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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#161

Post by nikisweeting »

yowlingcat wrote: post #42
nikisweeting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance? The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers…

The pieces aren't difficult in isolation, but the combined logistical total cost of operational ownership is high and includes huge tail risks. When your metal fails, it stays down until physically fixed. Depending on your business, that's either acceptable or not.

We mitigate that risk by having our backup servers and database replicas in the cloud, but the big beefy primary machines are bare metal run on cheap Quebec power w/ unlimited 1Gbps residential bandwidth.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#162

Post by mekster »

drchopchop wrote: post #41
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

They don't get force-rebooted that often, I have EC2 instances that have been up for over 365 days with no issues. Setting up instances, managing updates, adding IAM perms is orders of magnitude faster/easier than dealing with rack-and-stack data centers. Full downtime isn't that frequent, either. The Kinesis outage on Wednesday didn't affect any of our USE1 functionality, with the exception of maybe Cloudfront propa…

I don't remember them force rebooting for nearly 10 years.

A server is easily surviving over 1000 days and it's usually our side that needs to reboot.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#163

Post by doublerabbit »

dheera wrote: post #131
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Self hosting being cheaper is obvious. It's just a nightmare to manage reliability. With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical acce…

> Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical access to the machine.

I disagree.

You still get all those problems with a shared provider, recall Ghandi's outage?, DigitalOcean, Linnode's and AWS a week ago. Your also stuck in a tighter situation when it does occur.

With years of colocation I have never encountered a power-out event within the datacentre. That's a potential seven years of uptime if I hadn't changed providers in-between.

Nor have I ever suffered a corrupt filesystems and that includes myself preforming DR monthly via sudden power-loss cold-boots. Sure I accidentally deleted /etc/ once.

The only issue out-standing is a failed RAM stick however it's a poorly server which I'm retiring in the new year. Poor thing.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#164

Post by calvinmorrison »

mattmanser wrote: post #153
calvinmorrison wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used this with Azure. We contracted a firm to write a stack for eCommerce sites we were spinning up left and right. It passed through ITIL and was approved all over the chain. After that - security was happy, ops was happy, everyone was happy. Everything was just deploying an application - be it an application making millions of dollars per instance across many brands. It enabled the branding/marketing teams to la…

What on earth has this got to do with the scenario being discussed? You have a mature product, with a proven market and known scalability demands. The exact opposite of how this thread started and somehow this is a good anecdote refuting it!

> You can generalize the infrastructure to run 99% of businesses needs and write that Terraform code only once. You can bring that with you everywhere and take care of the basics in seconds and you can sleep at night easily without a pager going off.

To quote my parent. That's what we did and it worked for us.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#165

Post by mekster »

rootsudo wrote: post #25
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Very true, Running something on the open Internet is super annoying. If you properly subnet, or restrict to VPN, I can see it as useful but then you have a whole other host of problems to conquer. If you're doing a static page or such, no issue, but the second you're hosting a webapp or need to have a database, yeah.

When you're uninformed and don't know what you're facing, things seem complicated and cloud solutions tend to look very attractive but what is so hard about running a web app?

For sake, just spin up a single server somewhere cheaper and run it all in there and vertically scale up after you've put the appropriate monitoring to know when you need to scale up.

And put your money where it's worth it.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#167

Post by mekster »

nikisweeting wrote: post #38
honkycat wrote: post #17

Good luck hiring the professionals needed to run a bunch of co-located servers in 2020.

Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance? The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers…

For those generations of people who grew up by being able to spin up servers with a few mouse clicks, doing that manually seems like a whole level of professional skills.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#168

Post by dragontamer »

oblio wrote: post #126
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always nonplussed by the "additional FTE" argument, its obscenely overestimated - """We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up t…

Tftp?

Tftp is commonly used for PXEBoot scenarios.

You have a centralized PXEBoot server (basically a DNS + TFTP Box). All servers you manage auto-boot to PXEBoot, then download their image from the central server, then automatically provision themselves through Puppet or Kubernetes or whatever the heck you're doing.

Throw down a few network power-adapters (to turn on/off in times of emergency), IPMI for network remote KVM, a VPN to provide security, and you're set to run your own small cluster.

-------

If you need more servers, you buy them up, give them a PXEBoot thumb-drive, and add them to your network.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#169

Post by mekster »

teh_klev wrote: post #50
Patrick-STH wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are included in our colo costs with a second data center where we have a smaller DR cluster.

It never fails to amaze me how many HN contributors don't seem to read the linked articles yet seem compelled to tell you off for things you've already accounted for, explained and justified.

It's because comments are usually far more intelligent and interesting to read and I set my app to open up comments than the story by default. I don't blame the others doing the same.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#170

Post by amerkhalid »

busterarm wrote: post #51
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

I know corps and teams where they need approvals for each cloud resource they instantiate. That is a culture problem.

On other hand, when we were using simple VPSes at various companies, at some companies, I could just send email saying I provisioned a new server and at the others, they wanted a ticket with justification for it. But we always had enough test servers to try out and experiment. Cloud is great in many ways but freedom has more to do with an organization.

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