Move Back to Datacenters

> Some software is only available as SaaS anymore

This reminds me of the idea of "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

> What does it mean to say that a given computing activity is your own? It means that no one else is inherently involved in it. To clarify the meaning of “inherently involved,” we present a thought experiment. Suppose that any software tasks you might need for the job are implemented in free software and you have copies, and you have whatever data you might need, as well as computers of whatever speed, functionality and capacity might be required. Could you do this particular computing activity entirely within those computers, not communicating with anyone else's computers?

> If you could, then the activity is entirely your own. For your freedom's sake, you deserve to control it. If you do it by running free software, you do control it. However, doing it via someone else's service would give that someone else control over your computing activity. We call that scenario SaaSS, and we say it is unjust.

It sounds a bit preachy like some of the FSF/GNU stuff sometimes does, but at the same time I can't shake the feeling that they're somewhat right and that those arguments have also fallen on deaf ears most of the time.

For my own personal stuff, I just self-host everything I need in containers and mostly use free software, so I can (and have) easily move hosting providers or host things myself in my homelab, have full backups and so on. But at the same time, it definitely takes a bit of work to figure everything out and not everyone wants that, especially in environments where you can point a finger and go "the vendor is having some issues, we're off the hook".

Plus, I don't think there are many alternatives to certain software out there, like MongoDB (maybe JSON in RDBMS if you really need to, but the API would be different then), or S3 (MinIO has a license that's too strong for some, Zenko feels abandoned, Garage is the same as MinIO, maybe SeaweedFS but that doesn't have full/mostly full API compatibility from looking into it).

Honestly, it sometimes unironically feels like building boring software that relies on MariaDB/PostgreSQL and maybe Redis/RabbitMQ is the right answer. Not quite sure about blob storage, though.

Also, a lot of people here work for startups or have their own startups.

The cloud makes a lot of sense for startups for a variety of reasons. Low capex, easier to get started, you’re willing to pay a premium to not have to deal with certain issues, at least in the beginning, and your costs are likely not very high anyways because your usage is relatively low.

Scaling is definitely one, but another big category is just depending on other cloud services, whether it's message queues, managed databases, object storage, ML training pipelines, software-defined networking, whatever.

In any of those cases, we either have a choice to implement and support some onprem alternative, require the customer to provide the necessary service locally (which is not particularly effective for all sorts of reasons), or simply disable features onprem.

In the cloud, we get significant benefits from using managed services. Onprem, we not only lose those benefits, we have to pay an additional cost in terms of making our code support both environments and building out the deployment and support of the services in question.

It's really exactly the same issues that make cloud attractive to businesses in the first place.

No. We rolled our own stack for 10 years, until 2018, well after AWS and Azure were around.

We switched to Azure in 2018 and never looked back.

Sure you trade security (do you really, though?) in exchange for:

- not needing to head to the DC because a power supply failed and a rando who was in the cage never plugged in the redundant one

- not having to be way over-capacity in scalability, or suddenly under-capacity and emergency ordering some more 1Us

- not sifting through eBay to buy a spare hard drive that one of your boxes from 2011 needs but dell no longer makes

and the list goes on ad infinitum.

This problem has been solved. It's time to move on. Any time a company spends tinkering with their stack is less time spent delivering something of value.