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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I recently rented a rack with a telecom and put some of my own hardware in it (it's custom weird stuff with hardware accelerators and all the FIPS 140 level 4 requirements), but even the telecom provider was offering a managed VPS product when I got on the phone with them.

The uptime in these DCs is very good (certainly better than AWS's us-east-1), and you get a very good price with tons of bandwidth. Most datacenter and colo providers can do this now.

I think people believe that "on prem" means actually racking the servers in your closet, but you can get datacenter space with fantastic power, cooling, and security almost anywhere these days.

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It's a spectrum:

On top is AWS lambda or something where you are completely removed from the actual hardware that's running your code.

At the bottom is a free acre of land where you start construction and talk to utilities to get electricity and water there. You build your own data center, hire people to run and extend it, etc.

There is tons of space in between where compromises are made by either paying a provider to do something for you or doing it yourself. Is somebody from the datacenter where you rented a rack or two going in and pressing a reset button after you called them a form of cloud automation? How about you renting a root VM at Hetzner? Is that VM on prem? People who paint these tradeoffs in a black and white matter and don't acknowledge that there are different choices for different companies and scenarios are not doing the discussion a service.

On the other hand, somebody who built their business on AppEngine or CloudFlare workes could look at that other company who is renting a pet pool of EC2 instances and ask if they are even in the cloud or if they are just simulating on-prem.

There's also a good point here (at least at the top of the stack) about reliability: the top of the spectrum goes down relatively frequently due to its dependencies, but even plain old boring EC2 has much better reliability than services like Lambda.

I think the question people are really interested in is usually "What percentage over my costs would I pay to outsource X?" (where X is some component of the complexity stack)

Which, first order approximated, is a function of (1) how big a company you are (aka "Can you even afford to hire two people to just do X?") and (2) how competitive the market is for X.

Colo and dedicated VMs are so reasonably priced because it's a standardized, highly-competive market.

Similarly, certain managed cloud services are ridiculously expensive because they have a locked-in customer base.

Which would suggest outsourcing components that have maximum vendor competition and standardization, as they're going to be offered at the lowest margin.

>I think people believe that "on prem" means actually racking the servers in your closet, but you can get datacenter space with fantastic power, cooling, and security almost anywhere these days.

That's because that is what on prem means. What you're describing is colocating.

When clouds define "on-prem" in opposition to their services (for sales purposes), colo facilities are lumped into that bucket. They're not exactly wrong, except a rack at a colo is an extension of your premises with a landlord who understands your needs.

> it's custom weird stuff with hardware accelerators and all the FIPS 140 level 4 requirements

What kind of weird stuff are we talking?

Servers for an API for https://arbitrand.com

Essentially very high security and throughput TRNG servers (with cryptographic signing and the like).

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