alt Hacker NewsI mean we literally did this in one of my previous places. We took all the old laptops that were to be junked by IT, and used them as a selenium test farm. We saved like $100k per month on the AWS bill at the cost of basically electricity.
If all the machines were running Windows, the difference would've been even more drastic.
What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be fault tolerant to hardware failure, yet companies still insist on buying expensive server grade HW for everything.
Replies
I would agree with you about autoscaling if ECC was enabled in every consumer computer :'/
Been through this recently in a fairly large enterprise
We have some in house software which runs in k8s. Total throughput peaks at about 1mbit a second of control traffic - it's controlling some other devices which are on dedicated hardware. Total of 24GB of ram.
The software team say it needs to run across 3 different servers for resilience purposes.
The VM team want to use neutronix as their VM platform, so they can live migrate one VM to another.
They insist on 25gbit networking, and for resilience purposes that needs to be mlagged
The network team also have to have multiple switches and routers, again for resilience.
So rather than having 3 $1000 laptops running bare metal kubes hanging off a pair of $500 1G switches eating maybe 200W, we have a $140k BOM sucking up 2kW.
When something goes wrong all those layers of resilience will no doubt fight each other. The hardware drops, so the VM freezes as it restored onto another host, so K8s moves the workloads, then the VM comes back, the k8s gets confused (maybe? I don't know how k8s works).
It's all needlessly overspecced costing 30 times as much as it should.
But from each individual team it makes sense. They don't want to be blamed if it doesn't work, they don't have to find the money. It's different departments.
> What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be fault tolerant to hardware failure, yet companies still insist on buying expensive server grade HW for everything.
Simple: the cost of managing the hardware scales with its heterogenity and reliability. Even just dealing with the dozens of different form factors (air vent placement!) and power units of laptops would be a big headache.
Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks