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Why we are not leaving the cloud

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#191

Post by viraptor »

stephenr wrote: post #185
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…

> rewrite the storage to S3 instead which is much cheaper So, pay for the privilege of being vendor-locked to Amazon. What a wonderful idea.

That's how business choices work. You gain x for y. If you value no lock-in more than other gain, then that's your choice to make.

(There are multiple services providing S3 interfaces BTW)

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#192

Post by eyko »

cstejerean wrote: post #173
cookiecaper wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright laws are what give studios the rights to license that content. Right now, most things published commercially after 1923 are copyrighted and require permission from their rightsholder to distribute. That's practically the entire history of cinema locked up tight. Copyright should be adjusted so that people can make money off of their creations without allowing the culture to be held hostage to corporatio…

It wouldn't matter to Netflix. The really old titles are cheap and Netflix always carries them. The problem Netflix had/had is access to latest releases. When it comes to movies this the bulk of what people want to watch. Since they couldn't guarantee access to new content they had to pay to produce their own new content.

I'd like to see Rambo and The Terminator on Netflix.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#193

Post by philliphaydon »

cookiecaper wrote: post #165
philliphaydon wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what this has to do with copyright laws. This has to do with content licensing and studios not wanting to license content...

The copyright laws are what give studios the rights to license that content. Right now, most things published commercially after 1923 are copyrighted and require permission from their rightsholder to distribute. That's practically the entire history of cinema locked up tight. Copyright should be adjusted so that people can make money off of their creations without allowing the culture to be held hostage to corporatio…

That implies the studios don't own the copyright which means they shouldn't be suing for piracy.

The movie industry has Long spent its years fighting piracy instead of providing a solution to a problem. Now there are solutions to the problem and the industry is refusing to adapt and continues to hold the content for themselves instead of licensing it to the likes of Netflix.

We know the studios have the right to license content because that's exactly what they do when they sell licenses over seas to broadcasters in other countries to air content.

This isn't about copyright. It's about the studios lack of ability to license content.

This is why in 2017 piracy is still a major issue.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#194

Post by jstoja »

Why didn't they chose to split it? You always have your bare-metal infrastructure and if you need a terrible growth and need more IT infra, you can use public cloud to handle to load until you find plan a good solution bare metal.

Sure it's some work, the setup is sometimes not ideal, but it's a huge gain imho.

In addition, many people bring the argument that infrastructure is not their core skill. It is true, but do they need to get to the level of public clouds to run their own infrastructure ? I mean, even with sub-optimal choices on hardware but smart choice on how you handle your architecture, you still can have huge savings and not so many risks by doing it in-house.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#195

Post by ismail-khan »

majewsky wrote: post #142
user5994461 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hiring someone else to do it is more expensive than in-house. Except you're gonna need between 10 and 100 people to recreate the service in-house, not just one. Trying to re-do something from scratch in-house is always more expensive than just buying the product.

I get the sentiment, but it really depends: For some services, it's very true. For other services, careful problem analysis will show that you only need one or two features from the full package, which then can be replaced by a very small shell script.

Can you give an example where a shell script would solve the problem? Curious to know

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#196

Post by discordianfish »

dx034 wrote: post #184

As much as I like gitlab, that decision seems weird. I'd expect a business to come up with numbers for different scenarios, not just quotes (even if those weren't the only deciding factor). What I mean is, instead of writing about 8TB disks vs 2TB disks, get hard numbers for those and calculate costs for different versions to the costs in the cloud. Instead of saying that engineers are expensive, look at market data…

They also miss out on the dog fooding aspect. They target enterprise customers who run probably run gitlab on bare metal. By doing the same, you experience what your customers do and have much closer feedback loops on any issues that might especially affect bare metal.

Regarding managed dedicated.. I had very bad experience with rackspace in that regard, which is why we moved AWS. At another job we had our own DC suite but had some company taking care of initial cabling as well as remote hands from the datacenter. If I ever do bare metal again, that's why I would do.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#197

Post by dustinmoris »

sytse wrote: post #29
gtaylor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they were using this as justification or explanation in their eventual reversal. I think they provided these quotes as interesting tidbits. Kind of like pull-out quotes on an article. You can ignore them entirely and still get the gist of the post. On a more general note: It's got to be incredibly hard to do what GitLab does with their extreme transparency. I feel like we have to be careful about readin…

Thanks. The most useful advice was shared in private. People coming to our office to share war stories of regretting moving to bare metal. I also received dozens of people sending direct messages via twitter because they couldn't share their stories publicly. Some of the best advice are things that we can't share publicly. For example a major company going bare-metal and then spending a lot of time to set up an autho…

Did you have to sign a NDA? Because if people send you random advice via email after reading a blog post then this sounds to me very much like "publicly sharing" their experience...

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#198

Post by tgtweak »

Use your bare metal for your low-water mark and "scale over" to the cloud.

Setting up a hybrid cloud like this is not overly complicated and AWS and other providers will offer you a direct connect network connection in many carrier neutral colocation datacenters so you can sit on your cloud vpc with a physical connection in your datacenter of choice.

Get the best of both worlds. Providers like ovh can get very close to the cost of buying your own metal with a tco break-even at over 18 months, not counting network and power equipment costs. Using ec2 or GCE for a large number of persistent vms without a heavy discount seems... Wasteful.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#199

Post by obsurveyor »

philliphaydon wrote: post #193
cookiecaper wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright laws are what give studios the rights to license that content. Right now, most things published commercially after 1923 are copyrighted and require permission from their rightsholder to distribute. That's practically the entire history of cinema locked up tight. Copyright should be adjusted so that people can make money off of their creations without allowing the culture to be held hostage to corporatio…

That implies the studios don't own the copyright which means they shouldn't be suing for piracy. The movie industry has Long spent its years fighting piracy instead of providing a solution to a problem. Now there are solutions to the problem and the industry is refusing to adapt and continues to hold the content for themselves instead of licensing it to the likes of Netflix. We know the studios have the right to lice…

This is a very naive view of the issue. There are many hands in the production of a film and many rights associated with are assigned at the time it was made, screening rights, distribution rights, periods for when rights expire, etc. When new technology, such as streaming on computers, comes about, the licensing of new rights needs to be established all over again with all the rights holders. A single holder that can't be contacted or established(due to death, closure, acquisition, etc) can effectively put any new licensing into limbo.

This isn't even getting into exclusivity licensing that the studios seem to be real keen on doing with Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, VUDU and a jillion other streaming services. You know those shows that are branded "Netflix Original" on Netflix? Those aren't literally made by Netflix, they've just paid for some/all of the production and licensed them exclusively for some period of time. They're still produced by all the same studios that have been producing shows and movies for years.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#200

Post by shshhdhs »

dustinmoris wrote: post #197
sytse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. The most useful advice was shared in private. People coming to our office to share war stories of regretting moving to bare metal. I also received dozens of people sending direct messages via twitter because they couldn't share their stories publicly. Some of the best advice are things that we can't share publicly. For example a major company going bare-metal and then spending a lot of time to set up an autho…

Did you have to sign a NDA? Because if people send you random advice via email after reading a blog post then this sounds to me very much like "publicly sharing" their experience...

I disagree. It's a private email. Gitlab can ask permission to post, but it would be impolite and perhaps unethical to assume a private email is now "public". If they wanted it public, they could have chosen to provide a comment on HN, Twitter, etc.
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