171–180 of 202 posts
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>99.5% uptime is good enough for nearly all businesses. I don't know what your business is, but as a presales engineer in the ecommerce field, if our SLA was 99.5% we wouldn't even make it past the first round of vendor selection.
> we provide a hosted service in the insurance industry. its right in the second line of the comment
Well that's embarrassing, thanks for the reinforcement!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>99.5% uptime is good enough for nearly all businesses. I don't know what your business is, but as a presales engineer in the ecommerce field, if our SLA was 99.5% we wouldn't even make it past the first round of vendor selection.
> I don't know what your business is, but as a presales engineer in the ecommerce field, if our SLA was 99.5% we wouldn't even make it past the first round of vendor selection. As you know, the SLA isn't the same as the downtime. It just means the threshhold where you'd start paying back some credits for missing the SLA (only to customers who notice and ask). Which is often cheaper than building the infrastructure to…
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> Software startup can use consumer grade workstations and self host at their office (or at home) (...) And if you do not need the scale, but reliability, it is easier to rent two servers at coloc. Yeah, just don't forget the backups and monitoring, the networking setup (load balancing between your two servers or workstations at the very least), patching, moving to new servers/workstations when you outgrow the curren…
It is a startup, not a space program. Backup can be done with simple ssh+rsync script. Patching is a weekly weekend cron script+reboot. Some heartbeat monitoring... If it goes down for a few hours, not a biggie. For "throw it all in a PaaS" you need dedicated person, monitoring, billing etc... It is more expensive, not simpler. Cloud provider may also terminate your accounts, change settings etc...
My clients spend a lot more on AWS bills than they would on self-hosted infra; $1000ish compared to $200/mo from self-hosted or a pair of $1000 servers colo'd for about $100/mo. They get a lot more - Reliability and support channels. That's what they're paying for. Absolutely, I recommend that they when they scale, they move their most expensive parts in terms of AWS costs (bandwidth-intensive things like gameservers and media bouncers) from AWS to self-hosted, because those are the things that are too expensive on AWS and have reliability properties where "Throw a bunch at the wall, fail them fast" is a good guarantee. For your production backups, don't rely on simple scripts. Don't rely on complex scripts. Rely on commonly tested solutions of other people's amortized experience.
There is also the option of managed metal. You get raid, monitoring and super performance.
I used to think VPS was the middle ground but now I like managed metal best.
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.
If you're using Kubernetes, you want a managed cloud storage solution and you want a managed database solution, and AWS is among the best for those. (Though, personally - I prefer GKE). The smaller VPS providers have solutions for those. DynamoDB, though? Not so much.
What it really comes down to is this - you cannot just make a blanket assumption on Cloud vs Self Hosted
Generally however I believe that the hybrid approach is going to be the best for most larger companies - any highly variable workload (that benefits massively from autoscaling in the cloud) is going to be better renting servers from AWS or similar. And any very predictable workload (especially ones that require lots of compute or GPU power) will be cheaper to run on your own (think something like a GPO farm for a 3D animation studio).
And of course there is nothing stoping you from doing both and having your very predicatble and high power workloads in your own DC with your own managed hardware and then just autoscale as needed to whatever Cloud you want.
This shit always comes full circle - we had Mainframes and Terminals (basically a mini cloud) and the pendulum swung for awhile to personal PC's and now we are penduluming back again. Theres no all encompassing solution for everyone.
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.
No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs…
> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a: - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) - Data center environment specia…
Security you should probably have no matter where your shit is hosted......
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> What happens if your server is overheating? As I said, this is usually provided by data center itself, however you have to still have to vet the vendor. It's 2023. Hardware operates within spec 99.99% of the time, unless the data center is literally on fire. AWS/GCP has outages too, btw. > Yes, AND Nagios, Solarwinds, Cisco, IBM, VMWare, etc. etc. and every one of their subsidiaries that have esoteric needs. If you…
> Ummm...no. Just no. Have you ever had to create multiple subnets, DMZs, SD-WAN setups, plus VPN access, etc. etc. with multiple locations, all with security in mind, and full redundancy across three data centers? >> Again, if that's your use case, then we're not talking about 1 cloud engineer vs 3 non-cloud engineers. At my company we operate a setup like this on AWS with about 8 people total (5 infra engineers and…
Hardware is easier, cheaper, and more reliable than ever and I rarely (system engineer) have to go out somewhere. Harddrives still occasionally fail but with a strong RAID and multiple hot spares your system will not even think about failure until you have a lot of failed drives (and even then you have a whole separate redundtant storage array to HA over to). I would estimate someone has to drive out there every 6 months on average - often less. Rarely a piece of RAM will fail. By the time I drive to the COLO the replacement drive or part is already there (the system automatically calls home and orders a replacement part from the vendor).
All of these systems are daisy chained together with multiple 40 or 100gig ethernet links so that even if a core switch goes down + multiple servers everything will keep running.
Does this take awhile inititally to setup? Yes it does. Does it take a lot of work to maintain and upgrade? Not at all.