Question about AWS
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Start with money. Price out five years of a workload on cloud versus on premises.
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If we had a bigger view of what you are trying to do, it would be far easier to throw numbers at you to work with. But I will show a simple example.
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Cost of an AD Server on LightSail...
Assuming that you need a GUI and a minimum reasonable amount of RAM at 4GB (which is tiny, but should work) you are looking at $40/mo for one little VM. That is $480 a year. Over five years, that is $2,400.
Now let's price a traditional server. Assuming you already have a place to put it in your office. A good server for a workload like this might be $800. That would be way more power than the AWS VM, but you can only go so cheap. Then you need a Windows license . Assume $1200 for Windows Standard plus Software Assurance. Your total is $2,000 over five years.
That's $400 cheaper. But the on premises option is way faster, both because the VM would have way more resources, and also because the latency to your users would be a fraction of AWS' latency. And things like backups would normally be cheaper.
If you continue to six years, the gap gets much larger.
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@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
If we had a bigger view of what you are trying to do, it would be far easier to throw numbers at you to work with. But I will show a simple example.
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future. Another thing is that our (head)office will be for renovation and we will be transferring location and be back in a year or two.
What triggered his curiosity is that a vendor took him for a spin of an instance where it seemed cheaper...because of the instance and not through a monthly payment by users (like O365 and GApps). Though that instance is for application not DC / AD.
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Now let's add a file server. Let's assume that you need 300GB of file server.
AWS will be $120/mo. That's $7200 in five years.
Now let's compare the on premises. We can probably get by with the $800 server that we already bought in the example above, but just to be insanely conservative let's spend another $800 to upgrade the hardware. We don't need another license as our last one has an unused VM allotment for us.
So in five years, this would cost a total of only the $800.
So between a tiny AD server and a really tiny file server, the on premises is $6800 cheaper over five years. And a sixth year would be SO dramatically cheaper.
And if you think AD on premises is faster than AWS, file servers don't work remotely well at all. You are easily looking at a file server that would be unusable on cloud and screaming fast on premises.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future.
How are those things affecting anything? Why is AWS better for branches or road warriors than your current premises? Do you have really bad Internet? If so, what will you do if your storage goes offline when your network isn't up?
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
What triggered his curiosity is that a vendor took him for a spin of an instance where it seemed cheaper
Why would he let a vendor set him up to be tricked like that? That's a really bad idea.
HOW did it "seem" cheaper? The simplest calculation shows that it has to cost SO much more.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
because of the instance and not through a monthly payment by users (like O365 and GApps). Though that instance is for application not DC / AD.
Doesn't matter. On premises is cheaper unless your scale is just so ridiculously small that you can never justify the smallest of hardware. But just one AD DC is enough to push you over that limit.
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@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
Now let's add a file server. Let's assume that you need 300GB of file server.
AWS will be $120/mo. That's $7200 in five years.
Now let's compare the on premises. We can probably get by with the $800 server that we already bought in the example above, but just to be insanely conservative let's spend another $800 to upgrade the hardware. We don't need another license as our last one has an unused VM allotment for us.
So in five years, this would cost a total of only the $800.
So between a tiny AD server and a really tiny file server, the on premises is $6800 cheaper over five years. And a sixth year would be SO dramatically cheaper.
And if you think AD on premises is faster than AWS, file servers don't work remotely well at all. You are easily looking at a file server that would be unusable on cloud and screaming fast on premises.
Thanks SAM, I would bring him the numbers then. 300GB is only 2 network folders. We are now reaching 6TB..hehehe.
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I think the trick is math. It sounds like he's using emotions to look at this, and not money. Make him put the cost into real numbers.
I use cloud all of the time, but that's because I'm doing things completely differently, don't have a premises at all, don't use Windows, etc.
Windows alone is almost a guarantee that cloud is out of the question. Not always, but almost always. But Windows, file server, non-elastic workloads. This is like a text book example of when no one should even talk about cloud.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
Thanks SAM, I would bring him the numbers then. 300GB is only 2 network folders. We are now reaching 6TB..hehehe.
Dear Lord! No normal service can handle that. LightSail and Vultr tap out below 500GB. The only way to do that is with traditional AWS which is a lot more work and anything about 300GB is really impossibly expensive. The cost of 6TB on cloud would be absurd. For something that would cost only $300 on premises, might cost you $1,000 per month on cloud.
$300 vs. $60,000
HAHAHAA
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@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future.
How are those things affecting anything? Why is AWS better for branches or road warriors than your current premises? Do you have really bad Internet? If so, what will you do if your storage goes offline when your network isn't up?
Yes we do have bad internet here in Philippines. We would be getting multiple vendors for these though. We already have 1 fiber and 2 dsl lines which we plan to upgrade. However, still, just 2 weeks ago, we experienced a fiber outage and 1 dsl line. We still made use of 1 slow dsl for 2 days.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future.
How are those things affecting anything? Why is AWS better for branches or road warriors than your current premises? Do you have really bad Internet? If so, what will you do if your storage goes offline when your network isn't up?
Yes we do have bad internet here in Philippines. We would be getting multiple vendors for these though. We already have 1 fiber and 2 dsl lines which we plan to upgrade. However, still, just 2 weeks ago, we experienced a fiber outage and 1 dsl line. We still made use of 1 slow dsl for 2 days.
Does that make AWS better or worse? If you had AWS and your ISP went down, your office would be offline but your road warriors would still be working. If you had on premises and the Internet went down, your office would keep working but the road warriors would be offline.
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I think some of the problems are probably more fundamental. Why are tools like AD and SMB file sharing being used in your situation? Those aren't appropriate tools or even platforms in your use case, from the sounds of it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future.
How are those things affecting anything? Why is AWS better for branches or road warriors than your current premises? Do you have really bad Internet? If so, what will you do if your storage goes offline when your network isn't up?
Yes we do have bad internet here in Philippines. We would be getting multiple vendors for these though. We already have 1 fiber and 2 dsl lines which we plan to upgrade. However, still, just 2 weeks ago, we experienced a fiber outage and 1 dsl line. We still made use of 1 slow dsl for 2 days.
Does that make AWS better or worse? If you had AWS and your ISP went down, your office would be offline but your road warriors would still be working. If you had on premises and the Internet went down, your office would keep working but the road warriors would be offline.
Told him that but he said that with multiple ISPs including wireless 4Gs, we can survive. If submarine cables are the culprit, then no business country-wide.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
He said that it would actually be great if we use AWS as he sees more branches and road-warriors in the future.
How are those things affecting anything? Why is AWS better for branches or road warriors than your current premises? Do you have really bad Internet? If so, what will you do if your storage goes offline when your network isn't up?
Yes we do have bad internet here in Philippines. We would be getting multiple vendors for these though. We already have 1 fiber and 2 dsl lines which we plan to upgrade. However, still, just 2 weeks ago, we experienced a fiber outage and 1 dsl line. We still made use of 1 slow dsl for 2 days.
Does that make AWS better or worse? If you had AWS and your ISP went down, your office would be offline but your road warriors would still be working. If you had on premises and the Internet went down, your office would keep working but the road warriors would be offline.
Told him that but he said that with multiple ISPs including wireless 4Gs, we can survive. If submarine cables are the culprit, then no business country-wide.
You mean that he just avoided the question?
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Even in the US with fast fiber, accessing 6TB over the Internet with SMB is ridiculously slow. Having to do it over DSL from another country.... impossible.
His proposed solution is going to cost a fortune and it wont' even work.
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@scottalanmiller said in Question about AWS:
Even in the US with fast fiber, accessing 6TB over the Internet with SMB is ridiculously slow. Having to do it over DSL from another country.... impossible.
His proposed solution is going to cost a fortune and it wont' even work.
Sort of. In anycase, you have been most helpful in opening my eyes. I can now concentrate on the Virtual Infrastructure I had proposed.
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With the numbers you just brought in, he may be discouraged. I'll sure to include those to my report/recommendation.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Question about AWS:
With the numbers you just brought in, he may be discouraged. I'll sure to include those to my report/recommendation.
Should be more than the numbers. Sure it will lose a ton of money. But the far bigger deal is how it won't even work. The AD will work, just slowly. But the file server realistically just won't function. No one does this, ever, for a reason.
If what he was proposing was cheap or functional, everyone would do it. But absolutely no one does. It's not like everyone hasn't thought about it and realized it doesn't work. He is thinking that he can reinvent the wheel, in a way that is so obvious yet he seems to think that everyone hasn't gone down this path already.
