[sofixa]

> what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud

It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks for monitoring/backups.

Allowing developers and related to have hardware/software at a whim is a massive advantage.

[oceanplexian]

If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour. You also don’t “deploy a server” to reduce load you plan ahead every few months and deploy thousands at a time. Even then- if you have a good relationship with a really good systems integrator, they can ship and rack machines in a matter of days, not weeks.

I’m increasingly convinced that the large scale companies that don’t do bare-metal because they never learned how, and all the people advising them have never done bare metal or have done it poorly, so it’s like the blind leading the blind.. But they are leaving a 50-90% cost savings, better control over reliability, latency, data residency, etc on the table by doing so.

[sofixa]

> If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour

Remote hands won't order your servers, configure your networking, install OSes/configure your PXE, and all the other tedious things running your own DC entails.

Yes, most DIY DCs are done terribly, that's to whole point - if so many people struggle with that, doesn't it make sense to just outsource it?

[oceanplexian]

They will do whatever is in the contract. Yes, they will hook up a crash cart and PXE the server (If you need that), done it hundreds of times in the old days. However in modern datacenters no one "installs OSes and configures the network". You plug it in, turn it on, everything self-provisions and starts serving traffic.

[sofixa]

> However in modern datacenters no one "installs OSes and configures the network". You plug it in, turn it on, everything self-provisions and starts serving traffic.

Absolutely agreed. That's what i used to in part do, and it's a massive effort to do everything automatically and efficiently, and it needs multiple people's time to create and maintain all the infrastructure, glue between different systems, scripts, tools. Even components as basic as DHCP suck absolutely (your options are either something from the 1990s, isc-dhcp-server, which lacks an API in any real sense, or Kea, made from the same people, which really shows), and before Tinkerbell there was literally nothing that could be used to automate such a thing at scale.

And more to my point, how many datacenters do you think are "modern"? I've only encountered one that was starting to get there (where i used to work before an acquisition by a company with arcane practices in their DCs), and having worked with hundreds of customers with "on prem" stuff, for the vast majority it's a legacy horror show.

[dcoperator1]

The price for colocating in a Tier 2 datacenter close enough for me to walk to was $75/amp. Which is about the same cost as AWS.

You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.

[nine_k]

How can you directly compare $75 / amp to AWS? This very much depends on the kind if load you have.

Also, AWS's egress likely costs much more than the datacenter's; again, possible savings very much depend on the kind of load you have.

[wongarsu]

I'd agree that unless you can really profit from having very specific hardware, you're better off renting dedicated servers than colocating servers you own. Have somebody else worry about having people on call to switch out failed hard drives.

Comparing either to AWS will inevitably lead to a much more complex discussion about spot instances, traffic costs, ancillary services etc.

[dijit]

100% Agree.

I don't like the idea that the only way to get developers moving is to use cloud, but I agree that it's a solid replacement for really bad ops.

What I've seen in many places is an abstraction over bare metal, some are better than others, openstack, Kubernetes on-prem, vmware etc; are all solutions that have differing amounts of adoption. Ubisoft had a lot of stuff in this area, as does Google. Ubisofts was pretty terrible though.

If you need a physical machine to be deployed, you've hit a certain level of scale and your load is much more known: and even though it can take a few weeks, what you get back is quite competitive.

But if you're waiting for hardware to get anything moving in the first place then that's obviously bad.

What I've taken to doing is prototyping on Google Cloud and then planning to migrate things to on-prem once everything is reaching maturity.

[throwawaymaths]

It also lets a CFO convert capex to opex (may or may not have tax implications), and you eliminate a cost center from your balance sheets (and turns it into service payments) which makes CFOs look better, even if it's net worse for the Company

[dijit]

CFO's don't care about CapEx vs OpEx.

At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one.

I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it.

When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.

[throwawaymaths]

Ok. I guess I just worked for one CFO that obsessed about it, so for me n=1

[dijit]

Well, n=2 for me, but that's not to say you're wrong.

I reached the conclusion that it's basically a self-perpetuating myth because I asked my CFO's directly about it because it comes up often.

Curious though: where are you based? My CFO's were German and... German (but the second was working in Sweden with Swedish financial rules)

Maybe it is actually different depending on location or there's some other factor at play?

[throwawaymaths]

USA. So we have weird tax rules. Also I dunno the CFO could have been drinking the sales teams coolaid (we were also trying to sell enterprise to move to the cloud). And there was a lot of drinking (and hookers and probably blow) at that company

[hitpointdrew]

> It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters,

If you actually do the math it is pretty much a wash vs using AWS. Yes you will pay a lot more upfront, but over a 5 year period (standard warranty length, and typical deprecation time) it pretty much evens out compared to AWS. I am sure there are many uses cases where on-prem would actually be cheaper than AWS over 5 years.

At the companies I work for the red-tape isn't nearly as bad as you make it seem (or have perhaps experienced at places you have worked). The biggest time sink right now is the ongoing supply chain issues and vendors just not having equipment, the approvals/tickets are pretty quick where I work.

[kqr]

If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be.

The upside is that it's much cheaper once you're at the scale where you no longer need to variableise your compute costs, but can tank the up-front fixed costs and do proper capacity planning.

[acdha]

> If you have a little spare capacity, developers can still get hardware/software on a whim, at just a (comparatively) small one-time expense. Spare capacity is much cheaper than people make it out to be.

Those people are speaking from greater experience - there are many things which seem easy but aren’t once you’re over a certain scale, and at large organizations you often have things like conflicting policies or coordinated demand (e.g. your slack capacity disappears when every project is trying to hit the same budget deadline or a change moratorium ends, a pipe breaks in building A and you need to shift a ton of previously-stable systems for 6 months, etc.).

You can do that kind of capacity planning well but it’s harder than it looks and often politically challenging because the benefits aren’t obvious. Cutting corners looks like saving money right up until it doesn’t. If you aren’t buying servers by the hundred or storage by the petabyte, you are unlikely to be competitive with a cloud service without sacrificing multiple of performance, reliability, timeliness, and security.

[kqr]

I think you and I are saying basically the same thing, only putting emphasis on different aspects due to our various historic experiences.

Look at your demand pattern (variable or stable, predictable or unpredictable) and what cost structures your finances can support (variable or fixed, up-front or as-you-go), pick a solution based on that, not what's cool.

[acdha]

Also adding your barriers to entry: staff, facilities, process, etc. It doesn’t help you saving on servers over a cloud provider if your procurement process means you have people sitting idle for 6 months.

[systemvoltage]

Equinix Bare Metal. https://metal.equinix.com/

They’re a $6B revenue company that most people haven’t heard of. Their expertise is in building data centers for other data center companies.