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Use One Big Server (2022)

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343 points antov825 | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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decasia ◴[] No.45085472[source]
Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.
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1. marcosdumay ◴[] No.45085982[source]
> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front).

Yes, there is.

Honestly, it looks to me that this school of thought is mostly adopted by people that can't do arithmetic or use a calculator. But it does absolutely exist.

That said, no, servers are not nearly expensive enough to move the needle on a company nowadays. The room that often goes around them is, and that's why way more people rent the room than the servers in it.

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2. sam_lowry_ ◴[] No.45086162[source]
Connectivity is a problem, not the room.

I ran the IT side of a media company once, and it all worked on a half-empty rack of hardware in a small closet... except for the servers that needed bandwidth. These were colocated. Until we realized that the hoster did not have enough bandwidth, at which point we migrated to two bare metal servers at Hetzner.

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3. marcosdumay ◴[] No.45086787[source]
It's connectivity, reliable power, reliable cooling, and security.

The actual space isn't a big deal, but the entire environment has large fixed costs.

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4. sam_lowry_ ◴[] No.45092794{3}[source]
In abstract yeah.

In practice, all that except connectivity is relatively easy to have on-site.

Connectivity is highly dependent on the business location, local providers, their business plans and their willingness to go out of their way to serve the clients.

And I am not talking only about bandwidth, but also reserve lines and latency.