Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#11

Post by xradionut » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:39 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #4

What a silly argument. "If you just want to use someone else’s computers, it means you don’t love computers — at least not every aspect to them." Uh, don't they use Dell? If they love them so much, why not build their own? Why stop there? I love software and programming languages, but it doesn't mean I'm going to use my own compiler or run a company on my own libc.

Whom is going to do a better job? A group of educated, passionate people that can troubleshoot their own problems in realtime? Or "Peggy" at Cloud Vendor X that deals with 400 other clients?

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#12

Post by Rexxar » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:39 PM UTC

bprieto wrote: post #6

droz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

competition isn't required for quality.

Of course it is. If there is no competition, you can get by with a crappy product or service if your client need it.

I think droz mean "You don't need competition to do a good job" rather than "It's better to have competition when you want buy something of quality".

But in either case, sometimes, competition lowers at the same time the price and the quality. So competition doesn't necessarily increase quality.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#13

Post by mechanical_fish » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:40 PM UTC

jtbigwoo wrote: post #5

I suspect that this is part of the problem with many big manufacturing companies these days. Ford was a leader for so many years was because their leadership was passionate about engineering and manufacturing. Henry Ford was an engineer for the Edison Company before he was a manager and is famous for obsessing about every detail of the manufacturing process. That sort of spirit infected the company up through the 196…

A Ford bought today is less expensive, considerably safer, more efficient, and more reliable than a Ford from the days of Henry Ford.

Meanwhile, today's manufacturing companies routinely make objects – like the processor driving the machine that you are reading this on – that are orders of magnitude more complex than the most advanced technology of 1959.

And all of this was done by companies that employ lots of accountants. I'm not sure why you think that accountants and engineers don't routinely coexist, or that Henry Ford didn't employ plenty of accountants back in his day. Being able to manufacture good stuff in bulk at reasonable prices is a major exercise in accounting, and always has been.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#14

Post by nupark2 » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:41 PM UTC

Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Amazon's fixed rate per-byte pricing.

A real analysis would have even dug into the question of sysadmins vs engineering staff, and the potential for "the cloud" to allow programmers to actually program infrastructure, eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon).

Instead, we got bizarre platitudes about how they "love computers". How boring. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time in the hot/cold, blaring fan world of data centers -- sometimes late at night, when a hard drive failed or a switch's fans went out. Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane; whether or not it makes sense in terms of cost was the answer I'd hoped to get from this article.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#15

Post by mechanical_fish » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:44 PM UTC

xradionut wrote: post #11

MichaelGG wrote: post #4

What a silly argument. "If you just want to use someone else’s computers, it means you don’t love computers — at least not every aspect to them." Uh, don't they use Dell? If they love them so much, why not build their own? Why stop there? I love software and programming languages, but it doesn't mean I'm going to use my own compiler or run a company on my own libc.

Whom is going to do a better job? A group of educated, passionate people that can troubleshoot their own problems in realtime? Or "Peggy" at Cloud Vendor X that deals with 400 other clients?

That depends on whether the fix that Peggy deploys for one client also fixes the same problem for the other 399.

In other words: It depends.

There's no general answer, because deciding where to draw the abstraction barrier between you and your vendors is an unsolved, difficult, and evolving problem.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#16

Post by KyleBrandt » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:48 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #4

What a silly argument. "If you just want to use someone else’s computers, it means you don’t love computers — at least not every aspect to them." Uh, don't they use Dell? If they love them so much, why not build their own? Why stop there? I love software and programming languages, but it doesn't mean I'm going to use my own compiler or run a company on my own libc.

There is always the question of degree and practicality. So in terms of libc / and custom compilers that is perhaps ad absurdum. There really wouldn't be any practical benefit taking it to that far for most companies. However, people that love programming languages often probably wish it was practical and that they had an excuse to write compilers at some point.

As far as Dell goes, I honestly have mixed feelings at this point. When I started at the company there was less than 10 people, so the idea of having centralized firmware updates etc seemed practical. I'm not sure I really feel this way any more -- I go back forth. But sticking with Dell seems to make sense at this point so we have more uniformity in hardware and management.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#17

Post by mechanical_fish » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:51 PM UTC

jinushaun wrote: post #10

Poorly written argument full of red herrings. From what I can tell, their answer to the "why aren't you in the cloud" question is that they "love computers so much that they want to do it all themselves because it's so fun".

Hey, at least they're being honest.

Would you have preferred a gigantic stack of technical chaff designed to rationalize and obscure the fact that they're doing whatever seemed like fun at the time? Because I'm sure we can find you some examples. ;)

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#18

Post by brudgers » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 8:56 PM UTC

nupark2 wrote: post #14

Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Amazon's fixed rate per-byte pricing. A real analysis would have even dug into the question of sysadmins vs engineering staff, and the potential for "the cloud" to allow programmers to actually program infrastructure, eliminating internal sysadmin staff complete…

It was a real analysis that went beyond just counting the beans. As a privately held company, getting rid of passionate people doesn't make the stock go up, increase anyone's bonus, or benefit their long term goals - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#19

Post by quanticle » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 9:02 PM UTC

The reason I'm still wary of the cloud is that the abstractions are still too leaky (to borrow Joel Spolsky's turn of phrase). When you start abstracting away core system calls (like fsync), things work great 99.99% of the time. But when that .01% bites you, it bites hard. We don't expect core system calls (like fsync) to fail. And when they fail, the fact that our code is two or three levels levels of abstraction higher means that we often have no way of fixing the issue. The cloud will be at a disadvantage to "real servers" as long as its abstractions are leaky enough to be distinguishable from real hardware.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#20

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 17, 2011, 9:23 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #18

nupark2 wrote: post #14

Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Amazon's fixed rate per-byte pricing. A real analysis would have even dug into the question of sysadmins vs engineering staff, and the potential for "the cloud" to allow programmers to actually program infrastructure, eliminating internal sysadmin staff complete…

It was a real analysis that went beyond just counting the beans. As a privately held company, getting rid of passionate people doesn't make the stock go up, increase anyone's bonus, or benefit their long term goals - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent.

[deleted]