4 ms·

We're a small team (four engineers) and we purchased four Dell mini PCs to toss into our small office space. The break even compared to our AWS hosted runners (

by jjice 2y ago

We're a small team (four engineers) and we purchased four Dell mini PCs to toss into our small office space. The break even compared to our AWS hosted runners (which were much faster and cheaper than the GH ones) was like four or five months, plus they cut the time again by over half. We have to deal with them if something weird happens, but it's been such a low time investment that it has been such a great choice. Plus, who doesn't love having some new hardware to play with?

edweis 2y ago
Why 4 Dell Minis? You don’t need a monitor for CI/CD, and why 4? Is it for redundancy? Performance? We are interested in doing the same setup.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Not OP, but I went with MOREFINE AMD Ryzen mini PCs. They can be configured with a ton of CPU/RAM (including ECC). They're really compact, support 2.5 Gb ethernet, and are great to work with. A comparable Dell workstation with ECC RAM would've been significantly more expensive, and you have to deal with their business folks to purchase them (or at least I couldn't figure out how to buy them direct).
- jjice 2y ago
  Wasn't my choice, but one wasn't enough so we threw a few more at it. So mostly for performance, but the redundancy is an added benefit. They were a pretty decent space, power/heat, performance, and noise ratio for us. Our office is a single room with six desks, so space, noise, and heat are a larger consideration for us. I use a mini PC at home for a personal server as well, but that's just because used enterprise equipment is often a great deal.
dehrmann 2y ago
> We have to deal with them if something weird happens Check back in three years once you've had to deal with OS upgrades, power outages, running out of disk space, and one of them failing.
- abuani 2y ago
  Three years sounds like a reasonably good return on investment. At that point the teams either big enough to justify paying $$ for a hosted solution, or still cheaper to buy dedicated hardware.
  - delfinom 2y ago
    You can also just rent dedicated servers from hetzner or ovh for far cheaper than AWS instances with more horsepower. More expensive than a dell mini in a closet. But you get datacenter Internet and power backup.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > justify paying $$ for a hosted solution, or still cheaper to buy dedicated hardware. Always cheaper if you have at least some demand. For the lazy fix even just get a few mac mini and it'd work fine.
- delfinom 2y ago
  It's a CI runner my dude. You just obliterate and reinstall the base system in what 10 minutes?
- cr125rider 2y ago
  Are any of those problems challenging to deal with? Even if it’s a few expensive man hours the ROI is still quite short.
- barkingcat 2y ago
  if the break even was 4-5 months, it means compared to going to cloud vendors, in 36 months, the self hosted solution would have saved 7.2 times the cost!! Even if within 3 years there needs to be OS upgrades, you can just e-cycle the old machines and buy brand new minipc's (with added benefit of increased performance) every time you need to upgrade, and you'd still be ahead!!
- jjice 2y ago
  We're about eight months in at the moment, so here are some current stats: - No OS upgrades (running Ubuntu 22 LTS), but regular update - We've had a power outage, but not during the day, so when they rebooted, they went right back to action. Same issue with a network outage in the office. - We have hit disk space issues due to not clearing all the data we needed to. A quick SSH and an rm or two did the job, plus another 30 minutes to an hour to update a cron to remove that portion of the cache I see what you mean for sure, and there will undoubtedly be more things that come up at some point, but with the savings, it would take quite a few engineering hours per month to lose the savings at this point. And I won't lie, when something goes wrong, it's a nice change of pace to deal with a server instead of code once and a while. Can't actually use that for calculations, but I don't hate when it happens so far.

by jjice 2y ago

edweis 2y ago

Why 4 Dell Minis? You don’t need a monitor for CI/CD, and why 4? Is it for redundancy? Performance? We are interested in doing the same setup.

candiddevmike 2y ago
Not OP, but I went with MOREFINE AMD Ryzen mini PCs. They can be configured with a ton of CPU/RAM (including ECC). They're really compact, support 2.5 Gb ethernet, and are great to work with. A comparable Dell workstation with ECC RAM would've been significantly more expensive, and you have to deal with their business folks to purchase them (or at least I couldn't figure out how to buy them direct).
jjice 2y ago
Wasn't my choice, but one wasn't enough so we threw a few more at it. So mostly for performance, but the redundancy is an added benefit. They were a pretty decent space, power/heat, performance, and noise ratio for us. Our office is a single room with six desks, so space, noise, and heat are a larger consideration for us. I use a mini PC at home for a personal server as well, but that's just because used enterprise equipment is often a great deal.

dehrmann 2y ago

> We have to deal with them if something weird happens Check back in three years once you've had to deal with OS upgrades, power outages, running out of disk space, and one of them failing.

abuani 2y ago
Three years sounds like a reasonably good return on investment. At that point the teams either big enough to justify paying $$ for a hosted solution, or still cheaper to buy dedicated hardware.
- delfinom 2y ago
  You can also just rent dedicated servers from hetzner or ovh for far cheaper than AWS instances with more horsepower. More expensive than a dell mini in a closet. But you get datacenter Internet and power backup.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > justify paying $$ for a hosted solution, or still cheaper to buy dedicated hardware. Always cheaper if you have at least some demand. For the lazy fix even just get a few mac mini and it'd work fine.
delfinom 2y ago
It's a CI runner my dude. You just obliterate and reinstall the base system in what 10 minutes?
cr125rider 2y ago
Are any of those problems challenging to deal with? Even if it’s a few expensive man hours the ROI is still quite short.
barkingcat 2y ago
if the break even was 4-5 months, it means compared to going to cloud vendors, in 36 months, the self hosted solution would have saved 7.2 times the cost!! Even if within 3 years there needs to be OS upgrades, you can just e-cycle the old machines and buy brand new minipc's (with added benefit of increased performance) every time you need to upgrade, and you'd still be ahead!!
jjice 2y ago
We're about eight months in at the moment, so here are some current stats: - No OS upgrades (running Ubuntu 22 LTS), but regular update - We've had a power outage, but not during the day, so when they rebooted, they went right back to action. Same issue with a network outage in the office. - We have hit disk space issues due to not clearing all the data we needed to. A quick SSH and an rm or two did the job, plus another 30 minutes to an hour to update a cron to remove that portion of the cache I see what you mean for sure, and there will undoubtedly be more things that come up at some point, but with the savings, it would take quite a few engineering hours per month to lose the savings at this point. And I won't lie, when something goes wrong, it's a nice change of pace to deal with a server instead of code once and a while. Can't actually use that for calculations, but I don't hate when it happens so far.