Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we use our own hardware

fastmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 547 posts

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#131

Post by sgarland »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #125
sgarland wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points. I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected. Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of…

> So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration ... And running your own hardware is not incompatible with Kubernetes: on the contrary. You can fully well have your infra spin up VMs and then do container orchestration if that's your thing. And part your hardware monitoring and reporting tool can work perfectly fine from containers. Bare metal -> Hypervisor -> VM -> container orchestration -> a c…

Fully agree. And if you want to take it to the next level (and have a large budget), Oxide [0] seems to have neatly packaged this into a single coherent product. They don't quite have K8s fully running, last I checked, but there are of course other container orchestration systems.

> Go to the machine once the spare disk as already been resilvered

Hi, fellow ZFS enthusiast :-)

[0]: https://oxide.computer

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#132

Post by icedchai »

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…

Writing piles of IaC code like Terraform and CloudFormation is also a PITA and a distraction from focusing on your core product.

PaaS is probably the way to go for small apps.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#133

Post by jeffbee »

zosima wrote: post #122
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…

You are focusing on technology. And sure of course you can get most of the benefits of AWS a lot cheaper when self-hosting. But when you start factoring internal processes and incompetent IT departments, suddenly that's not actually a viable option in many real-world scenarios.

Exactly. With the cloud you can suddenly do all the things your tyrannical Windows IT admin has been saying are impossible for the last 30 years.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#134

Post by marcosdumay »

sgarland wrote: post #103
zosima wrote: post #83

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…

All of that is... completely unrelated to the GP's post.

Did you reply to the right comment? Do you think "politics" is something you solve with Ansible?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#135

Post by akpa1 »

The fact that Fastmail work like this, are transparent about what they're up to and how they're storing my email and the fact that they're making logical decisions and have been doing so for quite a long time is exactly the reason I practically trip over myself to pay them for my email. Big fan of Fastmail.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#136

Post by icedchai »

glitchc wrote: post #87
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…

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

Except, almost nobody, outside of very large players, does cross region redundancy. us-east-1 is like a SPOF for the entire Internet.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#138

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#139

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> The problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis.

Yes. Mass psychosis explains an incredible number of different and apparently unrelated problems with the industry.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#140

Post by ternnoburn »

renewiltord wrote: post #105
ForHackernews wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very confused by this. What is in beta? I've had "offline" email access for 25 years. It's called an IMAP client.

[flagged]

Hey, this response makes you look like an adolescent asshole. Parent poster was clearly asking about prioritization.
Post reply on HN