On: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

[snarfy]

The idea of the cloud is to only pay for what you use. Your on-premise server is idle 99% of the time so why are you paying for a full server?

If that's not true, it turns out it's quite expensive to run things in the cloud. If your workload is crunching numbers 24/7 at 100% cpu, it's better to buy the cpu than to rent it.

[jiggawatts → snarfy]

> Your on-premise server is idle 99%

That's almost never true for any organisation big enough to start using virtualisation. Typical cluster utilisation levels that I have seen are 20-60%.

It starts to make sense to buy a small 5-node VMware cluster for orgs as small as 100 users, at which point the cloud becomes questionable.

I mean, sure, if you have less than 100 staff and it doesn't make sense to buy a cluster, use the cloud.

[Polylactic_acid → snarfy]

Cloud servers tend to be more reliable as well if you don't run your own datacenters. We have lost our internet connection or power 3 times in the last year in the office. Its not the end of the world since we can go to 4g for our own usage but if our servers were hosted locally this would be a huge issue.

[dathinab → Polylactic_acid]

Don't forget that between cloud and servers in the company there are still VPS and rented dedicated hardware in a data center.

So you:

1. Don't manage hardware.

2. But manage a server (OS+software stack).

3. Have reliable internet, power and physical security from the data center you are renting your hardware from (if you trust them fully!).

4. Have fixed cost but also fixed resources. Tends to be cheaper for many tasks. Especially CPU/GPU heavy ones.

[Polylactic_acid → dathinab]

I consider VPSs to be cloud servers. Is this not common?

[XCSme → Polylactic_acid]

I mentioned in another comment that I use VPS and not cloud services. I think of cloud as the auto-scaling infrastructure with dynamic pricing. I think of VPS as just sharing a dedicated machine with others, so each one gets a few cores and shares other resources. The implementation of VPSs nowdays is probably more similar to cloud services, where your own space might be moved around to another physical machine without any downtime.

[Polylactic_acid → XCSme]

So you consider cloud servers to be what most people call serverless (S3/serverless functions/etc)?

[XCSme → Polylactic_acid]

I do hate the term "serverless" as it makes no sense, but I think of cloud as a system that automatically spins-up/down VPSs based on your current usage. This means the infrastructure/software also allows for automatically load-balancing between those VPSs. So I think of cloud as the VPS servers that are used to host the actual data + the layer on top that does all the scaling, provisioning, load-balancing, etc.

[mjevans → Polylactic_acid]

Disagree; your still at the mercy of whatever last mile is __between__ the cloud and the office.

Also any bandwidth limitations; in the US that's still a big deal.

Public facing stuff should probably be colo or rented server.

[Polylactic_acid → mjevans]

In my case they are public/customer facing services. Our internal stuff like CI runs on premise.