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Why we are not leaving the cloud

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Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#151

Post by hueving »

morgante wrote: post #69
tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field. The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs. In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong

Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings. There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs.…

>Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Significant savings is not something you get from the cloud unless you were massively over-provisioned with your hardware. In nearly every case I've seen, moving an equivalent workload to the cloud has resulted in more costs for the same size workload. But the company still made the decision to do it because it was less stuff to worry about and it made expanding that much quicker.

You pay a premium for the flexibility of the cloud.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#152

Post by chetanahuja »

random28345 wrote: post #109
chetanahuja wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong. The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model in addition to really good user experience across a wide variety of platforms. I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was…

> The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model Actually, the original success involved putting DVDs in mailboxes. > I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was still an iPhone user) while riding a train in 2011'ish. Right, but you're going to be equally astonished in 2017 if you don't get the same level of s…

> equally astonished in 2017

> Prime Video, Hulu, HBO GO, YouTube Red,

So Netflix has a six year lead and attendant network effects in it's favor. If you don't believe me, I created a facebook clone in PHP last weekend which works just as well (or better) than the original Facebook. Do you want to join it?

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#153

Post by drdaeman »

tetha wrote: post #141
drdaeman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud may save from hardware/driver issues - by providing an already tested environment, that doesn't (normally) trip on some weirdness in, say, network drivers. But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical…

This is why I said hardware op. If you use some VM-based cloud infrastructure you will still need a bunch of good system/linux admins to make your application work on the linux in the cloud. Without these, you're toast. Bare metal requires you to have both good system and linux admins, and on top of that, good hardware admins, networks and datacenter hands. These are different skill sets. So again: If you do the bare…

Are hardware sysadmins a different caste? Unless you you mean having own networking (like a router/ASA in addition to the server, or even your own private fiber), of course, and those CCNAs etc. Or those experts on some specialized hardware, like giant FC SANs or whatever one might fancy. If, when talking about "bare metal" we go to those extremities, then, sure, cloud is unbeatable.

I believe, usually, "bare metal" hosting means you order the hardware, get it installed, but networking/cooling/power supply/etc are done by the datacenter people, not your own staff (your own staff may be not even permitted to enter the server room). No less-common specialized hardware to deal with, either.

System engineers must known OS internals well. If they do, it's unlikely they can debug, say, a kernel memory leak (which can be a thing in a VM), but not a lockup in a network card driver's interrupt handler (which is close to impossible in a cloud VM, but I saw this on a bare metal). Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be, like, too specialized and just weird sort of specialization. Am I wrong?

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#154

Post by mikekchar »

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

When you are in business, saving money is not always the most important thing. In reality, you usually spend 95% of your revenue. The question is not "How much money can we save", but "What investment will bring the greatest return".

It's a bit like buying the building that you are working in rather than renting it. Or hiring full time cleaning staff rather than hiring a firm to take care of it. The second choice is more expensive, but requires less capital/time up front. If you can use that money and time to better effect then it is a no brainer. As companies get bigger, they have less opportunities to make large returns on their money/time, so it often makes sense to start focusing on those smaller returns.

As an aside, this is also why you shouldn't go to your CTO and say, "I can save $X by refactoring/rewriting/testing our code". The CTO can usually always find things that appear to be better ROI opportunities and so you get into a situation where refactoring/rewriting/testing becomes forbidden. Rather you should always attempt to use appropriate techniques to maximise throughput in development and to keep your stake holders happy.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#155

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

morgante wrote: post #69
tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field. The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs. In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong

Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings. There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs.…

> There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Those "old-school sysadmins..." get hired by large cloud companies. Amazon has plenty. The cloud is just somebody else's computers.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#156

Post by drdaeman »

user5994461 wrote: post #128
drdaeman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud may save from hardware/driver issues - by providing an already tested environment, that doesn't (normally) trip on some weirdness in, say, network drivers. But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical…

> I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not. And that's why cloud will win every single time, forever, on all metrics. Because the cloud requires less engineers to achieve the same work, as it takes care of the low level hardware work.

How that's different from hosting provider engineers taking care of setting up a dedicated server and even pre-installing a tested OS image? They also usually handle all the hardware-related issues you may encounter.

That used to work well before the "cloud" era, and still does.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#157

Post by synicalx »

badloginagain wrote: post #84
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 article has some really good points why being in the cloud is a good idea. GitLabs core competencies are in software, not hardware- similar to many startups. Sure, they could hire up an infrastructure team, but that's at an opportunity cost of their software team. The cloud offers convenience that all the `original internet companies` wish they had when they were starting out. There may be value in switching when…

I think their recent cock up is a great example of why they need an ops team regardless of whether or not they're in the cloud.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#158

Post by nemothekid »

cookiecaper wrote: post #135
viraptor wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 things I think you should consider in this situation. 1. Reserved instances. If you've got a running business and are expecting to be around for 1-3 years, you get 40-60% discount on that 4xlarge. 2. Do you want to move the service exactly as it is? Maybe you don't need the large ebs? Maybe you can rewrite the storage to S3 instead which is much cheaper? Do you have heavy, sporadic tasks that you can move out of yo…

Why should he re-architect his system and introduce some Amazon-specific dependencies like S3 just so he can give Amazon money? How much development time and money will he spend trying to make his setup work on AWS? How many new bugs will he accidentally introduce in the process? How badly will moving to cloud storage via S3 affect his performance v. having the files on a local disk? When S3 outages like the one that…

>Why should he re-architect his system and introduce some Amazon-specific dependencies like S3 just so he can give Amazon money?

You could make the same argument going the other way though - why should GitLab spend money recruiting/hiring people, leasing space, setting up monitoring, etc, if their solution today works? Why should anyone re-architect their system to give $COMPANY money? When your bare metal's RAID controller craps out and you have to order another, will his customers be understanding of his decision to move to bare metal?

It doesn't makes sense to factor in fixed costs of such a migration.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#160

Post by lightedman »

kogepathic wrote: post #112
234dd57d2c8dba wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No surprise here. Honestly, their team seem to be lower skill or less experienced than I'd have thought. I would never approve a production system as expansive as Gitlab's to only have two databases in a cluster. That is asking for trouble, and any {sys,db}admin worth their salt will tell you the same. As soon as you need to do anything on one database, you've just lost your cluster policy. The lack of automation, es…

> I would never approve a production system as expansive as Gitlab's to only have two databases in a cluster. That is asking for trouble, and any {sys,db}admin worth their salt will tell you the same. As soon as you need to do anything on one database, you've just lost your cluster policy. I do agree with you it reflects poorly on GitLab for only having a primary and replica, with broken backups. BUT, they are a star…

"BUT, they are a startup, and they need to be laser focused on growing the company and securing funding for the next quarter so they can keep the lights on."

Having run and sold a few startups and turnkey operations, let me tell you - if you don't focus on your core product first and foremost and demonstrate the utmost competency in it, you're just pissing money away and are likely to fail.

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