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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#231

Post by slothtrop »

johnklos wrote: post #65

The whole push to the cloud has always fascinated me. I get it - most people aren't interested in babysitting their own hardware. On the other hand, a business of just about any size that has any reasonable amount of hosting is better off with their own systems when it comes purely to cost. All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding…

The bottom line > babysitting hardware. Businesses are transitioning to cloud because it's better for business.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#232

Post by icedchai »

amluto wrote: post #191
tylerchurch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only true for teams and apps of a certain size. I've worked on plenty of teams with relatively small apps, and the difference between: 1. Cloud: "open up the cloud console and start a VM" 2. Owned hardware: "price out a server, order it, find a suitable datacenter, sign a contract, get it racked, etc." Is quite large. #1 is 15 minutes for a single team lead. #2 requires the team to agree on hardware s…

I’ve never worked at a company with these particular problems, but: #1: A cloud VM comes with an obligation for someone at the company to maintain it. The cloud does not excuse anyone from doing this. #2: Sounds like a dysfunctional system. Sure, it may be common, but a medium sized org could easily have some datacenter space and allow any team to rent a server or an instance, or to buy a server and pay some nominal…

Obligation? Far from it. I've worked at some poorly staffed companies. Nobody is maintaining old VMs or container images. If it works, nobody touches it.

I worked at a supposedly properly staffed company that had raised 100's of millions in investment, and it was the same thing. VMs running 5 year old distros that hadn't been updated in years. 600 day uptimes, no kernel patches, ancient versions of Postgres, Python 2.7 code everywhere, etc. This wasn't 10 years ago. This was 2 years ago!

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#233

Post by j45 »

amluto wrote: post #191
tylerchurch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only true for teams and apps of a certain size. I've worked on plenty of teams with relatively small apps, and the difference between: 1. Cloud: "open up the cloud console and start a VM" 2. Owned hardware: "price out a server, order it, find a suitable datacenter, sign a contract, get it racked, etc." Is quite large. #1 is 15 minutes for a single team lead. #2 requires the team to agree on hardware s…

I’ve never worked at a company with these particular problems, but: #1: A cloud VM comes with an obligation for someone at the company to maintain it. The cloud does not excuse anyone from doing this. #2: Sounds like a dysfunctional system. Sure, it may be common, but a medium sized org could easily have some datacenter space and allow any team to rent a server or an instance, or to buy a server and pay some nominal…

The cloud is someone else’s computer.

Having redirected of a vm provider or installing a hyper visor on equipment is another thing.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#234

Post by sgarland »

Cyph0n wrote: post #210
sgarland wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you’re literally running your own datacenters, which is in no way required for the majority of companies. Colo giants like Equinix already have the infrastructure in place, with a proven track record. If you enable Multi-AZ for RDS, your bill doubles until you cancel. If you set up two servers in two DCs, your initial bill doubles from the CapEx, and then a very small percentage of your OpEx goes up every mon…

But reliable connectivity between regions/datacenters remains a challenge, right? Compute is only one part of the equation. Disclaimer: I work on a cloud networking product.

It depends on how deep you want to go. Equinix for one (I'm sure others as well, but I'm most familiar with them) offers managed cross-DC fiber. You will probably need to manage the networking, to be fair, and I will readily admit that's not trivial.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#235

Post by UltraSane »

evantbyrne wrote: post #223
UltraSane wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding," This is false. AWS infrastructure is vastly more secure than almost all company data centers. AWS has a rule that the same person cannot have logical access and physical access to the same storage device. Very few companies have enough IT people to have this rule. The AWS KMS is vastly m…

Making API calls from a VM on shared hardware to KMS is vastly more secure than doing AES locally? I'm skeptical to say the least.

Encrypting data is easy, securely managing keys is the hard part. KMS is the Key Management Service. And AWS put a lot of thought and work into it.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/cryptographic-details...

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#236

Post by xiande04 »

Aside: Fastmail was the best email provider I ever used. The interface was intuitive and responsive, both on mobile and web. They have extensive documentation for everything. I was able to set up a custom domain and and a catch-all email address in a few minutes. Customer support is great, too. I emailed them about an issue and they responded within the hour (turns out it was my fault). I feel like it's a really mature product/company and they really know what they're doing, and have a plan for where they're going.

I ended up switching to Protonmail, because of privacy (Fastmail is within the Five Eyes (Australia)), which is the only thing I really like about Protonmail. But I'm considering switching back to Fastmail, because I liked it so much.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#237

Post by UltraSane »

j45 wrote: post #188
UltraSane wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding," This is false. AWS infrastructure is vastly more secure than almost all company data centers. AWS has a rule that the same person cannot have logical access and physical access to the same storage device. Very few companies have enough IT people to have this rule. The AWS KMS is vastly m…

The cloud is someone else’s computer. It’s like putting something in someone’s desk drawer under the guise of convenience at the expense of security. Why? Too often, someone other than the data owner has or can get access to the drawer directly or indirectly. Also, Cloud vs self hosted to me is a pendulum that has swung back and forth for a number of reasons. The benefits of the cloud outlined here are often a lot of…

> The cloud is someone else’s computer.

And in the case of AWS it is someone else's extremely well designed and managed computer and network.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#238

Post by sgarland »

liontwist wrote: post #179
glitchc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud solves one problem quite well: Geographic redundancy. It's extremely costly with on-prem.

Cloud noob here. But if I have a central database what can I distribute across geographic regions? Static assets? Maybe a cache?

Yep. Cross-region RDBMS is a hard problem, even when you're using a managed service – you practically always have to deal with eventual consistency, or increased latency for writes.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#239

Post by twoparachute45 »

johnklos wrote: post #65

The whole push to the cloud has always fascinated me. I get it - most people aren't interested in babysitting their own hardware. On the other hand, a business of just about any size that has any reasonable amount of hosting is better off with their own systems when it comes purely to cost. All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding…

>What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points. They don't seem to care much about data or facts, just that they love cloud and want everyone else to be in cloud, too.

The irony is absolutely dripping off this comment, wow.

Commenter makes emotionally charge comment with no data or facts and decries anyone who disagrees with them as "silly talking points" for not caring about data and facts.

Your comment is entirely talking about itself.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#240

Post by ndriscoll »

bluedino wrote: post #200
johnklos wrote: post #65

The whole push to the cloud has always fascinated me. I get it - most people aren't interested in babysitting their own hardware. On the other hand, a business of just about any size that has any reasonable amount of hosting is better off with their own systems when it comes purely to cost. All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding…

I want to see an article like this, but written from a Fortune 500 CTO perspective It seems like they all abandoned their VMware farms or physical server farms for Azure (they love Microsoft). Are they actually saving money? Are things faster? How's performance? What was the re-training/hiring like? In one case I know we got rid of our old database greybeards and replaced them with "DevOps" people that knew nothing a…

Complicating this analysis is that computers have still been making exponential improvements in capability as clouds became popular (e.g. disks are 1000-10000x faster than they were 15 years ago), so you'd naturally expect things to become easier to manage over time as you need fewer machines, assuming of course that your developers focus on e.g. learning how to use a database well instead of how to scale to use massive clusters.

That is, even if things became cheaper/faster, they might have been even better without cloud infrastructure.

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