someone has to go and power-cycle the machines every couple months it's chill, that's the point of not using ceph
I think that anyone with actual experience of operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters would challenge this assumption.
Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.
we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.
the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.
The biggest hurdle is getting a mgmt system in place to alert you when something goes wrong - especially at this size. Grafana, Loki, monit, etc are all good tools to leverage that provide quick fault identification.
I have four racks rather than ten, and less storage but more compute. All purchased new from HP with warranties.
Ordering each year takes a couple of days work. Racking that takes one or two.
Initial setup (seeing differences with a new generation of server etc and customizing Ubuntu autoinstallation) is done in a day.
So that's a week per year for setup.
If we are really unlucky, add another week for a strange failure. (This happened once in the 10 years I've been doing this, a CPU needed replacement by the HP engineer.)
I replaced a couple of drives in July, and a network fibre transceiver in May.
Ignoring failed hdds week likely mean very little maintenance.
Yes, drives are going to fail. Yes, power supplies are going to burn out. Yes, god, you’re going to get new parts. Yes, you will have to actually talk to vendors.
Big. Deal. This shit is -not- hard.
For the amount of money you save by doing it like that, you should be clamoring to do it yourself. The concern trolling doesn’t make any sort of argument against it, it just makes you look lazy.
I point out to people that AWS is between ten to one hundred times more expensive than a normal server. The response is "but what if I only need it to handle peak load three hours a day?" Then you still come out ahead with your own server.
We have multiple colo cages. We handle enough traffic - terabytes per second - that we'll never move those to cloud. Yet management always wants more cloud. While simultaneously complaining about how we're not making enough money.
But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.
I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.
AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.
I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.
And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.
For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.