The Rise of Data Centers
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Rise of Data Centers
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I think people leapt into the cloud making two big mistakes
- Not having any governance in place
- Not having devoted time to reading and/or understanding the Well Architected Framework. All the big 3 have a version of the WAF and they all say the same thing.
The result of those big 2 was a lot of hardware spun up and left running which would have had a traditional data centre manager coming down on the perpetrators like the wrath of Zeus.
When a past employer moved to the cloud at least part of it was to leave a data centre where, had we stayed, we would have been the only client and therefore vulnerable to the financial situation of the company running that data centre.
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Referring to private data centers, you wrote:
The cost of running them privately will exceed that of what vendors will charge.
I think that's true if:
- You're comparing apples to apples - some of my clients don't want/need armored security, redundant power, cooling, internet connections, etc, so their private data centers end up way cheaper.
- You're not including the migration costs - moving running apps from one place to another costs real money. I have one client who tried to move to Azure for 3 years, spent 7 figures trying, and they still haven't moved a single app yet.
- You're not comparing performance - some of my clients simply can't get the database performance they need yet out of Azure and AWS, despite working directly with those companies. Good on-prem hardware has gotten so good, and so inexpensive.
(I still love cloud in my toolbox, I just understand why some of my clients get actively angry when the subject comes up.)
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For us, the "right" choice has remained colocation for 20 years. We get a secure, redundantly provisioned data center - sharing the cost of duplicate power, air conditioning, and internet with many others. One security staff, building, and access control system protects many customers. But we have complete control over our physical servers. We are able to mix and match CPU and storage needs for different apps without being limited to what a cloud provider offers. We get to choose when to upgrade hardware, and some we keep for quite a long time. Also, our storage needs exceed the "norm", and we find cloud storage costs to be out of line with everything else offered. I agree that private (single customer) data centers will become very rare, only the largest firms will have them. But colocation versus cloud will be debated forever, with folks choosing what makes sense for them.
Student of SQL and Golf, Master of Neither - David.Poole wrote:
I think people leapt into the cloud making two big mistakes
- Not having any governance in place
- Not having devoted time to reading and/or understanding the Well Architected Framework. All the big 3 have a version of the WAF and they all say the same thing.
The result of those big 2 was a lot of hardware spun up and left running which would have had a traditional data centre manager coming down on the perpetrators like the wrath of Zeus.
When a past employer moved to the cloud at least part of it was to leave a data centre where, had we stayed, we would have been the only client and therefore vulnerable to the financial situation of the company running that data centre.
I think both of those things are a challenge, though I don't see a lot of governance inside most companies. The cloud just makes it a bit worse. The bigger problem often is things keep running, which is $$.
- Brent Ozar wrote:
Referring to private data centers, you wrote:
The cost of running them privately will exceed that of what vendors will charge.
I think that's true if:
- You're comparing apples to apples - some of my clients don't want/need armored security, redundant power, cooling, internet connections, etc, so their private data centers end up way cheaper.
- You're not including the migration costs - moving running apps from one place to another costs real money. I have one client who tried to move to Azure for 3 years, spent 7 figures trying, and they still haven't moved a single app yet.
- You're not comparing performance - some of my clients simply can't get the database performance they need yet out of Azure and AWS, despite working directly with those companies. Good on-prem hardware has gotten so good, and so inexpensive.
(I still love cloud in my toolbox, I just understand why some of my clients get actively angry when the subject comes up.)
I somewhat agree. Certainly the security stuff can be pricey in any data center, and most people don't do what Azure/AWS/GCP do, but even smaller levels of security add up because it's not amortized over many people. If you colo, then it's likely much cheaper to do what Basecamp did and rent a few racks/cages, stuff them with hardware, and pay the facility to go press on buttons or replace cables. However, there is still a management of the infra, which can be a decent cost.
What I find is that people who manage well can do fine in either on-premises setups (colos) or public clouds. Those that don't manage well, always see greener grass elsewhere.
- BobAtDBS wrote:
For us, the "right" choice has remained colocation for 20 years. We get a secure, redundantly provisioned data center - sharing the cost of duplicate power, air conditioning, and internet with many others. One security staff, building, and access control system protects many customers. But we have complete control over our physical servers. We are able to mix and match CPU and storage needs for different apps without being limited to what a cloud provider offers. We get to choose when to upgrade hardware, and some we keep for quite a long time. Also, our storage needs exceed the "norm", and we find cloud storage costs to be out of line with everything else offered. I agree that private (single customer) data centers will become very rare, only the largest firms will have them. But colocation versus cloud will be debated forever, with folks choosing what makes sense for them.
I think the fact you made a choice and made it works says a lot. Plenty of people don't make their thing work, so they look elsewhere. I suspect many places do (can/should) well with colocation, when they have known systems and workloads. When you need a lot of flexibility, changes, that's hard to do locally at the speed up clicking "New resource".
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For data intensive applications, simply moving the database or file storage to the cloud while keeping your applications running on-prem will probably not save you any money. In addition to poor performance, you will pay significantly for ingress/egress charges.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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This sounds like IaaS, excluding the OS. So, in a way, they are going to the cloud. They are just owning the servers, instead of just deploying VMs.
For a modern application, running on PaaS o SaaS model, this is not a real option. If you're incorporating LLMs to the system design, it gets even more unattainable.
So yes, for applications not born in the cloud, staying IaaS is an option and owning the servers and the HA/DR strategies is a place we've been for many years.
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