

Ask HN: What big companies use PaaS services and why? - mgingras

The pricing models for most PaaS services seem hugely prohibitive compared to hiring a DevOps team member and deploying to AWS. This also seems like a more reliable solution than depending on Heroku, Bluemix, or App Engine.
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benologist
A full time devops person is one person defining and managing the processes
that will put your software on servers and keep them running and scaling. A
PaaS provides you with dozens or hundreds of such people along with stable
general-purpose platforms and processes that already work.

PaaS starts at pennies per hour and employees start at thousands per month on
top of which you still need the servers etc they will manage. Cost can be
prohibitive both ways.

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durzagott
The company I work for has deployed an on-premise PaaS using CloudFoundry. You
get many of the benefits of a PaaS without the astronomical costs.

Of course, we do need a small team of excellent DevOps engineers to keep the
whole thing moving forward.

They are also now starting to deploy Openstack in order to benefit from a
software-defined infrastructure. It's all very cool.

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ziles88
Are you suggesting it costs your team less to deploy on premise than in the
cloud? How could your company ever run a server more effectively and cheaper
than a could provider?

~~~
durzagott
The volume of traffic and data makes it prohibitive.

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dinfarfar
I would love to use a public PaaS, but cost is a bit, shall we say, steep ATM
though.

We run around 550 instances of apps, totalling at ~250Gb RAM. So ~450Mb RAM
per instance. In the coming moths that will just grow, as more and more of the
online applications gets either migrated or written for running in the PaaS.

With Heroku[1], the pricing example stops at 150 dynos, but if the pricing is
linear we would spend $19657/month.

With Bluemix[2] $14295/month.

Im sure that with that amount of instances one could negotiate better terms.

Ofc, hypervisors and storage is something you have to factor in the equation.
But being a large enterprise we already have heaps of that stuff lying around
and being under-utilised.

Also, been a while(~ 1 year) since I did a performance comparison[3] between
in house and public, and last time I did, our performance crushed the public
offerings, so we would have to run more instances to get the same performance,
bringing up the cost.

Another consideration we would have to take into account is the network, our
applications are written with ms latency in mind, so to move into a public
offering we would have to migrate all our DBs and services around the apps
into a public provider near the public offering, which would be insanely
expensive, complicated and time consuming. And ofc, rewrite all the
applications to live in a world where we dont have <1ms connectivity to
everything.

I would say that I currently spend a couple of hours/month actually working on
CF fixing bugs, trouble shooting etc. Rest of the time I can work on other
stuff, so I would not really factor in my salary to much into the equation.

We get compute and flash storage for "free" from other projects(massive SAP
and other back office installations wont go away anytime soon). We get a
predictable awesome network across two DCs with <1ms latency for free (massive
SAP and other back office installations wont go away anytime soon). We have
full control over a free, open source, general purpose PaaS(CF wont go away
anytime soon). Im not spending enough time administrating it(really, CF is
great in that respect) to factor into the cost calculations. This VS >10k a
month is why we don't use a public provider.

I suspect that the situation is similar in a lot of large companies, there is
resources, already there for other big projects not being used.

[1] [https://www.heroku.com/pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing)

[2]
[https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/](https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/)

[3] Highly unscientific, running toy apps and JMeter against them. Comparing 5
instances in inhouse CF vs 5 dynos for instance, most R/S wins.

