101–110 of 547 posts
Such an awesome article. I like how they didn't just go with the Cloud wave but kept sysadmin'ing, like ol' Unix graybeards. Two interesting things they wrote about their SSDs: 1) "At this rate, we’ll replace these [SSD] drives due to increased drive sizes, or entirely new physical drive formats (such E3.S which appears to finally be gaining traction) long before they get close to their rated write capacity." and 2)…
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…
Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics. This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.
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…
Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics. This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.
But once those are set up, how is it different? AWS is quite clear with their responsibility model that you still have to tune your DB, for example. And for the setup, just as there are Terraform modules to do everything under the sun, there are Ansible (or Chef, or Salt…) playbooks to do the same. For both, you _should_ know what all of the options are doing.
The only way I see this sentiment being true is that a dev team, with no infrastructure experience, can more easily spin up a lot of infra – likely in a sub-optimal fashion – to run their application. When it inevitably breaks, they can then throw money at the problem via vertical scaling, rather than addressing the root cause.
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…
And moreover most of the actual interesting things, like having VM templates and stateless containers, orchestration, etc. is very easy to run yourself and gets you 99.9% of the benefits of the cloud.
About just any and every service is available as container file already written for you. And if it doesn't exist, it's not hard to plumb up.
A friend of mine runs more than 700 containers (yup, seven hundreds), split over his own rack at home (half of them) and the other half on dedicated servers (he runs stuff like FlightRadar, AI models, etc.). He'll soon get his own IP addresses space. Complete "chaos monkey" ready infra where you can cut any cable and the thing shall keep working: everything is duplicated, can be spun up on demand, etc. Someone could still his entire rack and all his dedicated server, he'd still be back operational in no time.
If an individual can do that, a company, no matter its size, can do it too. And arguably 99.9% of all the companies out there don't have the need for an infra as powerful as the one most homelab enthusiast have.
And another thing: there's even two in-betweens between "cloud" and "our own hardware located at our company". First is colocating your own hardware but in a datacenter. Second is renting dedicated servers from a datacenter.
They're often ready to accept cloud-init directly.
And it's not hard. I'd say learning to configure hypervisors on bare metal, then spin VMs from templates, then running containers inside the VMs is actually much easier than learning all the idiosyncrasies of all the different cloud vendors APIs and whatnots.
Funnily enough when the pendulum swung way too far on the "cloud all the things" side, those saying at some point we'd read story about repatriation were being made fun of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics. This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.
I have said for years the value of cloud is mainly its api, thats the selling point in large enterprise.
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 think there are accounting reasons for companies to prefer paying opex to run things on the cloud instead of more capex-intensive self-hosting, but I don’t understand the dynamics well.
It’s certainly the case that clouds tend to be more expensive than self-hosting, even when taking account of the discounts that moderately sized customers can get, and some of the promises around elastic scaling don’t really apply when you are bigger.
To some of your other points: the main customers of companies like AWS are businesses. Businesses generally don’t care about the centralisation of the internet. Businesses are capable of reading the contracts they are signing and not signing them if privacy (or, typically more relevant to businesses, their IP) cannot be sufficiently protected. It’s not really clear to me that using a cloud is going to be less secure than doing things on-prem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact is, managing your own hardware is a pita and a distraction from focusing on the core product. I loathe messing with servers and even opt for "overpriced" paas like fly, render, vercel. Because every minute messing with and monitoring servers is time not spent on product. My tune might change past a certain size and a massive cloud bill and there's room for full time ops people, but to offset their salary, it…
Anecdotal - but I once worked for a company where the product line I built for them after acquisition was delayed by 5 months because that's how long it took to get the hardware ordered and installed in the datacenter. Getting it up on AWS would have been a days work, maybe two.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics. This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.
I’m not convinced this is entirely true. The upfront cost if you don’t have the skills, sure – it takes time to learn Linux administration, not to mention management tooling like Ansible, Puppet, etc. But once those are set up, how is it different? AWS is quite clear with their responsibility model that you still have to tune your DB, for example. And for the setup, just as there are Terraform modules to do everythin…