You're Moving to Bare Metal or Colocation Wrong When You Shoot for the Moon, Here's Why
Hi. I'm Max Clark. We'll just get into it. Here's the deal. If you're on a cloud platform, you can bring that in house and you can save a ton of money.
Speaker 1:That's just the way this works. Commonly, what we see and what we help clients with is, you know, compute in a cloud moving into some sort of on premise hardware. Right. You know, so that could be the company buying their own equipment and putting into a data center, co locating it or going into a bare metal metal platform. Bare metal is just a fancy term for you're renting the hardware from that provider.
Speaker 1:Now the problem that we run into all the time and actually the only thing that's running through my head right now and I'm thinking about this is a really old song, you know, and the line is shoot the moon. Right? Because you're gonna give an I. T. Person, you're gonna give an engineer a requirement like, hey, let's go do this.
Speaker 1:And what are they gonna do? They're gonna turn around and be like, hey, man, let's go get some phenomenal hardware. Like, this is gonna be great. And by the way, I did this too. I was guilty of it.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, so I understand it. What I mean by that? Oh, we're running AWS and running an EC 2 instance. That's a 10 gig interface with 64 v CPU and 384 gig of RAM.
Speaker 1:By the way, it's a 10 gig interface. Right? And it's going through a hypervisor, so it's shared. And so we have a hardware spec now that we figured out. It's really awesome.
Speaker 1:And what we need is we need a dual socket 64 core terabyte of RAM with, you know, RAID 10 NVMe drives and quad 100 gig NICs. And then you're in the process and you're like, wait a minute. These things are really expensive. I thought we're gonna save money. And, you know, and it's like, what happened?
Speaker 1:Is, you know, same thing I've seen with network stacks. It's like, hey, you know, we've got this data center, and we need to update our network switches because, you know, we're just at capacity or we're having some failure. We install this crazy cockamamie stuff because it was cheap. What do we need to do? Oh, let's go out and get, like, the brand new Juniper or a wrist box because they're awesome.
Speaker 1:And I've always wanted to play with it. And then I can do this crazy e VPN or I don't even know what the acronym is, but it sounds so cool. And I wanna figure out how to do it. You know, box. And then you turn around, you're like, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:Wait a minute. Wait. Wait. Wait. We've got 20 cabinets times 2 switches at $50,000 a piece, plus our spline, plus our core.
Speaker 1:Why is this gonna cost us $1,000,000 to upgrade? Like, that's crazy. We shouldn't upgrade this. We should just do something else. Like, it's just easier or cheaper for us to do something else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you've got some crazy lunatic telling you that you need to spend $1,000,000 or $25,000 a switch plus support when you could just go out and you could buy the freaking thing for $2,000 and be done with it. Like, you must been $40,000 in switching infrastructure. You wanna spend $1,000,000 in infrastructure. Same thing with your cloud migration project.
Speaker 1:Your repatriation is everybody wants to call it now is are you provisioning sane or are you provisioning insane? Are you do you have an engineer that is literally shooting the moon? You know, the sad thing about it is is your team your engineer thinks that they're doing the right thing by shooting the moon the reality what they're doing is they're just killing the project because by the time it gets into approvals and financial evaluation it doesn't make any sense they've shot themselves in the foot because what they really wanted to do was build out this platform in the 1st place, and then it just gets squashed because it doesn't make financial sense and it doesn't happen. So, like, don't shoot the moon. Like, don't don't shoot this.
Speaker 1:You know, it's like it's like, you know, there needs to be, like, we read these things of, like, oh, there's a person whose job in the meeting is just to figure out why to say yes, and there's another person in the meeting whose job is just to say no. Right? Like, I kinda feel like it needs to be the same thing with engineering where it's like, you know, there needs to be somebody in the room when you're, like, proposing an engineering system just to be like, no, we can do it for 1 tenth of the price, and that's what we're gonna do. You know, like, as like a stopgap like a lot of times I feel like that becomes my role with my clients is just talking off the ledge a little bit like yeah no don't get me wrong like what you're talking about doing is awesome and like it would be awesome to do that thing that you're talking about doing but you don't need to do that thing You need to do this other thing which actually meets what the business needs and will be a successful project won't be as cool as what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:But guess what? What you're talking about isn't going to happen because you're not going to get the money to do it. So instead, do this other thing, which is still really awesome. And you still get all the benefits from it, and it'll actually get done. Key.
Speaker 1:It'll actually get done. So if you're in a project and you get the sense that somebody is trying to shoot the moon or you're not sure if they're trying to shoot the moon, dig into it a little bit and find out. Does it actually make sense to do what you're talking about doing and what they're talking about doing and should you just dial it back a little bit and actually be really happy and really successful and getting what you need I'm Max Clark I'd love to hear your story your version of shooting the moon and what you say in comment below Hope this helps. Good feeling.
