

Ask HN: $40k on physical hardware? or use the cloud? - flannell

Our company is at a technical cross roads.  Upgrade current hardware to latest IBM Xseries running VMWare and a nice SAN disk array ($40k) <i>OR</i> start looking at Amazon EC2 ala cloud hosting?  This will be a production system so no down time!<p>Can cloud hosting be reliable? Thanks!
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aristus
I'd like to help but you need to explain a bit more about what your system
does. I've helped build and manage racks and cloud installs. Some general
stuff:

Downtime happens. It often happens when you move hardware around (say, you
need another SAN or replace you switches. Cloud servers are very ver flexible;
you can set up a parallel system and _test_ it for a week. You can't do that
with your own hardware without spending serious cash. The first time I
rearranged my entire server set up, while sitting in a cafe, was pretty damned
cool.

It also happens when hardware fails. With owned systems you have to drive to
the colo in the middle of the night.

I suggest you build a minimal parallel system in a cloud and try it out. Try
several providers.

~~~
flannell
The Software is a web based PHP5 App running both Mysql and Oracle on top of
SLES9. It collects performance information (KPIs) and sends out formatted
reports (PDF/XLS) to clients & customers. It's been running on IBM Xseries 336
servers since 2005 (eek!) and really needs an upgrade. Our technical provider
came up with the spec but am interested to see if cloud hosting has moved on;
I understand it was a bit shakey to start with.

~~~
aristus
Zynga runs largely on EC2, something like 10,000 nodes. I don't know how to
define "shaky", but that company bets hundreds of millions of dollars of
revenue on EC2.

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flannell
I didn't know that. I guess it scales extremely well.

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bcater
FWIW, I worked at an online advertising company that ran a whole division on
EC2 machines - at the peak, nearly 100 instances. This was never a problem for
us because we were judicious in our use of the machines (minify your content!)
and we were disciplined in our deployments and management. If you go that
route, just be sure the learn and follow best practices - you'll save yourself
quite a lot of time.

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ecommando
Do both. You would be nuts to depend on a single cloud provider, as the model
for clouds allows for adjusting "the dial" on performance to increase
revenues.

Spend $30K on physical equipment and network, and $10K on cloud deployment.

Then, over the course of a year or two, as you expand and learn how the cloud
"really works", you can adjust as needed.

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jacquesm
It very much depends on the nature of the usage, storage and bandwidth are the
big killers for some cloud applications.

For me (live video) the cloud doesn't even get close to being competitive with
leased hardware.

1GBit flat rate with 20T of storage goes for about 1200 euros / months,
including a quad (or even eight) core machine.

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hga
Well ... isn't the question more "Will $40K of IBM and VMWare kit in our hands
be (significantly) more reliable than Amazon's services?"

For your purposes, including scheduled downtime.

Also factor into the cost of the time it will take your people to learn how to
make your systems on EC2 reliable enough.

~~~
flannell
I think that's an interesting point. However, I do have to consider running
sensitive performance data running on equipment we don't control or host. So,
is it wise to run customers data on kit we don't own or host?

