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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#111

Post by sgarland »

cpursley wrote: post #73
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 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…

Counterpoint: if you’re never “messing with servers,” you probably don’t have a great understanding of how their metrics map to those of your application’s, and so if you bottleneck on something, it can be difficult to figure out what to fix. The result is usually that you just pay more money to vertically scale.

To be fair, you did say “my tune might change past a certain size.” At small scale, nothing you do within reason really matters. World’s worst schema, but your DB is only seeing 100 QPS? Yeah, it doesn’t care.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#112

Post by cpursley »

fhd2 wrote: post #82
cpursley wrote: post #73

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…

I'm with you there, with stuff like fly.io, there's really no reason to worry about infrastructure. AWS, on the other hand, seems about as time consuming and hard as using root servers. You're at a higher level of abstraction, but the complexity is about the same I'd say. At least that's my experience.

I agree with this position and actively avoid AWS complexity.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#113

Post by bdangubic »

dietr1ch wrote: post #100
glitchc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does it? I've seen outages around "Sorry, us-west_carolina-3 is down". AWS is particularly good at keeping you aware of their datacenters.

if you see that you are doing it wrong :)

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#114

Post by floating-io »

jeffbee wrote: post #75
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 problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis. I reject a theory that requires that, because my ego just isn't that large. I once worked for several years at a publicly traded firm well-known for their return-to-on-prem stance, and honestly it was a complete disaster. The first-party hardware designs didn't work right because they didn't have the har…

"Vendor problems" is a red herring, IMO; you can have those in the cloud, too.

It's been my experience that those who can build good, reliable, high-quality systems, can do so either in the cloud or on-prem, generally with equal ability. It's just another platform to such people, and they will use it appropriately and as needed.

Those who can only make it work in the cloud are either building very simple systems (which is one place where the cloud can be appropriate), or are building a house of cards that will eventually collapse (or just cost them obscene amounts of money to keep on life support).

Engineering is engineering. Not everyone in the business does it, unfortunately.

Like everything, the cloud has its place -- but don't underestimate the number of decisions that get taken out of the hands of technical people by the business people who went golfing with their buddy yesterday. He just switched to Azure, and it made his accountants really happy!

The whole CapEx vs. OpEx issue drives me batty; it's the number one cause of cloud migrations in my career. For someone who feels like spent money should count as spent money regardless of the bucket it comes out of, this twists my brain in knots.

I'm clearly not a finance guy...

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#116

Post by sgarland »

the__alchemist wrote: post #110
sgarland wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you need those tools? It seems that for fundamental web hosting, you need your application server, nginx or similar, postgres or similar, and a CLI. (And an interpreter etc if your application is in an interpreted lang)

I suppose that depends on your RTO. With cloud providers, even on a bare VM, you can to some extent get away with having no IaC, since your data (and therefore config) is almost certainly on networked storage which is redundant by design. If an EC2 fails, or even if one of the drives in your EBS drive fails, it'll probably come back up as it was.

If it's your own hardware, if you don't have IaC of some kind – even something as crude as a shell script – then a failure may well mean you need to manually set everything up again.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#117

Post by tzs »

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…

There was a time when cloud was significantly cheaper then owning.

I'd expect that there are people who moved to the cloud then, and over time started using services offered by their cloud provider (e.g., load balancers, secret management, databases, storage, backup) instead of running those services themselves on virtual machines, and now even if it would be cheaper to run everything on owned servers they find it would be too much effort to add all those services back to their own servers.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#118

Post by acedTrex »

jgb1984 wrote: post #62
klysm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s trading time for money

Fake news. I've got my bare metal server deployed and installed with my ansible playbook even before you manage to log into the bazillion layers of abstraction that is AWS.

But can you do that on demand in minutes for 1000 application teams that have unique snowflake needs. Because terraform or bicep can.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#119

Post by toomuchtodo »

tzs wrote: post #117
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…

There was a time when cloud was significantly cheaper then owning. I'd expect that there are people who moved to the cloud then, and over time started using services offered by their cloud provider (e.g., load balancers, secret management, databases, storage, backup) instead of running those services themselves on virtual machines, and now even if it would be cheaper to run everything on owned servers they find it wo…

The cloud wasn’t about cheap, it was about fast. If you’re VC funded, time is everything, and developer velocity above all else to hyperscale and exit. That time has passed (ZIRP), and the public cloud margin just doesn’t make sense when you can own and operate (their margin is your opportunity) on prem with similar cloud primitives around storage and compute.

Elasticity is a component, but has always been from a batch job bin packing scheduling perspective, not much new there. Before k8s and Nomad, there was Globus.org.

(Infra/DevOps in a previous life at a unicorn, large worker cluster for a physics experiment prior, etc; what is old is a new again, you’re just riding hype cycle waves from junior to retirement [mainframe->COTS on prem->cloud->on prem cloud, and so on])

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#120

Post by tokioyoyo »

sgarland wrote: post #111
cpursley wrote: post #73

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…

Counterpoint: if you’re never “messing with servers,” you probably don’t have a great understanding of how their metrics map to those of your application’s, and so if you bottleneck on something, it can be difficult to figure out what to fix. The result is usually that you just pay more money to vertically scale. To be fair, you did say “my tune might change past a certain size.” At small scale, nothing you do within…

I don’t think you’re correct. I’ve watched junior/mid-level engineers figure things out solely by working on the cloud and scaling things to a dramatic degree. It’s really not a rocket science.
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