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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#441

Post by throwaway-aws9 »

re-thc wrote: post #400
throwaway-aws9 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're just young. And I feel great! > Did you know that cloud cost less than what the internal IT team at a company would charge you? Yes. Internal IT teams ran old-school are inefficient. And that's what the vendor tells you while they create shadow IT inside your company. Skip ITSM and ITIL... do it the SRE way. Until the cloud economist (real role) comes in and finds a way to extract more rent out of their cust…

> Yes. Internal IT teams ran old-school are inefficient. They aren't. It's politics. They want to protect and improve their own headcount and resources. > One is hard dollars the other is funny money. All the same to a team / department. It's not like people run it like their own wallet. > finds a way to extract more rent out of their customer base I find you just have a grudge against the cloud and hence too young.…

> the so-called "internal" IT team can and will do just the same.

but how is shadow IT gonna solve anything? it'll get kudos from the junior VP, chuckles from the SVP, but the CIO will laugh you out of the room at how poor you are at getting shit done internally.

> The problem isn't the cloud.

The problem is how gullible folks are at cloud advocacy, or any vendor advocacy in general. It's all lies but cloud lies are better than others! Your 3-year commitment won't scale down to low figures. Oh you wanna have that many nodes come black Friday? Gotta reserve! Yup, infinite scale actually means infinite lies.

Above all, the cloud is not cheap. 11B profit on 33B revenue per quarter at AWS. If your local IT spend is inefficient, I bet it won't be more efficient in the cloud.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#443

Post by g8oz »

sanderjd wrote: post #278
g8oz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth becoming good at.

Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.

It's more nuanced for sure than my pithy comment suggests. I've done both self-managed and managed and felt it was a good use of my time to self-manage given the size of the organizations, the profile of the workloads and the cost differential. There is a whole universe of technology businesses that do not earn SV/FAANG levels of ROI - for them, self-managed is a reasonable allocation of effort.

One point to keep in mind is that the effort is not constant. Once you reach a certain level of competency and stability in your setup, there is not much difference in time spent. I also felt that self-managed gave us more flexibility in terms of tuning.

My final point is that any investment in databases whether as a developer or as an ops person is long-lived and will pay dividends for a longer time than almost all other technologies.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#444

Post by asdfman123 »

dh2022 wrote: post #440

LOL’ed IRL at “ In a future blog post I hope I can tell you about how we produce our own power and you should too.” Producing own power as a pre-requisite for running on-prem is a non-starter for many.

"It's really not hard to create your own coal power. Our engineers have built a small coal power generator and simply get coal from our mines (which I'll describe in a future blog post)."

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#445

Post by danpalmer »

lelanthran wrote: post #53
danpalmer wrote: post #22

> Cloud companies generally make onboarding very easy, and offboarding very difficult. I reckon most on-prem deployments have significantly worse offboarding than the cloud providers. As a cloud provider you can win business by having something for offboarding, but internally you'd never get buy-in to spend on a backup plan if you decide to move to the cloud.

> As a cloud provider you can win business by having something for offboarding, but internally you'd never get buy-in to spend on a backup plan if you decide to move to the cloud. Its the other way around. How do you think all businesses moved to the cloud in the first place?

My point is that at the point of moving, or creating a new deployment, it's perfectly reasonable to say "how do we get off the cloud if it goes badly", yet no one says "how do we get onto a cloud if managing a datacenter sucks".

The cloud providers win business with at least some hint of offboarding support, but on-prem doesn't have that same incentive.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#446

Post by swordsith »

Recently learned about tailscale and have been accessing my project from my phone, It's been a game changer. The fact that they support teams of up to 3 people and 100 devices on the free plan is awesome imo. Running locally just makes me feel so much more comfortable.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#447

Post by sanderjd »

g8oz wrote: post #443
sanderjd wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.

It's more nuanced for sure than my pithy comment suggests. I've done both self-managed and managed and felt it was a good use of my time to self-manage given the size of the organizations, the profile of the workloads and the cost differential. There is a whole universe of technology businesses that do not earn SV/FAANG levels of ROI - for them, self-managed is a reasonable allocation of effort. One point to keep in…

I feel like you and I have similar experiences, but have drawn entirely opposite conclusions from them :)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#448

Post by sanderjd »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #412
cheema33 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it. Same here. But, I assume you have managed PostgreSQL in the past. I have. There are a large number of people software devs who have not. For them, it is not a low complexity task. And I can understand that. I am a software dev for our small org and I run the servers and services we need. I use ansible and terraform to automate as much…

> Same here. But, I assume you have managed PostgreSQL in the past. I have. There are a large number of people software devs who have not. For them, it is not a low complexity task. And I can understand that. I'd say needing to read the documentation for the first time is what bumps it up from low complexity to medium. And then at medium you should still do it if there's a significant cost difference.

But is there a significant cost difference? I'm skeptical.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#449

Post by thiagonazariosl »

seg_lol wrote: post #303
spacebanana7 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is incredibly difficult in the public sector. Yes, there are various financing instruments available for capital purchases but they're always annoying, slow and complicated. It's much easier to spend 5k per month than 500k outright.

Your numbers don't line up, if you are spending 5k in cloud costs, and on prem is 1/3 of cloud. At 48 month replacement cycle, 1/3 of 5k * 48 months is 80k. So it is 80k vs 5k a month for 48 months. I think the primary reason that people over fixate on the cloud is that they can't do math. So renting is a hedge.

You hit the nail on the head regarding the math. Most teams treat cloud costs as an inevitable tax rather than an engineering variable. As someone with an accounting background turned Cloud Architect, I see this 'math gap' daily. Usually, it's not a cloud vs. on-prem issue, but a lack of infrastructure discipline—idle resources and unoptimized NATs burn through that 48-month budget faster than hardware depreciation ever would. I’ve been using a 'Hardened by Design' framework to cut this waste by 50% without the overhead of moving back to a data center. Efficiency is often just better IaC.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#450

Post by conductr »

scalemaxx wrote: post #304

Everything comes circle. Back in my day, we just called it a "data center". Or on-premise. You know, before the cloud even existed. A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new? Better computing for sure. Better virtualization and administration software, definitely. Cooling and power and racks? More of the same. The argument made 2 decades ago was that you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital ex…

Curious question. If opex is so exceedingly high for cloud, pushing people back to capex to save money, then why has no cloud entrant come around with a price competitive alternative?

It seems the main issue is that everyone is anchored to AWS so they have no incentive to reduce their prices. Probably same for Azure. I think Google is just risky because they kill products so easily.

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