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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

#31

Post by MattyDub »

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.

Note that Joel's company Fog Creek software actually did develop their flagship product, FogBugz, on their own compiler: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#32

Post by drhayes9 »

lhnn wrote: post #24

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 organiza…

I'm totally with you -- they have fun, that's what they want, end of story.

But they did say that people who use the cloud don't care as much:

> If you just want to use someone else’s computers, it means you don’t love computers — at least not every aspect to them.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#34

Post by chollida1 »

lhnn wrote: post #24

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 organiza…

I think the reason most people are disappointed is that from the title they expected the article to be something that it wasnt.

I personally thought I going to get a break down of the pros and cons of being cloud hosted vs running your own servers.

The article ended up being completely non technical or quantitative and boils down to "we like to build our own computers".

Chalk it up to high expectations that weren't met :) That's not the authors fault.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#35

Post by gbeech »

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…

> eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon)

Man, this idea is one of the most insane things I hear. Amazon does not install your operating systems, Amazon does not install and configure you applications, Amazon does not troubleshoot anything related to the operation of the servers, Amazon does not do analysis on your traffic patterns and decide when you need more instances, Amazon absolutely doesn't care about how well your product runs as much as your own staff does, in other words there is no way you outsource your WHOLE sysadmin staff. All Amazon does is provide the hardware and network infrastructure to run on. It is not a magic bullet that says I don't need to have these people around. SysAdmin != server monkey - yes it is part of our jobs, but quite honestly it is a very very small part of it.

> Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane

Call me insane because I sure do love spending time in a datacenter, it's one of the few times working in IT you really get to do something with your hands, and that does have a certain appleal to me.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#36

Post by wmf »

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…

In what way does fsync work differently in the cloud?

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#37

Post by josephcooney »

KyleBrandt wrote: post #16
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…

A friend of mine has the uncanny ability of re-formulating every problem he is given in such a way that the logical solution to the problem is always: "Lets write a parser". He loves writing them. Not quite 'writing your own compiler' but it's going that way.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#38

Post by KyleBrandt »

nupark2 wrote: post #25
brudgers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, I'll bite...

> 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.

If a hard drive or a fan failing requires someone's attention at the data center in the middle of the night something is wrong (unless your company has such high uptime requirements that even redundant systems need to be fixed right away). Either your company can't afford to provide proper redundancy, or someone on the technical side has failed to implement redundancy or failover properly (which happens, but should be corrected). For example we had an entire router fail and this just caused a blip. We didn't have to do anything right away to fix it, just figure out what went wrong and bring it back up the next day. Also we don't really end up spending very much time in the data center itself (in fact I work remotely full time).

> We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps

We do like to consider ourselves experts -- we don't just dork around and tinker (at least, not most of the time)

> If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste

In part this is a matter of taste. But as I said:

"This culture means when we hire technical staff, we hire people who share this passion. I believe that this passion translates into a better product. Whenever someone does a cost analysis of cloud vs self hosting there is no row in the spreadsheet for “Work Productivity Increase due to Passion.”

Just because there is no good method to put it on a spreadsheet, doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the company. There are a lot of technical reasons we like to have control over the full stack. But I think it largely comes down to our culture. The culture of a company is very important. A culture could be all about how the numbers fall after you calculate your capital and operating expenses etc. Somehow it seems to me though that many people don't seem very happy in those cultures -- and this will effect employee retention and the sort of talent you can attract.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#39

Post by dkersten »

KyleBrandt wrote: post #16
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…

The practicality argument doesn't apply when they already say they're doing more than necessary because they love computers and if you don't that you don't really love computers.

When someone says that you don't love computers because you did whats most practical or cost effective for you, how can they say that they love computers when they do or don't do something else because its most practical or cost effective to them?

If it saves my time, is cheaper or easier to use amazon rather than running my own data center, that doesn't mean I don't love computers. If they love computers so much that practicality is out the window, then why aren't they using their own operating systems and libc's?

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#40

Post by josephcooney »

wmf wrote: post #36
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…

In what way does fsync work differently in the cloud?

It seems that (at least for AWS) EBS might not always do what you expect with fsync()

http://teddziuba.com/2011/04/amazon-the-purpose-of-pain.html

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