131–140 of 269 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what if I don't have anything lying around?
Depends on what you want to do with it. To start any old free PC that you can find online is going to work for experimenting with it.
"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…
It's still not ever a great idea (unless, maybe, this is what you do for a living for your customers), simply because it binds your time, which will absolutely be your scarcest asset if your business does anything.
I am speaking from my acute experience.
You write: I'm fortunate enough to work at a company (enum.co) where digital sovereignty is not just a phrase. info.addr.tools shows [1]: MX 1 smtp.google.com. TXT "mailcoach-verification=a873d3f3-0f4f-4a04-a085-d53f70708e84" TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all" TXT "google-site-verification=TTrl7IWxuGQBEqbNAz17GKZzS-utrW7SCZbgdo5tkk0" This is not just a phrase, it is a DNS entry. Using the most evil in phrases…
To be fair to enum, the services they sell are around k8, an s3-equivalent, and devops. If they sold/promised self-hosting/sovereign email services, and then were "caught" using gmail, that might be a different story. Your point stands - they're not fully completely independent. And maybe the language in the OP's article could have been different.. but the OP also specifically says "Oh no, I said the forbidden phrase…
"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…
Truth. All the major cloud platform marketing is YAGNI but for infrastructure instead of libraries/code.
As someone who works in ops and has since starting as a sysadmin in the early 00s, it's been entertaining to say the least to watch everyone rediscover hosting your own stuff as if it's some new innovation and wasn't ever possible before. It's like that old MongoDB is web scale video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs)
Watching devs discover Docker was similarly entertaining back then when us in ops have been using LXC and BSD jails, etc. to containerize code pre-DevOps.
Anyway, all that to say - go buy your gray beard sysadmins a coffee let them help you. We would all be thrilled to bring stuff back on-prem or go back to self hosting and running infra again and probably have a few tricks to teach you.
You write: I'm fortunate enough to work at a company (enum.co) where digital sovereignty is not just a phrase. info.addr.tools shows [1]: MX 1 smtp.google.com. TXT "mailcoach-verification=a873d3f3-0f4f-4a04-a085-d53f70708e84" TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all" TXT "google-site-verification=TTrl7IWxuGQBEqbNAz17GKZzS-utrW7SCZbgdo5tkk0" This is not just a phrase, it is a DNS entry. Using the most evil in phrases…
Self hosting is great, but I am more interested in decentralized technology, whether as services or even radio. I think in the near future the world will experience major disruptions, technical, financial, or even political, that centralized solutions are rendered useless, and the average person would rather have a local connection instead (local as in both topology and physical medium, so you have your own wifi stat…
You think civilisation will go down but you will still be able to chat with people via smartphone?
"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…
The main thing that gives me anxiety about this is the security surface area associated with "managing" a whole OS— kernel, userland, all of it. Like did I get the firewall configured correctly, am I staying on top of the latest CVEs, etc. For that reason alone I'd be tempted to do GHA workflow -> build container image and push to private registry -> trivial k8s config that deploys that container with the proper port…
Don't be me, but even if you royally mess up things won't be as bad as you think.
"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…
I wish I understood why some engineers feel the need to over-engineer the crap out of everything.
Is it because of wishful thinking? They think their blog is gonna eventually become so popular that they're handling thousands of requests per second, and they want to scale up NOW?
I just think about what web servers looked like at the turn of the millennium. We didn't have all these levels of abstraction. No containers. Not even VMs. And we did it on hardware that would be considered so weak that they'd be considered utterly worthless by today's standards.
And yet...it worked. We did it.
Now we've got hardware that is literally over 1000 times faster. Faster clocks, more cache, higher IPC, and multiple cores. And I feel like half of the performance gains are being thrown away by adding needless abstractions and overhead.
FFS...how many websites were doing just fine with a simple LAMP stack?
Cost, experience and for the paranoid (right or not) control. The biggest downside is initial cost in time, effort and cash compared to typing in a credit card. Ok other downsides include lack of power redundancy and decent networking which are more common in data-centers. Other side of this is, why buy 8xa100 for that project to stick them on eBay to recoup cost when you can rent them?
Convincing the family to buy in is hard too because (as you put) I can't promise the same level of redundancy/service guarantees.
Don't be me, but have some solace in the fact that even if you royally mess up things won't be as bad as you think.
I self host a lot of things on a VPS and have recently started self hosting on a raspberry pi 5, it's extremely liberating!