Why we are not leaving the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#31

Post by Dangeranger » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

timanglade wrote: post #25

Dangeranger wrote: post #3

It's interesting that the first half of the explanation is largely quotes from a prior HN post's responses. Does anyone else feel a bit weird seeing off hand comments getting quoted in the explanation for a business decision? I guess we should all get more accustomed to our public input carrying weight in the zeitgeist. Gitlab's "develop in the open" nature really shows through here. I am not saying that's bad, it's…

We quote a lot of responses from HN but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that led us to this decision. I was personally involved in a lot of private conversations about this, with the executive team, with investors and with people who had gone through this exercise before, and they all had as much if not more impact on our final decision than the HN thread did. It’s just harder to quote them than referencing add…

That is good to hear. My comment was not meant as a negative criticism of your process, although I can see how it could be interpreted that way. It was intended more as an observation about the openness that Gitlab brings to the process of design and decision.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#32

Post by Rezo » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

_m8fo wrote: post #9

Couldn't they have easily just drawn the opposite conclusion? I don't see a strong connection between the article's contents and its conclusion.

I read it as: commenters raised a bazillion legit questions that we had not necessarily considered (unknown unknowns), and now the whole endeavor seems more risky and the TCO questionable. Let's instead gradually re-architect our application, so it fits better in the cloud, which also happens to align with what most of our enterprise customers are going to need anyway.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#33

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

Dangeranger wrote: post #31

timanglade wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We quote a lot of responses from HN but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that led us to this decision. I was personally involved in a lot of private conversations about this, with the executive team, with investors and with people who had gone through this exercise before, and they all had as much if not more impact on our final decision than the HN thread did. It’s just harder to quote them than referencing add…

That is good to hear. My comment was not meant as a negative criticism of your process, although I can see how it could be interpreted that way. It was intended more as an observation about the openness that Gitlab brings to the process of design and decision.

[deleted]

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#34

Post by tbrowbdidnso » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:08 PM UTC

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me.

All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services.

These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid to run your own hardware... Why are we listening?

Look to the newer tech giants as a prequel of what's to come. Netflix for example, is completely at the mercy of Amazon. They might as well be "Netflix brought to you by Amazon". Their edge is in software alone, nothing that causes a huge barrier to entry like custom hardware. This makes them much easier to dethrone. Hilariously, they rent all their hardware from a direct competitor who has access to all their software secrets. Does anyone else see something wrong with this?

The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie.

It's the same tactic as when automotive companies paid off local governments to destroy Americas public transport many years ago. All the big tech companies have their hands in the cookie jar besides Facebook, who remains mostly silent but runs their own hardware as well.

The major tech companies have every incentive to make you think running your own servers is nigh impossible. Don't drink the fucking koolaid. If the industry continues to consolidate rapidly AmaGooSoft will be the ONLY places you can have web servers in ten years

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#35

Post by djsumdog » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

ben_pr wrote: post #28

I'm a little shocked at this decision. The issues faced are all solved problems from PB storage to HA on server clusters even across Data centers. Good solutions do have upfront costs but the math that cloud hosting is 5-10X more than co-location company owned/leased is still in the ball park. It sounds like they may need an architect with enterprise experience to help them out rather than random comments on HN.

Yea, every growing company I've been at has been in the process of moving off of hosted solutions and onto their own hardware to cut costs.

Two such companies made the mistake of doing that with OpenStack, which is terrible and should die in a fire.

But one later switched to DC/OS and containers and it has worked really well. They've been migrating apps running on EC2 instances into docker containers than can run on marathon in our local data center and the savings is pretty substantial (even adding in the cost of the teams needed to maintain our own platforms).

Managed solutions are great for startups. There is a lot of value in not having to setup, maintain and manager your own hardware .. but that does reach a limit and companies need to be prepared for that transition and avoid lockins.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#36

Post by lbotos » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:12 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

I mean, sure, you might not save money being in the "cloud" but running hardware is a different skillset than building software. If you can pay someone else to run your hardware, someone else who wants to be really good at running hardware, you might be able to focus more on your software, and get really good at making that?

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#37

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:21 PM UTC

keepper wrote: post #16

Why was hybrid not considered? With providers like megaport providing really inexpensive direct connect, this is almost a no brainer. This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in how you guys went about this. Physical environments DO work well, but they do require experience to run them. I have used AWS for as long as its been around, but nothing beats physical environments for "known wo…

> This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in how you guys went about this.

Your other points and experience are well taken, but this is definitely too harsh. Think about the nature of GitLab as an open company building dev tools and paying below-market salaries. They have a huge amount of developer mindshare relative to their internal head count. They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset.

Given these facts, I think an open decision making process serves them better than trying to make decisions behind closed doors. It may come off a little ham-fisted, but in actuality I think it's far less ham-fisted than a huge number (maybe even majority?) of engineering decisions made every day in companies that just don't have the expertise to make the right decision and often don't even realize they are getting burned by what they don't know they don't know.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#38

Post by closeparen » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:23 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

I don't think it's in doubt that it makes sense to own everything from the land to the silicon when you're the size of one of these "original internet companies."

The question is, does it make sense for businesses with a handful of servers running their office environment, to a few thousand servers running production for a moderately popular web service, to pay consultants to drive out and tend the servers in their office closets/colo racks, rather than piggy-back on someone else's (mostly) well-oiled machine with economies of scale.

If you can build an in-house equivalent of the AWS team, do it. If you're going to pay someone to do it for you, AWS might be a better deal than your neighborhood business IT firm.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#39

Post by tbrowbdidnso » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:23 PM UTC

lbotos wrote: post #36

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

I mean, sure, you might not save money being in the "cloud" but running hardware is a different skillset than building software. If you can pay someone else to run your hardware, someone else who wants to be really good at running hardware, you might be able to focus more on your software, and get really good at making that?

There is nothing hard about running hardware. The current VM trend gives you bare metal access. the only difference is you have to plug in your machines, and you get to look at them every once in a while.

Really, what software dev hasn't put together a desktop PC and plugged in some Ethernet jacks? That's all you need to Colocate.

Your response echos what cloud providers want everyone to think. Hardware is too hard for us, let's pay someone to do it and make 50% profit margins on us

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#40

Post by dsr_ » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:25 PM UTC

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. It enables you to test demand for a service for a very low absolute cost. Spin up a tiny machine for $60/year? And you can pay for it by the month, or the hour? That's great. You can find out if anybody is going to buy your thing at all. You can probably get to ramen-profitable.

As soon as you can confidently predict sufficient demand, the economically rational decision is to hire a good ops team and run real hardware. But to do so, you need to either have money or get money - and the costs of cloud service are zooming up, potentially leaving you without the margin to invest.

The question is what that level of sufficient demand is.