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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#261

Post by vel0city »

sgarland wrote: post #257
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd gladly use (and maybe even pay for!) an open-source reimplementation of AWS RDS Aurora. All the bells and whistles with failover, clustering, volume-based snaps, cross-region replication, metrics etc. As far as I know, nothing comes close to Aurora functionality. Even in vibecoding world. No, 'apt-get install postgres' is not enough.

Nitpick (I blame Amazon for their horrible naming): Aurora and RDS are separate products. What you’re asking for can mostly be pieced together, but no, it doesn’t exist as-is. Failover: this has been a thing for a long time. Set up a synchronous standby, then add a monitoring job that checks heartbeats and promotes the standby when needed. Optionally use something like heartbeat to have a floating IP that gets swappe…

> you can fairly closely replicate the experience of Aurora

Nobody doubts one could build something similar to Aurora given enough budget, time, and skills.

But that's not replicating the experience of Aurora. The experience of Aurora is I can have all of that, in like 30 lines of terraform and a few minutes. And then I don't need to worry about managing the zpools, I don't need to ensure the heartbeats are working fine, I don't need to worry about hardware failures (to a large extent), I don't need to drive to multiple different physical locations to set up the hardware, I don't need to worry about handling patching, etc.

You might replicate the features, but you're not replicating the experience.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#263

Post by organsnyder »

eitally wrote: post #256
couscouspie wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand…

They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.

I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#264

Post by jdmichal »

torginus wrote: post #151
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

It's about fitting your utilization to the model that best serves you.

If you can keep 4 "Java boxes" fed with work 80%+ of the time, then sure EC2 is a good fit.

We do a lot of batch processing and save money over having EC2 boxes always on. Sure we could probably pinch some more pennies if we managed the EC2 box uptime and figured out mechanisms for load balancing the batches... But that's engineering time we just don't really care to spend when ECS nets us most of the savings advantage and is simple to reason about and use.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#265

Post by komali2 »

> The cloud requires expertise in company-specific APIs and billing systems.

This is one reason I hate dealing with AWS. It feels like a waste of time in some ways. Like learning a fly-by-night javascript library - maybe I'm better off spending that time writing the functionality on my own, to increase my knowledge and familiarity?

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#266

Post by rmoriz »

Cloud, in terms of "other company's infrastructure" always implies losing the competence to select, source and operate hardware. Treating hardware as commodity will eventually treat your very own business as commodity: Someone can just copy your software/IP and ruin your business. Every durable business needs some kind of intellectual property and human skills that are not replaceable easily. This sounds binary, but isn't. You can build long-lasting partnerships. German Mittelstand did that over decades.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#268

Post by SahAssar »

friendzis wrote: post #235
couscouspie wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand…

> and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it. Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.

> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer"

That is not true. It takes a lot more than a bootcamp to be useful in this space, unless your definition is to copy-paste some CDK without knowing what it does.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#269

Post by toomuchtodo »

organsnyder wrote: post #263
eitally wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.

I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.

Perhaps we need bootcamps for on prem stacks if we are concerned about a skills gap. This is no different imho from the trades skills shortage many developed countries face. The muscle must be flexed. Otherwise, you will be held captive by a provider "who does it all for you".

"Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#270

Post by eldenring »

infecto wrote: post #208
apothegm wrote: post #204

This also depends so much on your scaling needs. If you need 3 mid-sized ECS/EC2 instances, a load balancer, and a database with backups, renting those from AWS isn’t going to be significantly more expensive for a decent-sized company than hiring someone to manage a cluster for you and dealing with all the overhead of keeping it maintained and secure. If you’re at the scale of hundreds of instances, that math changes…

I also thinks it’s risk model too. Every time I see these kind of posts I think it misses the point there is a balance not only on cost like you describe but risk as well. You are paying to offload some of the risk from yourself.

The issue is that they have already paid off their datacenter 5x over compared to cloud. For offline, batch training, I don't ses how any amount of risk could offset the savings.
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