HN user
I run https://BareMetalSavings.com.
The amount of companies who use K8s when they have no business nor technological justification for it is staggering. It is the number one blocker in moving to bare metal/on prem when costs become too much.
Yes, on prem has its gotchas just like the EKS deployment described in the post, but everything is so much simpler and straightforward it's much easier to grasp the on prem side of things.
Thanks for sharing!
Plugging https://BareMetalSavings.com
in case you want to ballpark-estimate your move off of the cloud
Bonus points: I'm a Fastmail customer, so it tangentially tracks
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Quick note about the article: ZFS encryption can be flaky, be sure you know what you're doing before deploying for your infrastructure.
Relevant Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/1f59zp6/is_zfs_encrypt...
A spreadsheet of related issues that I can't remember who made:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OfRSXibZ2nIE9DGK6sww...
This.
I run BareMetalSavings.com[0], a toy for ballpark-estimating bare-metal/cloud savings, and the companies that have it hardest to move away from the cloud are those who are highly dependent on Kubernetes.
It's great for the devs but I wouldn't want to operate a cluster.
The first FAQ question addresses exactly that: colocation costs are added to every bare metal item (even storage drives).
Note that this doesn't intend to be used for accounting, but for estimating, and it's good at that. If anything, it's more favorable to the cloud (e.g, no egress costs).
If you're on the cloud right now and BMS shows you can save a lot of money, that's a good indicator to carefully research the subject.
Not every use case is more efficient on the cloud
HBM or not, those latest server chips are crazy fast and efficient. You can probably condense 8 servers from just a few years ago into one latest-gen Epyc.
I run BareMetalSavings.com[0], a toy for ballpark-estimating bare-metal/cloud savings, and the things you can do with just a few servers today are pretty crazy.
To expand on this, I run BareMetalSavings.com[0] and the most common cause of people staying with the cloud is it's very hard for them to maintain their own K8S cluster(s), which they want to keep because they're great for any non-ops developer.
So those savings are possible only if your devs are willing to leave the lock in of comfort
Out of curiosity, why not go bare metal in a managed colocation? Is that for the geographic spread? Or unpredictable load?
Every few months of this spend is like buying a server
Edit: back at my pc and checked, relevant bare metal is ~$500/m, amortized:
https://baremetalsavings.com/c/LtxKMNj
Edit 2: for 100tb..
Yes, bare metal is not a panacea. Some use cases require 0 personnel change going bare metal (even having reduced labor), and some are very much the opposite.
Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference :