Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
We use Teams, it's not great but it also provides a lot of functionality. I'm curious as to what your "requirements" are that none of these meet.
Mostly cost and governance. Having a low cost (ours costs us... a couple dollars a year?) IM platform that we can control users, store the data, scale without paying for it, control the users completely, have security, and actually be usable (looking at Teams there.)
We use Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Teams, Cliq and Rocket every day for different reasons. Telegram and WhatsApp are personal or pre-employment only. Slack and Teams are "customer systems that we hate". Slack isn't bad, it's really just pricing that makes it ridiculous. If it were free, it would be really nice.
Literally none of them are remotely affordable to do a good job except running our own. Which takes essentially zero effort to maintain, gives us everything we need, and costs effectively nothing. It's not just "slightly better", it's black and white, slam dunk winner with no real competitors (other than like Mattermost that we would also run ourselves.)
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Just a quick price comparison...
Rocket for us is around $20 a year, give or take? It's soft cost because it runs on excess resources that already exist and uses only trivial admin time that isn't a priority, so resources we already pay for. It has costs, but they are unmeasurably low.
Slack would cost us around $500/mo or $6K a year. That's a lot of money for no noticeable benefits. I mean Slack, overall, might be slightly nicer than Rocket. But not nice enough for me to really clearly know in what ways.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Teams: I hope you are kidding. We have one customer on it and it's like stepping back to 2003 to a project I would recommend flunking a college student for making. It's amateur at best. Worst tool I've seen in a very, very long time. It's like they never saw IM in the 2000s and just imagined that no one knew how it should work.
I don't love the tool, but how about some real gripes. Factual things it doesn't do that you need.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Mostly cost and governance. Having a low cost (ours costs us... a couple dollars a year?) IM platform that we can control users, store the data, scale without paying for it, control the users completely, have security, and actually be usable (looking at Teams there.)
So the only real gripe here is store the data because all of the others are available through the other systems. And any hosted solution won't let you store the data so you've got a self fulfilling argument here.
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Teams: I hope you are kidding. We have one customer on it and it's like stepping back to 2003 to a project I would recommend flunking a college student for making. It's amateur at best. Worst tool I've seen in a very, very long time. It's like they never saw IM in the 2000s and just imagined that no one knew how it should work.
I don't love the tool, but how about some real gripes. Factual things it doesn't do that you need.
Real gripes like a slow interface, difficult to find and follow conversations. Eveyrthing needs to be expanded to be read. It constantly says that you have unread messages but doesn't show any. It deploys as malware. Slow and cumbersome, wastes the team's time.
Yes, it integrates with O365 which is nice, if you have O365 which they do with the customer that uses it. They don't like it, though. But they put up with it for the integration and price.
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Mostly cost and governance. Having a low cost (ours costs us... a couple dollars a year?) IM platform that we can control users, store the data, scale without paying for it, control the users completely, have security, and actually be usable (looking at Teams there.)
So the only real gripe here is store the data because all of the others are available through the other systems. And any hosted solution won't let you store the data so you've got a self fulfilling argument here.
Huh? those are really big, very real issues. It's not functional because it doesn't do what is needed. And I don't know many companies that don't need that. It's pretty basic stuff. Poo pooing basic functionality is a pretty bad way to make a point.
Basically the in house system is cheaper and does way more. To get the same functionality from others is either really costly or not available.
Now, to try to make that not sound "real", you act like data storage, cost, or governance don't matter. What exactly would matter then?
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I prefer Slack myself but I have Teams here and don't see any of those issues you state. Some people like it so that's fine if they do. I think the cost of Slack is worth it. I think it is unrealistic to have a free product that works that well and be free to scale.
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Only time cloud is cheaper is for intermittent use or if you need less resources than one server can provide.
Even a $5 Vultr VM is expensive in comparison.This of course assuming you want to deal with your own infrastructure and many don't.
Comparing $5 Vultr VM to your own server.
$5 Vultr is 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, up to 25 GB SSD.
Server specs
Consolidation ratio: 6 vCPU to 1 pCPU.
CPU: 32 cores
Number of Vultr VMs: 32 x 6=192 VMs
RAM: 192 x 1GB = 192 GB
Average Storage Utilization: 20% of 25GB = 5GB
SSD: 192 x 5GB=960 GB
Example of server: 1U Supermicro 32 core AMD Epyc Rome, 192GB RAM, 2x1TB NVMe SSD, 2x10GbE
Cost of server: less than $7K.
Lifespan of hardware: 5 yearsHypervisor management
Monthly cost: $50
Yearly cost: 12 x 50 = $600
5 year cost: 5 x $600 = $3KHosting Costs
1U Colocation America, /24 IP Range
Monthly cost: ~$250/month
Yearly cost: 12 x 250 = $3000
5 year cost: 5 x $3000 = $15KTotal cost server, hosting and management
$7K + $3K + $15K = $25KVultr costs
Number of $5 VMs: 192 VMs
Monthly cost: 192 x $5 = $960/month
Yearly cost: 12 x $960 = $11520/year
5 year cost: 5 x $11520 = ~58KSo $5 VMs @ Vultr is about twice as expensive as your own server in colo - if you have enough workloads to fill one server.
So in this particular case, if you need 100 small VMs or more than it's cheaper to own the server.
With a smaller server the break-even would with fewer VMs.If you are on-prem you don't have the hosting costs but you need to account for power and cooling and other costs instead.
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@Pete-S said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Hypervisor management
Monthly cost: $50
Yearly cost: 12 x 50 = $600
5 year cost: 5 x $600 = $3KThat's less than one hour of IT maintenance a month for 192 VMs.....
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@stacksofplates said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Teams: I hope you are kidding. We have one customer on it and it's like stepping back to 2003 to a project I would recommend flunking a college student for making. It's amateur at best. Worst tool I've seen in a very, very long time. It's like they never saw IM in the 2000s and just imagined that no one knew how it should work.
I don't love the tool, but how about some real gripes. Factual things it doesn't do that you need.
Give notifications of messages in a timely manner.
I'm normally seeing notices 6+ hours after they are sent - on my iPhone that is. -
@Pete-S said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Only time cloud is cheaper is for intermittent use or if you need less resources than one server can provide.
Even a $5 Vultr VM is expensive in comparison.This of course assuming you want to deal with your own infrastructure and many don't.
Comparing $5 Vultr VM to your own server.
$5 Vultr is 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, up to 25 GB SSD.
Server specs
Consolidation ratio: 6 vCPU to 1 pCPU.
CPU: 32 cores
Number of Vultr VMs: 32 x 6=192 VMs
RAM: 192 x 1GB = 192 GB
Average Storage Utilization: 20% of 25GB = 5GB
SSD: 192 x 5GB=960 GB
Example of server: 1U Supermicro 32 core AMD Epyc Rome, 192GB RAM, 2x1TB NVMe SSD, 2x10GbE
Cost of server: less than $7K.
Lifespan of hardware: 5 yearsHypervisor management
Monthly cost: $50
Yearly cost: 12 x 50 = $600
5 year cost: 5 x $600 = $3KHosting Costs
1U Colocation America, /24 IP Range
Monthly cost: ~$250/month
Yearly cost: 12 x 250 = $3000
5 year cost: 5 x $3000 = $15KTotal cost server, hosting and management
$7K + $3K + $15K = $25KVultr costs
Number of $5 VMs: 192 VMs
Monthly cost: 192 x $5 = $960/month
Yearly cost: 12 x $960 = $11520/year
5 year cost: 5 x $11520 = ~58KSo $5 VMs @ Vultr is about twice as expensive as your own server in colo - if you have enough workloads to fill one server.
So in this particular case, if you need 100 small VMs or more than it's cheaper to own the server.
With a smaller server the break-even would with fewer VMs.If you are on-prem you don't have the hosting costs but you need to account for power and cooling and other costs instead.
I don't consider this fair though - with Vultr, if the host dies, Vultr moves your workload to a different server, your single server setup doesn't do that.
you really have 192 VMs running on that 1U box in colo? damn, nice! -
@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@Pete-S said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Hypervisor management
Monthly cost: $50
Yearly cost: 12 x 50 = $600
5 year cost: 5 x $600 = $3KThat's less than one hour of IT maintenance a month for 192 VMs.....
The VM maintenance would be the same for Colo or Vultr... he's only looking at the hypervisor for management costs.
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@IRJ said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
@Pete-S said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Hypervisor management
Monthly cost: $50
Yearly cost: 12 x 50 = $600
5 year cost: 5 x $600 = $3KThat's less than one hour of IT maintenance a month for 192 VMs.....
Yes, but it's just for the hypervisor. Each workload need their own management, patches, updates and what not - but that is the same regardless of where it's running.What @Dashrender said above.
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
I don't consider this fair though - with Vultr, if the host dies, Vultr moves your workload to a different server, your single server setup doesn't do that.
That is true. But in the case of Vultr I don't think they run on real server grade stuff either. But if you had two smaller servers instead of one I think the costs would be about the same. The colo costs would be a little higher.
you really have 192 VMs running on that 1U box in colo? damn, nice!
No, we don't have that particular config. That was just an example buying something new today.
We do have a lot of rackspace and many hosts in colo though. -
@jmoore said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
I prefer Slack myself but I have Teams here and don't see any of those issues you state. Some people like it so that's fine if they do. I think the cost of Slack is worth it. I think it is unrealistic to have a free product that works that well and be free to scale.
Sure, but the cost that they charge isn't realistic either. Zoho does it for like $1. That's cool. But Slack does less for the price, and is almost 700% the cost! That's crazy.
A key issue we find with Teams is how you have to dig to read every message as everything is hidden in conversations. It's almost impossible to find where someone is talking to you, everything gets missed.
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
I don't consider this fair though - with Vultr, if the host dies, Vultr moves your workload to a different server, your single server setup doesn't do that.
you really have 192 VMs running on that 1U box in colo? damn, nice!If the physical server at Vultr dies, yes they spin you up on another and that's definitely really nice.
If your physical server on prem dies, you could always spin up on a cloud as a failover the same as they do. Not necessarily as quickly or easily, but going on prem (or colo) for your primary doesn't preclude cloud for a failover.
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
you really have 192 VMs running on that 1U box in colo? damn, nice!
He's just giving an example. But you pretty easily can.
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@Dashrender said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Hosting Costs
1U Colocation America, /24 IP Range
Monthly cost: ~$250/month
Yearly cost: 12 x 250 = $3000
5 year cost: 5 x $3000 = $15KLast I looked, 1U was more like $225 with that many IPs. And I think typically you'd get fewer for a lot less cost and/or go IPv6. /24 is two IPs per VM. No need to pay for that.
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The only service I've seen winning hand off wrt a dedicated infra is firebase. Developing apps for super small shops on firebase (the platform not the db only) is really convenient. Also there are a number of cases where developing serverless apps with pure functional back-ends is cheeeper. Butwe are talking custom software deployment not standard software montly billing. In the latter case I agree that could is really expensive for the average SMB.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:
Yes, it integrates with O365 which is nice, if you have O365 which they do with the customer that uses it. They don't like it, though. But they put up with it for the integration and price.
Integration with O365 is the only reason to use Teams IMO. But it is crap. I introduced it in our organisation and now most people hate me
However, Microsoft have spent a lot of money on slick TV adverts in the UK for it, so hopefully they'll invest in it and make it good.
We use it as a user-friendly front-end for Sharepoint, but I still end up opening Sharepoint if I want to do anything other than rudimentary document management, as Teams struggles.
We use it as a replacement for (consumer) Skype for messaging and screen sharing, but getting people to use it instead of Skype is a struggle. Skype is not great, but it's better. We use it for meetings, but free Zoom is much better.
I've never managed to get the calendar working correctly when organising Teams meetings. The chat is confusing, and we have lots of examples of people missing messages. To the extent that users sometimes send a Skype message that says "Did you get my Teams message?" Although I don't always get my Skype messages, so....
The embedded document editor is flaky, to the extent that I tell users to always select "Open in Desktop App" rather than "Edit in Teams".
I've tried using Microsoft Planner for project management (separate product but integrates nicely within Teams), but it's just not as good as the free version of Trello.
But, but, but.....I like the concept of a unified front-end interface to all our apps (Sharepoint, Planner, Word, IM etc etc), it's just not there yet. But it's still relatively new, and Microsoft have enough money to throw at it to make it work, eventually. I'm hoping my colleagues will eventually like me again
