5 ms·

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (thei

by mbesto 13y ago

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all of the above MS SQL licensing costs are crazy stupid. You either (a) have to fork over about $2-3k fee or (b) the cloud based cost is an extra ~$150/month on top of the standards windows vm cost. I'm genuinely curious about all of the above, because I am working with a MS-based startup and would be good to know. But most importantly, because the customer doesn't give a darn. 100% agree.

zdw 13y ago
Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price. Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.
- jasonkester 13y ago
  Keep in mind that BizSpark "runs out" when you pass a million dollars per year in revenue. At which point you can presumably afford a thousand dollars for a SQL Server license.
  - mjn 13y ago
    There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16 http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16
    - jasonkester 13y ago
      Fortunately, they reinvent the program every few years. So in reality you can be in EmpowerISV for 3 years, then BizSpark for 3 years, then [thing that replaces bizspark in 2/2014] for 3 years, etc. I've personally been in Microsoft's "let's give developers everything for basically free" programs since 2006, and am not worried that I'll suddenly face a crippling bill down the line. Shafting little startups for a lousy grand or two really is not their business model. Think about it for a second and it'll make sense. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not advocating gambling your business on Microsoft's goodwill here. For the same reason I don't advocate building a business that a single bill for $1,000 can kill. The worst case result of MS pulling the rug on all their BizSpark-esque programs is an extra couple thousand dollars a year in the expense column. Here's hoping nobody here works for a shop where that would be a big deal.
      - RyanZAG 13y ago
        What? You're basing your business continuity on a corporation creating a special 'free pass' for you every 3 years explicitly? Because they've done it once before? This seems like a terrible idea. Godspeed man, godspeed.
        moskie 13y ago
        One could just as easily scoff at someone for basing their business off of "open source community supported" tools. But, instead, the realistic position is to understand Microsoft's tools and programs will be a decent choice for years to come, just as using FOSS would be.
        RyanZAG 13y ago
        How is that even remotely comparable? I'm not saying anything about the quality of using MS tools - they're great - but they have a fee attached. They specifically say you will need to pay that fee within X years. Pretending the fee doesn't exist because you don't have to pay it until next year is what I'm scoffing at. Not the tools, the idea that MS will continue to make their expensive tools free when they have put an expiry date on that free license already. Open source community supported tools are completely different. The price and license are very clear - $0 up front, pay for support if you need it. Don't want to pay for support? No problem. Need a new feature? No problem, pay someone regular rates to add it. You can't lose access to anything because you already have everything. You can't be sued into paying because the GPL specially disallows the creator from suing you.
        moskie 13y ago
        We might be talking past each other here. No one is saying that it's a good business plan to assume that programs like BizSpark will never run out. That is of course a bad idea. But since no one suggested that, I assumed you were saying that using things like BizSpark at all is a bad idea.... which is not the case. A valid business plan can be created that involves the pricing structures that Microsoft gives. You can have a plan that involves using a program from MS that gives you their software for free now, with the idea that you will eventually be able to afford to pay for them. Any company worth existing should be able to afford it eventually. And, hey, look, it even happens that those windows of time can be extended. No one is saying that it would be a good business plan to rely on programs like BizSpark never ending... but it's still worth mentioning that MS has been forgiving if things don't go exactly as planned, and provides a way to delay the fees kicking in.
    - panderon 13y ago
      As a graduate of the BizSpark program, $100 gets you full license to the software you were using. Software licenses are then transferred to your organization. You don't suddenly incur $1000s of expenses.
- soundgecko 13y ago
  IIRC, you get to keep the existing licenses and only need to pay for new ones.
omni 13y ago
> What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? You can easily get near 8GB for way under $200/mo using reserved pricing. A one year reservation, heavy utilization m1.large gives you 7.5GB of RAM for $40/mo and $676 up front, or about $100/mo total.
- mbesto 13y ago
  Wait, am I an idiot then? I thought $200/mo just gets you reduced per minute rates? So ~720*0.00x + $200 = $y/mo. As far as I know, there is no way on Amazon to pay a flat monthly fee. It's all "pay for what you drink".
  - omni 13y ago
    I think you actually understand it just fine but might be confusing yourself a bit. Paying the reservation fee does just get you reduced per minute rates, but the fee is not $200/mo. The reservation fee in this example is $676 for an entire year. Once you pay that, your hourly rate for a single m1.large goes down to $0.056. My final $100/mo total is based on 24/7 uptime on that single server you've reserved.
    - mbesto 13y ago
      Oh sweet. Thanks for the explanation!
statictype 13y ago
Yeah, 8gigs of RAM on ec2 works out to about a m1.large? I assume they're running SQL Server Standard Edition (do Saas apps like this one qualify for web edition?) Shouldn't that be more than $200 a month?
jitbit 13y ago
$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.
- Toshio 13y ago
  > "[insert technology here] is free since we're in BizSpark." For how much longer? And then what?
  - timdorr 13y ago
    http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ There are tabs for SQL Server Web and Standard Editions. Depending on what version of SQL Server he needs, it's either a $0.136/hr additional cost to add Web Edition or $0.610/hr additional cost to add Standard Edition. That works out to an approximate $97.92 or $439.20 additional cost per month. So, not a huge jump in cost.
- aetimmes 13y ago
  What about the concerns with running your apps on a single server? Or do you Hyper-V within a single instance?
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  but one instance on Amazon is not high availability. The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story. This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server. To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime. [1] depending on usage, of course. [2] using stats from the article
jtolj 13y ago
>> All our stuff runs on one (1) server > This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak > (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available.
- _pmf_ 13y ago
  > It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available. One also has to take into account how many systems that are distributed over n servers have actually n points of failure. My estimate would be "quite a lot".
  - jtolj 13y ago
    Very true. It's expensive and complex to have real HA/redundancy, but they can't even bounce a DB server without taking down every one of their apps. I have no idea about administering Windows servers, but based on my experience with Windows Update on the desktop, I would imagine that you need to do that relatively often. Hopefully they have a staging environment running somewhere internally at least.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bstar77 13y ago
I'm not sure why anyone, with the technology options available today, would choose a single monolithic server approach and scale that vertically. I think this is just poor design and probably not an MS stack issue. But could this be an MS community thing, where they generally prefer proven technical solutions from 2001?
- twic 13y ago
  Possibly because it's actually pretty cost-effective. You need at least two machines for availability. But you get more bang per buck by making those two machines bigger than by adding a third. Until you hit the limit of what you can do on commodity-ish x86 servers, and would need to start buying Gucci kit from Sunacle or IBM or whoever, at which point your CFO is going to start crying like a baby.
  - bstar77 13y ago
    This may be cheaper up-front, but scales terribly which will increase costs exponentially whenever there is a need for growth. Additionally, like others have mentioned, a simple memory leak from one app will affect every other app on this box. Also, it doesn't sound like there's any redundancy. What happens when the HD blows up? If they fired these app up as separate VMs, they could at least scale each to what their needs are and only pay for what they are using. I manage an app architecture that consists of several Heroku apps along with a couple DBs at mongoHQ for under $100/month. Heroku definitely isn't the cheapest solution, but it allows me to scale horizontally and takes the massive load of sysadmin tasks off my back so I can focus on development.
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  Because the original poster shouldn't need more than one server to deal with 1 ticket a minute. (1500 tickets a day) you should be able to grow that by 1000% and still not break a sweat. In fact it should be able to cope with 1 a second. In reality most people are never going to deal with that level of scale.

by mbesto 13y ago

zdw 13y ago

Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price. Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.

jasonkester 13y ago
Keep in mind that BizSpark "runs out" when you pass a million dollars per year in revenue. At which point you can presumably afford a thousand dollars for a SQL Server license.
- mjn 13y ago
  There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16 http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16
  - jasonkester 13y ago
    Fortunately, they reinvent the program every few years. So in reality you can be in EmpowerISV for 3 years, then BizSpark for 3 years, then [thing that replaces bizspark in 2/2014] for 3 years, etc. I've personally been in Microsoft's "let's give developers everything for basically free" programs since 2006, and am not worried that I'll suddenly face a crippling bill down the line. Shafting little startups for a lousy grand or two really is not their business model. Think about it for a second and it'll make sense. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not advocating gambling your business on Microsoft's goodwill here. For the same reason I don't advocate building a business that a single bill for $1,000 can kill. The worst case result of MS pulling the rug on all their BizSpark-esque programs is an extra couple thousand dollars a year in the expense column. Here's hoping nobody here works for a shop where that would be a big deal.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      What? You're basing your business continuity on a corporation creating a special 'free pass' for you every 3 years explicitly? Because they've done it once before? This seems like a terrible idea. Godspeed man, godspeed.
      - moskie 13y ago
        One could just as easily scoff at someone for basing their business off of "open source community supported" tools. But, instead, the realistic position is to understand Microsoft's tools and programs will be a decent choice for years to come, just as using FOSS would be.
        RyanZAG 13y ago
        How is that even remotely comparable? I'm not saying anything about the quality of using MS tools - they're great - but they have a fee attached. They specifically say you will need to pay that fee within X years. Pretending the fee doesn't exist because you don't have to pay it until next year is what I'm scoffing at. Not the tools, the idea that MS will continue to make their expensive tools free when they have put an expiry date on that free license already. Open source community supported tools are completely different. The price and license are very clear - $0 up front, pay for support if you need it. Don't want to pay for support? No problem. Need a new feature? No problem, pay someone regular rates to add it. You can't lose access to anything because you already have everything. You can't be sued into paying because the GPL specially disallows the creator from suing you.
        moskie 13y ago
        We might be talking past each other here. No one is saying that it's a good business plan to assume that programs like BizSpark will never run out. That is of course a bad idea. But since no one suggested that, I assumed you were saying that using things like BizSpark at all is a bad idea.... which is not the case. A valid business plan can be created that involves the pricing structures that Microsoft gives. You can have a plan that involves using a program from MS that gives you their software for free now, with the idea that you will eventually be able to afford to pay for them. Any company worth existing should be able to afford it eventually. And, hey, look, it even happens that those windows of time can be extended. No one is saying that it would be a good business plan to rely on programs like BizSpark never ending... but it's still worth mentioning that MS has been forgiving if things don't go exactly as planned, and provides a way to delay the fees kicking in.
  - panderon 13y ago
    As a graduate of the BizSpark program, $100 gets you full license to the software you were using. Software licenses are then transferred to your organization. You don't suddenly incur $1000s of expenses.
soundgecko 13y ago
IIRC, you get to keep the existing licenses and only need to pay for new ones.

omni 13y ago

> What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? You can easily get near 8GB for way under $200/mo using reserved pricing. A one year reservation, heavy utilization m1.large gives you 7.5GB of RAM for $40/mo and $676 up front, or about $100/mo total.

mbesto 13y ago
Wait, am I an idiot then? I thought $200/mo just gets you reduced per minute rates? So ~720*0.00x + $200 = $y/mo. As far as I know, there is no way on Amazon to pay a flat monthly fee. It's all "pay for what you drink".
- omni 13y ago
  I think you actually understand it just fine but might be confusing yourself a bit. Paying the reservation fee does just get you reduced per minute rates, but the fee is not $200/mo. The reservation fee in this example is $676 for an entire year. Once you pay that, your hourly rate for a single m1.large goes down to $0.056. My final $100/mo total is based on 24/7 uptime on that single server you've reserved.
  - mbesto 13y ago
    Oh sweet. Thanks for the explanation!

statictype 13y ago

Yeah, 8gigs of RAM on ec2 works out to about a m1.large? I assume they're running SQL Server Standard Edition (do Saas apps like this one qualify for web edition?) Shouldn't that be more than $200 a month?

jitbit 13y ago

$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.

Toshio 13y ago
> "[insert technology here] is free since we're in BizSpark." For how much longer? And then what?
- timdorr 13y ago
  http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ There are tabs for SQL Server Web and Standard Editions. Depending on what version of SQL Server he needs, it's either a $0.136/hr additional cost to add Web Edition or $0.610/hr additional cost to add Standard Edition. That works out to an approximate $97.92 or $439.20 additional cost per month. So, not a huge jump in cost.
aetimmes 13y ago
What about the concerns with running your apps on a single server? Or do you Hyper-V within a single instance?
KaiserPro 13y ago
but one instance on Amazon is not high availability. The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story. This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server. To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime. [1] depending on usage, of course. [2] using stats from the article

jtolj 13y ago

>> All our stuff runs on one (1) server > This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak > (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available.

_pmf_ 13y ago
> It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available. One also has to take into account how many systems that are distributed over n servers have actually n points of failure. My estimate would be "quite a lot".
- jtolj 13y ago
  Very true. It's expensive and complex to have real HA/redundancy, but they can't even bounce a DB server without taking down every one of their apps. I have no idea about administering Windows servers, but based on my experience with Windows Update on the desktop, I would imagine that you need to do that relatively often. Hopefully they have a staging environment running somewhere internally at least.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bstar77 13y ago

I'm not sure why anyone, with the technology options available today, would choose a single monolithic server approach and scale that vertically. I think this is just poor design and probably not an MS stack issue. But could this be an MS community thing, where they generally prefer proven technical solutions from 2001?

twic 13y ago
Possibly because it's actually pretty cost-effective. You need at least two machines for availability. But you get more bang per buck by making those two machines bigger than by adding a third. Until you hit the limit of what you can do on commodity-ish x86 servers, and would need to start buying Gucci kit from Sunacle or IBM or whoever, at which point your CFO is going to start crying like a baby.
- bstar77 13y ago
  This may be cheaper up-front, but scales terribly which will increase costs exponentially whenever there is a need for growth. Additionally, like others have mentioned, a simple memory leak from one app will affect every other app on this box. Also, it doesn't sound like there's any redundancy. What happens when the HD blows up? If they fired these app up as separate VMs, they could at least scale each to what their needs are and only pay for what they are using. I manage an app architecture that consists of several Heroku apps along with a couple DBs at mongoHQ for under $100/month. Heroku definitely isn't the cheapest solution, but it allows me to scale horizontally and takes the massive load of sysadmin tasks off my back so I can focus on development.
KaiserPro 13y ago
Because the original poster shouldn't need more than one server to deal with 1 ticket a minute. (1500 tickets a day) you should be able to grow that by 1000% and still not break a sweat. In fact it should be able to cope with 1 a second. In reality most people are never going to deal with that level of scale.