of the big public cloud providers). The downside for saving the costs is that you're losing control with every step taken away: as soon as you go into a datacenter of any kind, you simply cannot call up a HVAC company and offer them 100k in hard cash if they're showing up in the next 60 minutes and fix the issue. With a colo DC you can usually go and show up there to see if the HVAC, UPS and other systems are appropriate to your needs, but with one of the big cloud providers you have to trust their word that they are doing stuff correctly.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  > so the only reason to do it in house is they can't trust any company they hire Now I'm deeply confused. Any company hired either has a profit margin (plus enough to fund an "Oh shit" fund in case times turn bad) or will not stick around longer than a few years. At which case why not just hire people directly and cut out the other company's profit margin? Assuming you hire similar people at the same rate, using your own existing and already-paid-for HR, how is that not cheaper?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    You need to deal with overhead. Nobody does their own HVAC in house because you rarely need them, and would have to pay to train people on that despite them not using it. In some cases you can even get a discount. Utilities are. Big customer of tree trimming, the companies doing that work can give a great deal because the utility doesn't care that they take a week off after a storm for high profit margin consumer trimming.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Lots of places have their own HVAC techs in house, if they have enough HVAC work to justify it. Even if it's not their core line of business. They will do whatever costs less, +/- some amount of subjective "hassle factor."
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Especially when it's "line critical" to their business, or if the person can do other things as well. Larger hotels often have dedicated staff for things like HVAC, etc, because the importance of getting things fixed quick if possible is worth the cost of having someone onsite/available. And you see similar things with colleges, etc; they often have a maintenance deportment that can be pretty large (though no doubt they've spun it off and brought it back in-house for the same "change is progress" reasons).
      - tssva 4y ago
        I have dealt with a large number of retail colo providers, wholesale data center providers and corporate owned data centers across the US over the last 20 years and all of them used contractors for HVAC and electrical. I'm not saying dedicated staff never happens but it is definitely not the norm.
IHLayman 4y ago
ML workloads definitely cost a lot of money. Even for a preemptible VM, A100 GPUs cost $0.88/hr/GPU. That's $624 a month for a single GPU and only the 40GB model. Want a dedicated 8 GPU machine in the cloud to do training with? That'll run you around 16 grand a month. Do that for 2 years and you may as well have bought the device. Want to do 16/24/40 GPU training? Good luck getting dedicated cloud machines with networking fast enough between them so that MPI works correctly, and prepared to give up your wallet. Also, that's just compute. What about data? Sure cloud accepts your data cheaply, but they also charge you for egress of that data. Yes you should have your data in more than one location, but if you depend on just cloud then you need it in different AZ which costs even more money to keep in sync and available for training runs. I think for simple workloads and renting compute for a startup, cloud definitely makes sense. But the moment you try to do some serious compute for ML workloads, good luck and hope you have deep pockets.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Re data, I think egress rates are going to start disappearing over the next few years. The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Sure, it won’t be quite as expensive (no profit margin) but it’s not an order of magnitude. Additionally, most companies don’t run the HW 24/7 and, if they do, it’s not a level of people they want to hire to support said operations. Not just running it, but you have to invest and grow something that’s not a core competency to get economies of multiple teams loading up the HW. If the next revolution in cloud comes in to cause companies to onsite the HW again, it’ll look like making it super easy to take spare compute and spare storage from existing companies and resell it on an open market in an easy way. Even still, I think the operational challenges of keeping all that up and running and being utilized at as close to 100% as possible and not focusing on your core business problem will be difficult because you won’t be able to compete with engineering companies that have a core competency in that space.
  - fennecfoxen 4y ago
    > The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Effectively hiring, retaining, evaluating and rewarding competent staff is hard. Even at a big company the datacenter can be a really small world, which makes it hard for your best employees to grow. Things are especially hard when you don't have a tech brand to rely on for your recruiting, and the staff's expertise is far outside the company's core business, making it harder to evaluate who's good at anything.
patkai 4y ago
that part can be outsourced to eg. Hetzner
jeffbee 4y ago
1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac and electricians on 24-hour payroll, go on-prem. Otherwise, cloud all the way.
- nix23 4y ago
  Why do you buy servers with metal flakes in it? No quality controll on your side?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Are you saying that part of the expected savings from going on-prem is that you will have to disassemble equipment bought from major OEMs and examine it for microscopic metal dust? That doesn't sound like it will save much money, honestly.
    - yobbo 4y ago
      Did they pass typical memory/reliability tests and so on?
      - nix23 4y ago
        Maybe in the first day's they survive it, but the flakes are 99% from the fans/bearings, that's why you test servers at max load for at least 1 week and HD's for 2-4 weeks. But i don't think they made even a initial load-/stresstest. Unpack it, trow it into the rack, no checking of internal plug's just nothing...pretty sure about that.
        varjag 4y ago
        Metal chips is squarely in the long tail of failure modes that you can't really anticipate (but of course really easy to be smug about in hindsight). It is also extremely unlikely the bearings, most likely these are from chassis frames assy not cleaned up properly.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
There are a few different ways to run a data center, a subset of which are much less expensive than the cloud but require a level of competency that some organizations will never have. It can also be relatively pain-free when done well. Some workloads are inherently inefficient in the cloud because of the architecture. Data center ops is ultimately a supply chain management problem, but most people don't treat it as such. That was my primary learning from doing data center ops at a few different companies. If you get the supply chain management right, and are technically competent, there can be a lot to recommend running your own data centers.
FpUser 4y ago
>"I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though." This is what I do. I rent bare metal from Hetzner and OVH. I also have some hosting hardware right at my place. It saves me a ton of money and no I do not spend any meaningful time to administer. All done by a couple of shell scripts. I can re-create fresh service from the backup on a clean rented machine in no time. As for cloud - if I need to run some simulation once a month on some bazillion core computer then sure. Cloud makes much sense in this particular case. I am sure there are other cases that can be cost effective. Bot for the average business I believe cloud is a waste of resources and money.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Hetzner is about 10x cheaper than AWS, give or take.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I love Hetzner and send them money every month, but you do get what you pay for. I don't think I'd like to run FedEx off of Hetzner.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    I was actually commenting on the margins that "cloud providers" charge. If I was a manager at FedEx I'd definitely spend some resources to DYI and send some of those millions over to my direction instead.
tomc1985 4y ago
If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter? I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!
- FredPret 4y ago
  I, too, enjoy pet servers over cattle. But when important parts of modern life depends on servers, I can definitely see the rationale for cattle.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Pet server classes is a much nicer concept anyway. I never liked the instance based personalization. Creating a machine, defining its class, and seeing it become a machine of its class is magical. Of course, the newest idea is for creating and destroying machines automatically... that outside of the could is quite pointless but people want it anyway. I imagine seeing all that orchestration working must be even nicer than a machine autoconfiguring, but I am yet to see a place where it just works.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    One argument for "cattle" servers on bare-metal is security. Being able to reset the machine to a clean, known-good state would clear any leftovers including potential malware. Having machines provisioned from images that include everything they need to run also means you don't even need to grant anyone root access (which you'd otherwise need to be able to audit so they don't leave anything malicious in there).
TimTheTinker 4y ago
I'll be really curious how much change Oxide will bring to the status quo. The promise is to be able to pay up front for a rack that will function as a highly capable VM, storage, and/or compute host, without any of the overhead that Dell, HP, and IBM bring. Just plug it in and start giving it workloads to do. All config can be done through the web-based management console or via the API, just like AWS.
kortilla 4y ago
> Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... This isn’t really a meaningful analysis though. It’s just “when you do things in house there are things you have to do”. It’s like saying, “I would rather retire than clean the toilets, restock the toilet paper, etc” in a discussion about whether to outsource your bathroom maintenance. Doesn’t tell you what’s cost effective.
tootie 4y ago
I'm more or the less the sole decider for all tech decisions in my org (I don't have full budget authority, but I tell the budget holders what things cost). I'm 100% on board with cloud and even going further up the value chain to PaaS and SaaS. Cloud is expensive, but predictable. DevOps is very expensive and unpredictable. I can't even keep staff retained these days. Having a fixed dollar cost, even if it's high, saves not only the operations cost, but also the accounting cost and recruiting cost. And not just cost, but risk! Managed services are generally lower risk, and even if they aren't you can buy some indemnity that they'll cover some of the cost of failures.
pjdesno 4y ago
I've got some experience with a big academic data center - >1 acre floor space, >10MW, ~$100M construction cost. I've also worked for commercial companies of various sizes. If your compute installation is big enough that payroll is a small fraction of the operating cost, then it's way cheaper than cloud. (that payroll has to include people who actually know how to build and run a huge compute installation) The problem is that people come in integer units, you need a bunch of them to cover a bunch of different areas of expertise, and the particular ones you need are expensive. If you've got $1M worth of computers, you're almost certainly better off scrapping them and going to cloud, although the folks you're currently paying to run them might disagree. If you have $100M+ worth of machines it's a whole different ballgame; I'm not sure where the exact crossover is. Note - that's assuming a single data center, and that you're big enough to build your own data center instead of renting colo space. If you need your machines to be geographically dispersed, you'll need to be even bigger before it's cheaper than cloud, and I'm not sure whether you'll ever hit crossover if you're renting colo space.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> fibers, cooling issues, physical security All of that can be handled by your colocation facility. In most cases you won't ever reach the scale where building your own DC makes sense. > Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform Should still be cheaper than paying the AWS premium including for bandwidth, not to mention that you don't always need virtualization. If all you need the bare-metal for is a handful of machines to do a very specific task that's too expensive on AWS then running directly on the metal is an option (and leave on AWS the stuff that does require the convenience of virtualization). > I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though. Agreed. Most companies shouldn't ever deal with hardware directly - just rent it from a provider and let them do the maintenance.

by pid-1 4y ago

bluGill 4y ago

To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues to work. Different operations demand different levels of service (I doubt that anyone keeps HVAC techs on staff 24x7, but if the AC is that critical it is mandatory). The only case where the CEO is up at 3am is if the CEO is the owner of the local HVAC service company, not the CEO of the building with the problem. Once you realize that to management the cost is outsourced no matter what the only question is do it with your own people and HR, or outsource it. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but for most companies it isn't their business and so the only reason to do it in house is they can't trust any company they hire.

SnowHill9902 4y ago
Not really. Time to service depends on SLA and redundancy. If you have no redundancy your time to service must be less or equal than your SLA. If you have redundancy it can be longer.
mschuster91 4y ago
The thing is, the cost for the HVAC 24x7x365 support for a datacenter will be roughly the same for a given location... but it makes a difference if it is you paying the whole bill (=you're self-hosting in your own datacenter), you are splitting the bill with a bunch of other customers indirectly (=you're self-hosting in a colo DC), or if you're splitting the bill with a shitload of other customers (=you're using some service on one of the big public cloud providers). The downside for saving the costs is that you're losing control with every step taken away: as soon as you go into a datacenter of any kind, you simply cannot call up a HVAC company and offer them 100k in hard cash if they're showing up in the next 60 minutes and fix the issue. With a colo DC you can usually go and show up there to see if the HVAC, UPS and other systems are appropriate to your needs, but with one of the big cloud providers you have to trust their word that they are doing stuff correctly.
29083011397778 4y ago
> so the only reason to do it in house is they can't trust any company they hire Now I'm deeply confused. Any company hired either has a profit margin (plus enough to fund an "Oh shit" fund in case times turn bad) or will not stick around longer than a few years. At which case why not just hire people directly and cut out the other company's profit margin? Assuming you hire similar people at the same rate, using your own existing and already-paid-for HR, how is that not cheaper?
- bluGill 4y ago
  You need to deal with overhead. Nobody does their own HVAC in house because you rarely need them, and would have to pay to train people on that despite them not using it. In some cases you can even get a discount. Utilities are. Big customer of tree trimming, the companies doing that work can give a great deal because the utility doesn't care that they take a week off after a storm for high profit margin consumer trimming.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Lots of places have their own HVAC techs in house, if they have enough HVAC work to justify it. Even if it's not their core line of business. They will do whatever costs less, +/- some amount of subjective "hassle factor."
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Especially when it's "line critical" to their business, or if the person can do other things as well. Larger hotels often have dedicated staff for things like HVAC, etc, because the importance of getting things fixed quick if possible is worth the cost of having someone onsite/available. And you see similar things with colleges, etc; they often have a maintenance deportment that can be pretty large (though no doubt they've spun it off and brought it back in-house for the same "change is progress" reasons).
    - tssva 4y ago
      I have dealt with a large number of retail colo providers, wholesale data center providers and corporate owned data centers across the US over the last 20 years and all of them used contractors for HVAC and electrical. I'm not saying dedicated staff never happens but it is definitely not the norm.

IHLayman 4y ago

ML workloads definitely cost a lot of money. Even for a preemptible VM, A100 GPUs cost $0.88/hr/GPU. That's $624 a month for a single GPU and only the 40GB model. Want a dedicated 8 GPU machine in the cloud to do training with? That'll run you around 16 grand a month. Do that for 2 years and you may as well have bought the device. Want to do 16/24/40 GPU training? Good luck getting dedicated cloud machines with networking fast enough between them so that MPI works correctly, and prepared to give up your wallet. Also, that's just compute. What about data? Sure cloud accepts your data cheaply, but they also charge you for egress of that data. Yes you should have your data in more than one location, but if you depend on just cloud then you need it in different AZ which costs even more money to keep in sync and available for training runs. I think for simple workloads and renting compute for a startup, cloud definitely makes sense. But the moment you try to do some serious compute for ML workloads, good luck and hope you have deep pockets.

vlovich123 4y ago
Re data, I think egress rates are going to start disappearing over the next few years. The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Sure, it won’t be quite as expensive (no profit margin) but it’s not an order of magnitude. Additionally, most companies don’t run the HW 24/7 and, if they do, it’s not a level of people they want to hire to support said operations. Not just running it, but you have to invest and grow something that’s not a core competency to get economies of multiple teams loading up the HW. If the next revolution in cloud comes in to cause companies to onsite the HW again, it’ll look like making it super easy to take spare compute and spare storage from existing companies and resell it on an open market in an easy way. Even still, I think the operational challenges of keeping all that up and running and being utilized at as close to 100% as possible and not focusing on your core business problem will be difficult because you won’t be able to compete with engineering companies that have a core competency in that space.
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  > The part that’s always missing with these rent vs buy analyses on HN for some reason is that it’s totally ignoring the opex cost of operating your own hardware which is going to be non 0. Effectively hiring, retaining, evaluating and rewarding competent staff is hard. Even at a big company the datacenter can be a really small world, which makes it hard for your best employees to grow. Things are especially hard when you don't have a tech brand to rely on for your recruiting, and the staff's expertise is far outside the company's core business, making it harder to evaluate who's good at anything.

patkai 4y ago

that part can be outsourced to eg. Hetzner

jeffbee 4y ago

1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac and electricians on 24-hour payroll, go on-prem. Otherwise, cloud all the way.

nix23 4y ago
Why do you buy servers with metal flakes in it? No quality controll on your side?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Are you saying that part of the expected savings from going on-prem is that you will have to disassemble equipment bought from major OEMs and examine it for microscopic metal dust? That doesn't sound like it will save much money, honestly.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    Did they pass typical memory/reliability tests and so on?
    - nix23 4y ago
      Maybe in the first day's they survive it, but the flakes are 99% from the fans/bearings, that's why you test servers at max load for at least 1 week and HD's for 2-4 weeks. But i don't think they made even a initial load-/stresstest. Unpack it, trow it into the rack, no checking of internal plug's just nothing...pretty sure about that.
      - varjag 4y ago
        Metal chips is squarely in the long tail of failure modes that you can't really anticipate (but of course really easy to be smug about in hindsight). It is also extremely unlikely the bearings, most likely these are from chassis frames assy not cleaned up properly.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

There are a few different ways to run a data center, a subset of which are much less expensive than the cloud but require a level of competency that some organizations will never have. It can also be relatively pain-free when done well. Some workloads are inherently inefficient in the cloud because of the architecture. Data center ops is ultimately a supply chain management problem, but most people don't treat it as such. That was my primary learning from doing data center ops at a few different companies. If you get the supply chain management right, and are technically competent, there can be a lot to recommend running your own data centers.

FpUser 4y ago

>"I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though." This is what I do. I rent bare metal from Hetzner and OVH. I also have some hosting hardware right at my place. It saves me a ton of money and no I do not spend any meaningful time to administer. All done by a couple of shell scripts. I can re-create fresh service from the backup on a clean rented machine in no time. As for cloud - if I need to run some simulation once a month on some bazillion core computer then sure. Cloud makes much sense in this particular case. I am sure there are other cases that can be cost effective. Bot for the average business I believe cloud is a waste of resources and money.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

Hetzner is about 10x cheaper than AWS, give or take.

missedthecue 4y ago
I love Hetzner and send them money every month, but you do get what you pay for. I don't think I'd like to run FedEx off of Hetzner.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  I was actually commenting on the margins that "cloud providers" charge. If I was a manager at FedEx I'd definitely spend some resources to DYI and send some of those millions over to my direction instead.

tomc1985 4y ago

If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter? I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!

FredPret 4y ago
I, too, enjoy pet servers over cattle. But when important parts of modern life depends on servers, I can definitely see the rationale for cattle.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Pet server classes is a much nicer concept anyway. I never liked the instance based personalization. Creating a machine, defining its class, and seeing it become a machine of its class is magical. Of course, the newest idea is for creating and destroying machines automatically... that outside of the could is quite pointless but people want it anyway. I imagine seeing all that orchestration working must be even nicer than a machine autoconfiguring, but I am yet to see a place where it just works.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  One argument for "cattle" servers on bare-metal is security. Being able to reset the machine to a clean, known-good state would clear any leftovers including potential malware. Having machines provisioned from images that include everything they need to run also means you don't even need to grant anyone root access (which you'd otherwise need to be able to audit so they don't leave anything malicious in there).

TimTheTinker 4y ago

I'll be really curious how much change Oxide will bring to the status quo. The promise is to be able to pay up front for a rack that will function as a highly capable VM, storage, and/or compute host, without any of the overhead that Dell, HP, and IBM bring. Just plug it in and start giving it workloads to do. All config can be done through the web-based management console or via the API, just like AWS.

kortilla 4y ago

> Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... This isn’t really a meaningful analysis though. It’s just “when you do things in house there are things you have to do”. It’s like saying, “I would rather retire than clean the toilets, restock the toilet paper, etc” in a discussion about whether to outsource your bathroom maintenance. Doesn’t tell you what’s cost effective.

tootie 4y ago

I'm more or the less the sole decider for all tech decisions in my org (I don't have full budget authority, but I tell the budget holders what things cost). I'm 100% on board with cloud and even going further up the value chain to PaaS and SaaS. Cloud is expensive, but predictable. DevOps is very expensive and unpredictable. I can't even keep staff retained these days. Having a fixed dollar cost, even if it's high, saves not only the operations cost, but also the accounting cost and recruiting cost. And not just cost, but risk! Managed services are generally lower risk, and even if they aren't you can buy some indemnity that they'll cover some of the cost of failures.

pjdesno 4y ago

I've got some experience with a big academic data center - >1 acre floor space, >10MW, ~$100M construction cost. I've also worked for commercial companies of various sizes. If your compute installation is big enough that payroll is a small fraction of the operating cost, then it's way cheaper than cloud. (that payroll has to include people who actually know how to build and run a huge compute installation) The problem is that people come in integer units, you need a bunch of them to cover a bunch of different areas of expertise, and the particular ones you need are expensive. If you've got $1M worth of computers, you're almost certainly better off scrapping them and going to cloud, although the folks you're currently paying to run them might disagree. If you have $100M+ worth of machines it's a whole different ballgame; I'm not sure where the exact crossover is. Note - that's assuming a single data center, and that you're big enough to build your own data center instead of renting colo space. If you need your machines to be geographically dispersed, you'll need to be even bigger before it's cheaper than cloud, and I'm not sure whether you'll ever hit crossover if you're renting colo space.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> fibers, cooling issues, physical security All of that can be handled by your colocation facility. In most cases you won't ever reach the scale where building your own DC makes sense. > Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform Should still be cheaper than paying the AWS premium including for bandwidth, not to mention that you don't always need virtualization. If all you need the bare-metal for is a handful of machines to do a very specific task that's too expensive on AWS then running directly on the metal is an option (and leave on AWS the stuff that does require the convenience of virtualization). > I believe companies selling bare metal as a service are a happy compromise of cost and convenience, though. Agreed. Most companies shouldn't ever deal with hardware directly - just rent it from a provider and let them do the maintenance.