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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

#51

Post by jodrellblank »

dkersten wrote: post #39
KyleBrandt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Clearly there's no difference in effort between a day installing and configuring a Dell server and several thousand person years of writing a solid, scalable operating system, so your question is perfectly reasonable.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#52

Post by ssmoot »

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…

Instead of 12 physical cores, 96GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD Array pushing 1M IOPs on dedicated hardware for my PostgreSQL database servers, I'd need 1TB of RAM in an AWS box because I'll be lucky if I can even break 10K in IOPs.

Does the price make sense then?

I have yet to see any significant AWS deployment that doesn't feel like it could be done better, more reliably, and much more cheaply as a co-located setup.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#53

Post by gbog »

maximusprime wrote: post #46
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.

" - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent." They're a microsoft shop. They're not going to attract top talent. Who here wants to deal with that stuff?

There is some truth in this comment, but better say the same thing in a more constructive way.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#54

Post by mathattack »

I think we are overanalyzing here. This is like a car company that maintains a garage to attract people who like to look under the hood. It's taking a strategic people decision when hard data isn't easily available. Everything about sys admin job descriptions seems like a digression.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#56

Post by mwsherman »

KyleBrandt wrote: post #38
nupark2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Eith…

For me, the best justification for “doing it ourselves” is that it’s what exceptional companies do. We dig under abstraction layers not knowing what we’ll find. We dig under Linq to SQL. We dig under Redis clients. We really never consider the vendor’s platform good enough.

The result of a million small optimizations is a platform that others can’t create.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#57

Post by sciurus »

reinhardt wrote: post #42
gbeech wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You conveniently left out the first part of the quoted sentence, "allow programmers to actually program infrastructure". Almost everything you wrote can be programmed these days without a "traditional" sysadmin.

Do your "traditional" programmers want to deal with all the practices listed at http://everythingsysadmin.com/the-test.html ?

Do your "traditional" programmers want to develop the sort of skill listed at http://www.sage.org/field/jobs-descriptions.html ?

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#58

Post by kamaal »

gbeech wrote: post #35
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…

>>* 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*.

Even in this case, I would still like to excuse my self of the headache dealing with real estate, electricity, air conditioning etc. In other words supporting factors required to keep the data center up and running.

Unless you are going to need ridiculous amounts of servers, its just not worth your time dealing with other support operations and its infrastructure. Hiring, managing and maintaining the staff full time to this job is not easy and takes a lot of your time.

For some large company it makes perfect sense to focus on data center infrastructure and support. But for small companies you are far better off letting some one else handle it and focus on your primary work.

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#59

Post by ssmoot »

kamaal wrote: post #58
gbeech wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>>* 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*. Even in this case, I would still like to excuse my self of the headache dealing with real estate, electricity, air conditioning etc. In other words supporting factors required to keep the data center up and running. Unless you are going to need ridiculous amou…

This comment doesn't make any sense. Companies who need to build their own data-center aren't going to get by on Heroku.

For everyone else there's co-location, where you don't worry about those things anyways. Unless you have a just terrible facility I guess. I mean sure, one time in the past three years I've complained to our colo folks that it seemed warmer than it should be while one of the A/C units was being serviced.

Other than that your argument doesn't make much sense. It makes me think you've either got no actual experience with this sort of thing, or you're co-locating at "Bob's BBQ & Server Emporium"...

Re: Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud

#60

Post by kamaal »

KyleBrandt wrote: post #38
nupark2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Eith…

Thanks for the honest reply.

But come to think of it in an another way. If you actually let some one else focus on the issues you don't necessarily need to handle you can focus well on issue you actually need to work on.

But, yes its all about personal preferences and I respect your preferences. In my case I would actually let some one else do the job I don't necessarily have to do and use the same time to do well in my actual job.

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