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Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

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Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#21

Post by wulczer »

quanticle wrote: post #19

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 h…

Cloud or not, if you're writing serious software (and by that I mean software that depends on fsync succeeding) you'd better expect system calls to fail and have code to handle that.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#22

Post by [deleted] »

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]

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#23

Post by nephyo »

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".

If I asked you why you were eating pizza and you responded "because I like pizza" would you still consider that a red herring argument?

All they are saying is that they are not in the cloud because they don't want to be in the cloud and because they quite like not being in the cloud. It works for them. Why is that expression at all controversial?

If they'd labeled their blog "Why being in the Cloud is a bad idea" or "Why being in the cloud would cost Stack Exchange a lot more" or "Why nobody should ever use the Cloud" then I could see the reason for the dispute. Then their arguments would be very unconvincing.

It is certainly valid for Stack Exchange to make a choice because it fits within their culture and then explain that that is why they are doing it. You might think it's a dumb decision and that's fine. But they clearly are not trying to convince you that they've made the best possible decision. They're just saying that good or bad, they've made the decision that they want to make. And it's clearly a decision that has been working well for them so far anyway. So why do people keep bugging them about it?

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#24

Post by lhnn »

Why is everyone attacking this article? So what if their reason is subjective? They want people who enjoy working on the whole stack. They have fun doing that, and that's all the reason they need.

They aren't saying that "people who use the cloud don't care as much". It's just their thing.

They're the masters of their own company, and as such, can do things however they like. One of the benefits of a private organization.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#25

Post by nupark2 »

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.

If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste -- and it's impossible to argue against personal taste.

An evaluation based on personal taste is useless. If I say "I like orange because it's a great color" -- then either you already like orange, in which case my analysis does you no good, or you don't like orange, in which case my statement can simply be ignored.

The same applies here, in that the article could have been coalesced to a single sentence: "We don't use the cloud because we don't want to. We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps"

Possibly interesting -- but not useful.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#26

Post by glimcat »

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.

You don't really love computers unless you're working out every bit of the quantum mechanics necessary to design and model its integrated circuits on a chalkboard.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#28

Post by roc »

glimcat wrote: post #26
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.

You don't really love computers unless you're working out every bit of the quantum mechanics necessary to design and model its integrated circuits on a chalkboard.

... and even then you wouldn't really love computers unless you were quarrying your own calcite and slate.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#29

Post by ww520 »

OT: I've heard claims that dedicated servers beat cloud VPS (i.e. AWS) in cost. But most of the dedicated servers I've seen cost $100 and up for a month. Is there a comparison on the cost/computing_power with benchmark for review?
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