[HN Gopher] Moore's Scofflaws
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Moore's Scofflaws
Author : steveklabnik
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-02-20 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oxide.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (oxide.computer)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Per core licensing is pretty dumb, especially considering
| commodity systems now have 32, 64, or more cores, and server
| cores vary widely in capabilities.
|
| Per core maybe made a tiny bit of sense when a server was one or
| two cores. But that era's long gone.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also it is a bizarre unit to break things up over. Actually,
| how do per-core programs account for things like SMT? What
| about Bulldozer? Can I get a discount license if I only run it
| on an "efficiency" core? And we won't even get into GPUs...
|
| What next? Let's charge users based on how many instructions
| they have in flight for our application. These ILP cheaters
| have been mooching off the rest of us for ages!
| ghaff wrote:
| It made a lot more sense back in the day. Then a slot of
| things switched to per-socket.
| wmf wrote:
| Oracle and IBM have detailed pricing tables with dozens of
| cases like "one mainframe core is worth three Intel cores".
| But then you negotiate the price anyway so it seems kind of
| pointless.
| bombcar wrote:
| Cloud, for better or worse, seems to be sold in vCPUs (read:
| cores), RAM (gigglebites), and disk.
|
| I wish there was a much better way to compare vCPUs than just
| "count" because one core of some five year old server is not
| the same as a core of a modern performance beast.
| wmf wrote:
| It's not like they charge the same price for a current gen
| vCPU as a five-year-old vCPU. The benefit of self-service is
| that you can benchmark it yourself.
| nyrikki wrote:
| IMHO per socket was extractive most of the time, especially
| when memory capacity was the limit on performance.
|
| The 'Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages'
|
| The main purpose shifted from a hypothetical development cost
| offset to an effort to extract more fees from customers who
| were locked into your product.
|
| Broadcom's changes to VMware, where they have publicly stated
| that increasing revenue while not attempting to build new
| revenue streams or through any value adds for the customers is
| happening now.
|
| I get that any technology moves to an extraction phase after
| growth slows.
|
| But for me, moves like per core licenses are an indicator we
| need to consider vendor mitigation.
|
| Unfortunately capital markets seem to prefer these lower long
| term but predictable gains through extraction vs long term
| dividends etc...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The cloud is where Moores Law goes to die.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Isn't this just an ad?
| hello_computer wrote:
| KVM is free. ZFS is free. Linux & BSD are free. The margins on
| server kit are tiny. If I've grown to the point that I need to
| buy my own hardware, the application software is probably
| something written in-house, so no licensing there either. Oxide
| gets plugged here non-stop, but the audience here still
| struggles to see what the point is. Sounds like a vanity
| project to keep some of the old Solaris talent in-pocket.
|
| edit: and the current growth-area is GPU/ML processing, where
| Oxide has bupkis.
| away271828 wrote:
| One can simultaneously be impressed by the engineering while
| wondering if this level of custom implementation at what will
| probably be pretty low scale really makes sense.
| hello_computer wrote:
| Bezos had a clear proposition: " _I can handle your
| workload better than you can for X cents per hour._ "
| Cantrill doesn't.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's definitely content marketing, but I find Oxide interesting
| enough that I don't mind.
| neom wrote:
| Bryan Cantrill is a million times smarter than me so I'm probably
| missing something. I thought people bought into the enterprise
| cloud ecosystems because of cost savings elsewhere? If you go
| into a platform like AWS/GCP/Azure shouldn't you be designing
| your applications to take advantage of the flexibility in the
| wide range of services offered? If you don't need that and you're
| not buying into all the abstractions they provide, you could use
| _any other_ cloud-lite (Vultr, OVH, Linode etc)?
|
| Maybe I'm stuck in 2015 but are people really out here rolling
| their own clouds these days?
| bcantrill wrote:
| Our big belief is that elastic infrastructure (that is, cloud
| computing) should be orthogonal to the economic model (that is,
| own versus rent). Today, that is not the case: if you want
| cloud computing, you more or less have to rent it. But we know
| that there are many who wish (or need) to run cloud computing
| but on an owned asset. There are many factors that deter that
| today, not least the odious per-core licensing that we
| highlight here. (For a particular brazen example of this, see
| VMware's infamous "AMD tax" ca. 2020.[0])
|
| [0] https://news.vmware.com/company/cpu-pricing-model-update-
| feb...
| dsizzle wrote:
| Why aren't there prices on the website? (Seems weird that
| there isn't given that blog post, where costs are pretty
| central.)
| steveklabnik wrote:
| (not Bryan, not actively part of the decision to put prices
| on the website or not, just my own take.)
|
| Different audiences have different expectations. In the
| place we are, that is, enterprise sales, the expectation is
| not that you can go to a website, get a price, and click a
| button. The expectation is that the two organizations will
| communicate over a period of time ("the sales cycle") to
| work through everything that goes into a deal, and
| eventually come to an agreement or not. This includes so
| many variables that putting the price on the website
| wouldn't make sense, as you're never going to end up at
| that exact price.
|
| I used to find this attitude frustrating, as an engineer,
| but the longer I have been a professional, and worked at
| various organizations, the more I come around to that being
| a good thing, not a bad thing.
| bombcar wrote:
| All I really want to know is "ballpark" - are we talking
| four, five, ten figures?
|
| I feel bad burning salesman time for a solution that is
| way out of our range, but I can't learn that until after
| a meeting or two.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I hear you, but I can assure you that this comes with the
| territory for sales people. Qualifying leads is part of
| the job.
| wmf wrote:
| It's between a half million and a million.
| dsizzle wrote:
| If the price isn't listed, I always take it as a sign
| that nobody is buying it for price reasons ("if you have
| to ask, you can't afford it"). Outside of the blog, I
| don't even see a claim that it's cheaper so that's
| consistent.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| That is understandable, but you would be mistaken.
|
| That quote (which may not even have been said by J.P.
| Morgan) is talking about luxury consumer goods, which is
| a completely different market than business to business
| sales.
| wmf wrote:
| I wonder how many startups are overpaying for things like
| cloud because they are using consumer thinking instead of
| business thinking.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| "If you have to ask, you probably can't fit it in your
| house."
| Sylamore wrote:
| As someone that often has limited time to research viable
| options to present to leadership, I expect to be able to
| negotiate pricing at the enterprise level if we want to
| move forward. What's deeply frustrating that keeps me
| from sometimes mentioning an option is having no idea
| what the rough order of magnitude pricing is. Some kind
| of pricing is deeply appreciated.
|
| If I don't know whether something will fit within the
| approximate budget for the project and can't quickly get
| an idea from other research I'm not going to mention it
| as an option. I'm used to spending about a million per
| rack but that's for a complete ESX cluster with storage
| and networking, if I have no idea how alternatives stack
| up against that it's hard to put it on the table.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I will echo this. A product with no pricing information
| will often just get no further exploration, especially if
| a competitor does have it. Don't underestimate the
| overhead of just having to talk sales before you have a
| price.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You are right that this sort of sales style has its
| downsides. I am also not saying there's no value in
| having _something_ on the page, or that Oxide is always
| going to be this way. I am just talking about why it is a
| norm in many parts of the B2B world.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually find it interesting how many things we (which, in
| part, I mean I) got wrong about cloud computing early on.
| Various other things too.
| rcxdude wrote:
| There are alleged cost savings elsewhere. I haven't seen a
| company that's actually realised them. Every company I know of
| that's gone all-in on cloud is paying a fortune and still has a
| big team to manage everything.
| milesward wrote:
| My company alone has over 150 case studies that document
| specific positive ROI on cloud adoption. Not every can or
| will run their own; I'm pumped for Oxide and I think they are
| going to smash, but some teams really really benefit from
| Public Cloud.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Even taking into account the cost of skilled staff, AWS was
| never price competitive with in house, at least in my
| experience. I simply could never make the numbers work.
|
| In my industry (telco) we had two teams: my team ran our own
| hardware, the other team ran less than 10% of our workload on
| an AWS stack that cost as much per month as we paid per year -
| _including_ annualised capital costs.
|
| They also had double the ops team size (!!), they had to pay
| for everyone to be trained in AWS, and their solution was far
| more complex and brittle than ours was.
|
| Assuming Oxide would have been price competitive with what we
| were already using, I would have jumped at the chance to use
| them, I could have brought the other team on board, and I think
| it would have given us a further cost and performance advantage
| over our AWS based competitors.
| bombcar wrote:
| This has been my (admittedly small and small size) experience
| - it's hard to make cloud competitive _unless_ you have
| something like vastly changing requirements, huge burst
| needs, etc.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Where you using cloud scale style purchasing in house or were
| you on enterprise servers with enterprise switches with
| enterprise storage?
|
| The cloud is good for many users, especially if they migrate
| to cloud native system design, but as a telco you would
| probably have facilities and connectivity which helps out a
| lot.
|
| Companies like Mirantis, choosing a technology completely
| inappropriate for distributed systems (puppet) put a bad
| taste in the mouths of many people.
|
| I implemented OpenStack at one previous employer to just
| convince them that they could run VMs, intending it to allow
| for a cloud migration in the future.
|
| As they ran a lot of long lived large instances it was
| trivial to make it cheaper to run in our own datacenter. Well
| until I moved roles and the IT team tried to implement it
| with expensive enterprise gear and in an attempt to save
| money used FEXs despite the fact I had documented they
| wouldn't work for our traffic patterns.
|
| Same thing during the .com crash. I remember our cage was
| next to one of the old Hotmail cages with their motherboards
| on boards. We were installing dozens and dozens of Netras and
| Yahoo was down the hall with a cage full of DEC gear...we
| went under because we couldn't right-size(cost) our costs.
|
| A lot of the companies who save a lot in cloud migrations
| were the same, having decked out enterprise servers, SANs,
| and network gear that was wasted in a private cloud context.
|
| Enterprise _ is often a euphemism for we are fiercely
| defending very expensive CYA strategy irrespective of value
| to the company or material risk.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I really like 0xide's insight here. I don't know if Bryan has an
| MBA but this article reminds me of how I learned that good
| systems engineers make for good product people.
|
| A friend of mine from Sun went to Santa Clara university for
| their MBA and I was always interested in running a company and we
| talked about what core knowledge the school felt that a "Master"
| of business administration should know. Not too surprisingly
| there was a lot about how you could organize a bunch of
| unreliable elements (employees) into a structure that reliably
| delivered results (products). And in one sense that is exactly
| what cloud computing did as well, organizing unreliable "cheap"
| PC type servers, into a fabric of reliable service delivery. It
| is the _system_ of organizing the parts that is the solution.
|
| Greg Lindahl was one of the founders of Blekko and his experience
| of managing hundreds of machines for the super computer types
| with big machine budgets and low IT budgets, was essential to
| Blekko's ability to deliver its search engine. With a DevOps
| group of six (one manager and five SREs) Blekko managed 2000+
| machines in two data centers. IBM was astonished when they bought
| us that we could manage with so few devops engineers.
|
| We had also done the "What would this cost us on AWS" calculation
| many times with many different variables and the 'break even'
| point, where the cost to self host at a Colocation facility fell
| below the cost to host with AWS was 120 servers. And that
| included reducing the DevOps group size to 3. So about 10 racks
| worth of servers. There was a really funny experience when IBM
| insisted we move our infrastructure to SoftLayer (an IBM
| business) when IBM acquired us and we pointed out that the "soft
| money" cost of running our infrastructure on SoftLayer was about
| $9M a month versus $120K a month. Which their finance group shut
| down that talk and just renewed the lease in the Colo.
|
| But to successfully run a big distributed thing like that, you
| needed to both put your servers in a colocation facility and have
| Greg's software which allowed you to manage them with a small
| team. The total cost of that infrastructure depended on it.
|
| I got a chance to go visit the 0xide team and they absolutely
| "got" that requirement. If I were running Engineering and
| Operations in Blekko today we totally would have kicked
| Supermicro to the curb and replaced them with the 0xide solution.
| I don't know if they have teamed up with Antithesis for testing
| their stuff but man, that combo of management software that never
| breaks and integrated server cabinets with all the things? That's
| a pretty good integration.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| I am constantly impressed by Oxide. Their writing is top notch, I
| think they're exceptional engineers and product thinkers, and
| clearly they care about the ecosystem they inhabit.
|
| One day I would love to get all of their OSS up and running
| locally. Truly, why not try to run your own private cloud? How
| many old laptops, desktops, PIs, etc must we all have lying
| around?
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| Tangent but "Your margin is my opportunity" was originally a Sam
| Walton quote when he was building the 5 and dime stores. Bezos
| was deeply inspired by early Walmart and Sam.
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/walmart
| bcantrill wrote:
| That's interesting -- the quote is very much attributed to
| Bezos. Did the quote actually come from Sam Walton, or merely
| the sentiment? Either way, it's clear that the Waltons were an
| inspiration to Bezos!
| ghaff wrote:
| Quote Investigator comes down pretty hard on the Bezos side
| and doesn't mention Walton.
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/01/13/margin/
| zbrozek wrote:
| Case is inverted with javascript disabled. I've never seen that
| before!
| dcre wrote:
| I can't reproduce in Firefox on macOS. Tell us more about your
| setup!
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