Re: [PLUG] small business server virtualization?

["Lee H. Marzke" <lee@marzke.net>]

Rich,

I think your right the fist time,  basically it's complicated.

All the hype of switching to cloud as a no-brainer is just misdirected,  it has to be
though out like any engineering problem.

Lee

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rich Freeman" <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 10:28:09 AM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] small business server virtualization?

> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 6:58 AM, Lee H. Marzke <lee@marzke.net> wrote:
>>
>> A good business case is NetFlix which runs on Amazon.   They  have a special
>> service 'chaos monkey' that randomly kills ANY of their servers, doing this
>> all the time, just to test that their recovery works.    Also Netflix runs
>> the  "Directory listing"  on amazon, with the actual streaming of movie
>> content from their private data center.     As you would guess, the
>> performance and reliability for streaming just doesn't work on Amazon.
>>
> 
> While I'll agree with just about everything you've said about Amazon
> I'm skeptical of your last sentence, unless this is actually based on
> something Netflix has said publicly.
> 
> I am guessing that performance/reliability isn't their main concern
> for streaming so much as cost, and maybe some kind of licensing
> conditions.
> 
> Reliability/performance shouldn't really be an issue, because
> load-balancing that across many servers should be pretty easy.  If an
> odd server goes down worst case a dozen users get a blip in their
> video, which is probably fine if it is rare.  And if they cared that
> much about it they could design with that in mind, and probably
> already have to do so with their own data centers.  Performance
> requirements for video streaming are pretty low unless you're
> transcoding in realtime, which I doubt Netflix would have to do.
> Really the processing power needed to stream the video is even less
> than what your Roku needs to play it back.
> 
> I mentioned licensing speculatively, because I have no idea what
> constraints Netflix is under with the content creators.  If Hollywood
> is paranoid and tells them that they need to be encrypting all their
> storage with hardware decryption modules or whatever then that might
> be something they just can't do with AWS.  This might or might not be
> a factor.
> 
> I think cost is the main factor and it comes into play in a few ways:
> 
> Bandwidth is of course a HUGE factor.  I can only imagine what kind of
> bandwidth Netflix consumes, and even if they centrally serve the
> content they could almost certainly negotiate at least as good a deal
> on bandwidth as Amazon could, and even a tiny bit of profit in
> Amazon's pricing would be a huge loss for Netflix if the pricing was
> the same.  I wouldn't be surprised though if Netflix actually uses
> more bandwidth for streatming than all of AWS.
> 
> Then you get colocation.  Because of those bandwidth costs Netflix
> will try to forward position their content closer to their customers,
> ideally inside of ISP networks so that they don't go out over the
> network, which lowers their costs even more.  That means they are
> running their own servers whether they want to or not, which means the
> benefits of giving this over to AWS is diminished.
> 
> Then I wonder about the actual hardware costs.  Streaming is the sort
> of thing that is extremely low-CPU but fairly high on IO/etc, so I
> imagine that at large scale there could be savings for optimizing your
> hardware around this.  Spending $1000 on hardware optimized for
> streaming video could very well go further than the more generic AWS
> options (despite the fact that AWS also has different options for
> optimization around CPU/RAM/IO/etc).
> 
> And of course there is storage.  I'm not sure how much of a cost that
> actually is these days with the costs of storage coming down (the
> costs of storage must be dropping faster than the rate new content is
> produced).  However, it could still be quite a bit.  Running storage
> pods or Ceph or whatever probably could be more cost-effective than
> paying for S3 at large scale.
> 
> It sounds to me that Netflix identified the one component of their
> design that has the largest opportunity for savings and decided to
> optimize it.  That is a good overall strategy for anybody using AWS.
> Use them to get up and running quickly.  Optimize later.  But
> definitely keep in mind the caveats Lee pointed out - they're designed
> around the new model where hardware isn't intended to be perfect.  You
> can't just migrate an application from a mainframe to AWS and expect
> no issues without a redesign.
> 
> --
> Rich
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 
IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM 
+1 800-393-5217 office 
+1 484-348-2230 fax
___________________________________________________________________________
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