Moving education services to the cloud
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
So if they can't afford to have someone look after the hardware, and can't buy gear that has warranties attached to it. What are the alternatives for offloading those servers to a cloud provider?
Here is the bottom line... if they can't afford these things, then they can't afford them. There is no silver bullet for not having any money. Running Windows workloads is a price premium that shops do when they have lots of financial resources are want to buy more expensive systems in exchange for other benefits. The reliance on Windows while not being able to afford Windows is a problem. Why aren't they on something that they can afford?
Cloud providers are more expensive, in general, not cheaper. They are only cheaper when the workload is temporary, very small in total or fluctuates wildly and can be automated in its scaling.
It sounds like the workloads are tiny here. But that's say two servers there, likely 4GB each. That alone is $80/mo or $960/year. That's a LOT of money compared to one reasonable in house server. If cutting cost is the goal, nothing is going to compare to on premises hardware. And things like HVAC generally benefit from being local.
You can easily buy a quality, supported server for less money than even two VMs can be hosted.
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@ChrisL said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Our basic 10U option starts at $399/month. An extra 2U for whatever other goodies one might want to throw in.
So that means $945/mo in savings! With room to grow. At 10U you have room for the three node starter cluster, 2U of switches, 1U of a backup appliance, 1U of router and room for 150% capacity growth if you ever need it (three more nodes taking you from two usable to five usable.)
So my numbers for 64VMs could, in theory, scale to as high as 160VM in that cost envelope!!
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Just to run some quick numbers for you. A Scale HC3 cluster starts around $25K. That's a three node cluster with a ton of memory, IOPS and full HA (at the platform level.) You can run something like 128 Linux VMs or 64 Windows VMs on that (give or take rather a bit.)
To do the same on Vultr (figure 64 2GB Windows nodes) you would pay $2,304/mo without HA. If you wanted failover you would need to double that.
With Scale HC3 you would need three Windows Datacenter licenses plus the $25K base hardware. Let's call that $46K total.
Let's say that you run this workload for four years. Vultr would be $110,592.
If we subtract the capex of the Scale HC3 plus the Windows licensing from that we have $1,345/mo to spend on our colocation. We only need a 6U colocation space for this setup. Figure 8U to be safe. Our colocation cost will be far less than that, @ChrisL could give you a ballpark on that.
If you get bigger than the stated Scale HC3 size, the cost of colocation plummets quickly per workload. If you needed four nodes or five nodes you outpace cloud by crazy margins.
And the cloud cost assumes no HA, no backups. If you want either of those, the numbers climb quickly. But HA is already built into the colocation option in my example and backups are cheap to add (relatively speaking.)
Not sure how to fork this conversation cause this is the turning point as I have a question. I'm reading your smbitjournal article on private cloud, but in short where does AWS really become viable for businesses?
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions). Someone else said they would get a number together, but based on our initial cost for servers and our saturation of admins looking after them... I don't know if the numbers are going to really add up. Which goes back to the question, where does AWS and Azure really make sense? I know they are supposed to be highly elastic, but you could just as easily add new servers to your racks. Unless part of that is "we need to down size quickly to save lots of money after laying off some people" or "we need to drop all these servers because we're cutting out those services or combining them with X service over here."
I mean the big point (taking from a spot in the article) that AWS & Azure appeal to companies who need a ton of temporary instances stood up. Is that only for development? I can't think of any other instances where a company would need a ton of temporary servers.
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
I mean the big point (taking from a spot in the article) that AWS & Azure appeal to companies who need a ton of temporary instances stood up. Is that only for development? I can't think of any other instances where a company would need a ton of temporary servers.
All large companies do. Constantly. Think about business intelligence. Web sites. Financial processing. Payroll. Simulations. Rendering. Application platforms. MangoLassi. Databases. VDI. Remote Desktops. Proxy servers. And on and on. Even AD and DNS need scaling in large companies.
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions).
Size is only a factor when it is very, very small. You are too large of an environment for cloud computing to make sense because you are so tiny that you can't justify a single server. That's just a threshold number. You are over, say, 30 VMs so cloud computing can't compete based on size.
So the question becomes - how much do you scale up and down? If you are not scaling up and down, why would anyone have even mentioned a cloud platform? That doesn't make much sense. You'd pay so much and get nothing for it.
I'd ask them... what made them consider cloud computing in the first place - because they've not listed a factor that would apply yet. So something is missing from the equation. What factor led them to this question?
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Which goes back to the question, where does AWS and Azure really make sense? I know they are supposed to be highly elastic, but you could just as easily add new servers to your racks. Unless part of that is "we need to down size quickly to save lots of money after laying off some people" or "we need to drop all these servers because we're cutting out those services or combining them with X service over here."
Adding servers is unidirectional. Cloud Computing is bidirectional. Adding servers is high latency. If your web app hit 90% capacity, how long till the new server could be purchased, racked, loaded and added to the cluster? AWS can do this in about ten seconds.
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions).
Size is only a factor when it is very, very small. You are too large of an environment for cloud computing to make sense because you are so tiny that you can't justify a single server. That's just a threshold number. You are over, say, 30 VMs so cloud computing can't compete based on size.
So the question becomes - how much do you scale up and down? If you are not scaling up and down, why would anyone have even mentioned a cloud platform? That doesn't make much sense. You'd pay so much and get nothing for it.
I'd ask them... what made them consider cloud computing in the first place - because they've not listed a factor that would apply yet. So something is missing from the equation. What factor led them to this question?
Honestly I was taken by surprise... I actually suggested Scale Computing because it would make more sense financially than moving all of our servers to a cloud provider. We spin up new servers but they aren't temporary... One of our new projects required 4 servers for a geographic information system (we lay a lot of fiber as an ISP), we also added a couple more servers for accounting that will remain. But nothing we setup and take down within even a year of it's creation. We try and eliminate redundant services (like the 4 new GIS servers, they displaced a really expensive older application).
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Which goes back to the question, where does AWS and Azure really make sense? I know they are supposed to be highly elastic, but you could just as easily add new servers to your racks. Unless part of that is "we need to down size quickly to save lots of money after laying off some people" or "we need to drop all these servers because we're cutting out those services or combining them with X service over here."
If your web app hit 90% capacity, how long till the new server could be purchased, racked, loaded and added to the cluster? AWS can do this in about ten seconds.
Valid point. Once a company plateaued in their rapid growth, would they move away from the cloud and into their own customer owned gear, or stay in the cloud should they need to scale back with a dip in popularity... I guess that's different with each business case. Just something I was thinking about.
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions).
Size is only a factor when it is very, very small. You are too large of an environment for cloud computing to make sense because you are so tiny that you can't justify a single server. That's just a threshold number. You are over, say, 30 VMs so cloud computing can't compete based on size.
So the question becomes - how much do you scale up and down? If you are not scaling up and down, why would anyone have even mentioned a cloud platform? That doesn't make much sense. You'd pay so much and get nothing for it.
I'd ask them... what made them consider cloud computing in the first place - because they've not listed a factor that would apply yet. So something is missing from the equation. What factor led them to this question?
Honestly I was taken by surprise... I actually suggest Scale Computing because it would make more sense financially than moving all of our servers to a cloud provider. We spin up new servers but they aren't temporary... One of our new projects required 4 servers for a geographic information system (we lay a lot of fiber as an ISP), we also added a couple more servers for accounting that will remain. But nothing we setup and take down within even a year of it's creation. We try and eliminate redundant services (like the 4 new GIS servers, they displaced a really expensive older application).
Yes, Scale is likely a great choice then. And can be on premises or hosted, as needed. Something like Scale at a Colocation facility can be idea.
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@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Which goes back to the question, where does AWS and Azure really make sense? I know they are supposed to be highly elastic, but you could just as easily add new servers to your racks. Unless part of that is "we need to down size quickly to save lots of money after laying off some people" or "we need to drop all these servers because we're cutting out those services or combining them with X service over here."
If your web app hit 90% capacity, how long till the new server could be purchased, racked, loaded and added to the cluster? AWS can do this in about ten seconds.
Valid point. Once a company plateaued in their rapid growth, would they move away from the cloud and into their own customer owned gear, or stay in the cloud should they need to scale back with a dip in popularity... I guess that's different with each business case. Just something I was thinking about.
Correct, it very much depends. But you don't use cloud for "steady growth", you use it for "rapid expansion and contraction." If you are not contracting, you should not be on cloud.
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Which goes back to the question, where does AWS and Azure really make sense? I know they are supposed to be highly elastic, but you could just as easily add new servers to your racks. Unless part of that is "we need to down size quickly to save lots of money after laying off some people" or "we need to drop all these servers because we're cutting out those services or combining them with X service over here."
If your web app hit 90% capacity, how long till the new server could be purchased, racked, loaded and added to the cluster? AWS can do this in about ten seconds.
Valid point. Once a company plateaued in their rapid growth, would they move away from the cloud and into their own customer owned gear, or stay in the cloud should they need to scale back with a dip in popularity... I guess that's different with each business case. Just something I was thinking about.
Correct, it very much depends. But you don't use cloud for "steady growth", you use it for "rapid expansion and contraction." If you are not contracting, you should not be on cloud.
Fair enough. As always, I appreciate the learning opportunity, Scott.
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
Just to run some quick numbers for you. A Scale HC3 cluster starts around $25K. That's a three node cluster with a ton of memory, IOPS and full HA (at the platform level.) You can run something like 128 Linux VMs or 64 Windows VMs on that (give or take rather a bit.)
To do the same on Vultr (figure 64 2GB Windows nodes) you would pay $2,304/mo without HA. If you wanted failover you would need to double that.
With Scale HC3 you would need three Windows Datacenter licenses plus the $25K base hardware. Let's call that $46K total.
Let's say that you run this workload for four years. Vultr would be $110,592.
If we subtract the capex of the Scale HC3 plus the Windows licensing from that we have $1,345/mo to spend on our colocation. We only need a 6U colocation space for this setup. Figure 8U to be safe. Our colocation cost will be far less than that, @ChrisL could give you a ballpark on that.
If you get bigger than the stated Scale HC3 size, the cost of colocation plummets quickly per workload. If you needed four nodes or five nodes you outpace cloud by crazy margins.
And the cloud cost assumes no HA, no backups. If you want either of those, the numbers climb quickly. But HA is already built into the colocation option in my example and backups are cheap to add (relatively speaking.)
Max from @StarWind_Software quoted me approximately $10K a box in this range, so if you don't need three nodes, their 2 nodes would less, and quite possibly a lot less, because those boxes each at something like 6 TB of SSD storage.
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@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions).
Size is only a factor when it is very, very small. You are too large of an environment for cloud computing to make sense because you are so tiny that you can't justify a single server. That's just a threshold number. You are over, say, 30 VMs so cloud computing can't compete based on size.
So the question becomes - how much do you scale up and down? If you are not scaling up and down, why would anyone have even mentioned a cloud platform? That doesn't make much sense. You'd pay so much and get nothing for it.
I'd ask them... what made them consider cloud computing in the first place - because they've not listed a factor that would apply yet. So something is missing from the equation. What factor led them to this question?
I'm guessing here, but I'd guess because those asking the questions don't realize that AWS/Azure aren't the same thing as Vultr/DO. They assume they are all VPSs (they don't know what cloud computing really is).
It sounds like the OP was in the same boat, treating AWS and Azure like VPS.
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@Dashrender said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@scottalanmiller said in Moving education services to the cloud:
@BBigford said in Moving education services to the cloud:
The reason I ask is because I just came out of a meeting where we were asked point blank by management why we couldn't have all of our servers on AWS. We have around 70 servers (mix of Windows/Linux, various distros & versions).
Size is only a factor when it is very, very small. You are too large of an environment for cloud computing to make sense because you are so tiny that you can't justify a single server. That's just a threshold number. You are over, say, 30 VMs so cloud computing can't compete based on size.
So the question becomes - how much do you scale up and down? If you are not scaling up and down, why would anyone have even mentioned a cloud platform? That doesn't make much sense. You'd pay so much and get nothing for it.
I'd ask them... what made them consider cloud computing in the first place - because they've not listed a factor that would apply yet. So something is missing from the equation. What factor led them to this question?
I'm guessing here, but I'd guess because those asking the questions don't realize that AWS/Azure aren't the same thing as Vultr/DO. They assume they are all VPSs (they don't know what cloud computing really is).
It sounds like the OP was in the same boat, treating AWS and Azure like VPS.
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@BBigford back on the original question though. You never answered a damned thing.
Forget AWS/Azure.
What services does this friend want to move? Answer this and we can give intelligent on topic answers.
