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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

#201

Post by hueving »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #92
tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I ma…

> You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to. Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more…

>Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to.

Have you ever used EC2 with traditional apps hoisted onto the cloud? Just because you can click a button for ELB doesn't mean anything when the system wasn't horizontally scalable to begin with. EC2 is just VMs, it doesn't provide any high availability at the VM level.

With local solutions (e.g. vmware/kvm/openstack), you can live migrate these annoying (but critical) pets around as you phase out hardware with very limited traffic interruption. With EC2, the thing eventually just shits the bed and you get a notice saying the instance will be retired even though it's already in a worthless state.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#202

Post by random28345 »

chetanahuja wrote: post #152
random28345 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> So Netflix has a six year lead and attendant network effects in it's favor.

I completely agree with you. I personally have a Netflix account, and do not subscribe to other services.

My point is that right now, today, this very instant in time, Netflix is not primarily differentiated on technology, but on having content that their subscribers want; that online video distribution is now a commodity.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#203

Post by lightedman »

kogepathic wrote: post #180
lightedman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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. I don't have direct experience running/selling a startup, but I have worked for several as an employee. In my experience, the product is important, but not necessarily the deciding factor in whether the company succeeds. Most of the success is down to the man…

"Doesn't matter how good the product is, if management can't pitch it to get funding you're dead."

Good products literally fund themselves and don't need outside investors. Just like drugs sell themselves, a good product will sell itself without the need for anything like marketing or investors. The money will naturally come.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#204

Post by sytse »

discordianfish wrote: post #196
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 sui…

I agree that dogfooding is important. Our users and customers run GitLab both on bare-metal and in the cloud. GitLab runs better on bare-metal because it tends to have better IO performance. So by running it in the cloud we are optimizing where it is needed.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#205

Post by sytse »

shshhdhs wrote: post #200
dustinmoris wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, everything is private unless it was posted in public by the author or explicit permission was given. We have a transparency value, but we understand that other organizations are different. And even we assume that our private communication will stay private.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#206

Post by CapitalistCartr »

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…

"What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"

-- Robert A. Heinlein

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#207

Post by StreamBright »

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…

>> All the original internet companies run their own hardware

Exactly and most of the companies are not original internet companies, and they use the cloud.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#208

Post by StreamBright »

keepper wrote: post #68
morgante wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running on rented hardware is the equivalent of a traditional product company renting all of their factories. Correct. Traditional product companies very rarely own all their own factories. Do you honestly think Netflix management is incompetent? They've run the numbers on this countless times. They have way more insight into their spend and operations than a random anonymous internet commentator.

Netflix runs their most expensive part (pushing those terrabits of traffic ), with their own hardware and network. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ so, you were saying? Or do you think facebook,google,aol,tripadvisor and pretty much anyone beside HotNewStartup are incompetent?

Even Netflix uses AWS for the autoscaling enabled workloads.

Besides, here is a list of companies using AWS:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

You think Google and Microsoft is incompetent when they offer cloud services to their customers? There are a lot of companies that do know want to own any datacenter related infrastructure because it is irrelevant to their business and there is no on-board expertise. While there are companies that can afford to hire staff for running large DC operations. I thought this is pretty obvious to everybody.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#209

Post by cookiecaper »

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 think it'd matter because right now, there is not really a market for only public domain video content, because such content is so sparse. If we made copyright expire after 10 years, I think there are a lot of people who'd be content with the "classics", and it'd allow innovation and competition to occur between "classics" providers, which is what will give customers the best experience.

Right now, competition is hamstrung because people are prevented from entering the market with anything that the consumer would find desirable, barring permission from the rightsholders.

Competition is not real competition if the same data cannot be accessed. For example, Chrome and Firefox compete because they both access the same internet, and whichever browser provides the better experience for that internet will win out. That kind of thing is not possible on walled gardens like Facebook because the law allows them to obliterate anyone who would create an alternate "Facebook browser", and it's not possible with things whose primary offerings fall under copyright protection, like Netflix.

We need to open these things up so that people can compete and provide the consumer with the best experience without needing anyone else's permission. It's true that most people will want access to new releases, but if copyright expired after 10 years, you'd at least have a secondary service that people would actually want to use, which would compete with Netflix et al for viewership on a lot of the content.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#210

Post by cookiecaper »

mgbmtl wrote: post #161
cookiecaper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the cloud is the grocery store. It doesn't give you a pre-packaged solution that you can just rip open and immediately access. Rather, the cloud is like leasing the land from an owner. You still have to till, plant, maintain, and harvest, but you have to pay an annual rent to do so. There are a few things that the landowner is responsible to provide, but most of the day-to-day maintenance responsibility…

I think most cloud providers go beyond that. For example, creating/restoring snapshots with a UI, monitoring/automation tools, large scale DB services, etc. I rent dedicated servers from a large-scale provider. They're really good at hardware and networking, but that's all they do (well, that and some OpenStack S3 equivalent). I have to do my own Icinga monitoring, Ansible automation, etc. For the type of product I r…

Snapshots can be created and restored with bare metal if you install the right software. Only basic metrics are monitored by AWS by default (have to pay more for more detailed monitoring) and alarms have to be specifically configured, as I recall. Note that "bare metal" doesn't necessarily mean non-virtualized; the end user can be running VMWare or Xen on owned hardware and get "cloud-style" flexibility and goodies like automatic monitoring.

DB services is a different class of problem than bare metal v. cloud application servers, and cloud DB services can be used whether you run your application on bare metal or cloud instances (but, for the record, the same type of things are mostly applicable here, in that the user still has to do their own security and configuration).

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