Why we use our own hardware • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#161

Post by jorams » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Your comment is confusing because you start this one saying your inbox is full of spam, but respond to a suggestion to mark it as spam by saying it's not actually spam.

If something is not spam but you want it out of your inbox there's a few options:

- click Unsubscribe next to the sender. This should be possible for essentially all promotional email.

- click Actions -> click Block . Messages from this address will now immediately go to trash.

- click Actions -> click Add rule from message (-> optionally change the suggested conditions) -> check Archive (or if you don't use labels click Move to) -> click Save. Messages matching the conditions will now skip your inbox.

There's not much they could do to make that easier without magically knowing what you care about and what you don't.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#162

Post by layer8 » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

tylerchurch wrote: post #123

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…

I think this is only true for teams and apps of a certain size. I've worked on plenty of teams with relatively small apps, and the difference between: 1. Cloud: "open up the cloud console and start a VM" 2. Owned hardware: "price out a server, order it, find a suitable datacenter, sign a contract, get it racked, etc." Is quite large. #1 is 15 minutes for a single team lead. #2 requires the team to agree on hardware s…

The SMB I work for runs a small on-premise data center that is shared between teams and projects, with maybe 3-4 FTEs managing it (the respective employees also do dev and other work). This includes self-hosting email, storage, databases, authentication, source control, CI, ticketing, company wiki, chat, and other services. The current infrastructure didn’t start out that way and developed over many years, so it’s not necessarily something a small startup can start out with, but beyond a certain company size (a couple dozen employees or more) it shouldn’t really be a problem to develop that, if management shares the philosophy. I certainly find it preferable culturally, if not technically, to maximize independence in that way, have the local expertise and much better control over everything.

One (the only?) indisputable benefit of cloud is the ability to scale up faster (elasticity), but most companies don’t really need that. And if you do end up needing it after all, then it’s a good problem to have, as they say.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#163

Post by zbentley » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

noprocrasted wrote: post #150

tylerchurch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only true for teams and apps of a certain size. I've worked on plenty of teams with relatively small apps, and the difference between: 1. Cloud: "open up the cloud console and start a VM" 2. Owned hardware: "price out a server, order it, find a suitable datacenter, sign a contract, get it racked, etc." Is quite large. #1 is 15 minutes for a single team lead. #2 requires the team to agree on hardware s…

3. "Dedicated server" at any hosting provider Open their management console, press order now, 15 mins later get your server's IP address.

For purposes of this discussion, isn't AWS just a very large hosting provider?

I.e. most hosting providers give you the option for virtual or dedicated hardware. So does Amazon (metal instances).

Like, "cloud" was always an ill-defined term, but in the case of "how do I provision full servers" I think there's no qualitative difference between Amazon and other hosting providers. Quantitative, sure.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#164

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:13 PM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #107

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…

Well cloud providers often give more than just VMs in a data enter somewhere. You may not be able to find good equivalents if you aren’t using the cloud. Some third-party products are also only available on clouds. How much of a difference those things make will depend on what you’re trying to do. I think there are accounting reasons for companies to prefer paying opex to run things on the cloud instead of more capex…

[deleted]

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#165

Post by noprocrasted » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

> And running your own hardware is not incompatible with Kubernetes: on the contrary

Kubernetes actually makes so much more sense on bare-metal hardware.

On the cloud, I think the value prop is dubious - your cloud provider is already giving you VMs, why would you need to subdivide them further and add yet another layer of orchestration?

Not to mention that you're getting 2010s-era performance on those VMs, so subdividing them is terrible from a performance point of view too.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#166

Post by goodpoint » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:15 PM UTC

noprocrasted wrote: post #150

tylerchurch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only true for teams and apps of a certain size. I've worked on plenty of teams with relatively small apps, and the difference between: 1. Cloud: "open up the cloud console and start a VM" 2. Owned hardware: "price out a server, order it, find a suitable datacenter, sign a contract, get it racked, etc." Is quite large. #1 is 15 minutes for a single team lead. #2 requires the team to agree on hardware s…

3. "Dedicated server" at any hosting provider Open their management console, press order now, 15 mins later get your server's IP address.

More like 15 seconds.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#167

Post by hamandcheese » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:16 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #130

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…

Dunno man, it's really really easy to set up an S3 and use it to share datasets for users authorized with IAM.... And IAM and other cloud security and management considerations is where the opex/capex and capability argument can start to break down. Turns out, the "cloud" savings comes from not having capabilities in house to manage hardware. Sometimes, for most businesses, you want some of that lovely reliability. (…

I feel like IAM may be the sleeper killer-app of cloud.

I self-host a lot of things, but boy oh boy if I were running a company it would be a helluvalotta work to get IAM properly set up.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#168

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:16 PM UTC

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…

> All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding, but serve to introduce doubt to non-technical people and to trick people who don't examine what they're told.

This feels like "no true scotsman" to me. I've been building software for close to two decades, but I guess I don't have "any real technical understanding" because I think there's a compelling case for using "cloud" services for many (honestly I would say most) businesses.

Nobody is "afraid to openly discuss how cloud isn't right for many things". This is extremely commonly discussed. We're discussing it right now! I truly cannot stand this modern innovation in discourse of yelling "nobody can talk about XYZ thing!" while noisily talking about XYZ thing on the lowest-friction publishing platforms ever devised by humanity. Nobody is afraid to talk about your thing! People just disagree with you about it! That's ok, differing opinions are normal!

Your comment focuses a lot on cost. But that's just not really what this is all about. Everyone knows that on a long enough timescale with a relatively stable business, the total cost of having your own infrastructure is usually lower than cloud hosting.

But cost is simply not the only thing businesses care about. Many businesses, especially new ones, care more about time to market and flexibility. Questions like "how many servers do we need? with what specs? and where should we put them?" are a giant distraction for a startup, or even for a new product inside a mature firm.

Cloud providers provide the service of "don't worry about all that, figure it out after you have customers and know what you actually need".

It is also true that this (purposefully) creates lock-in that is expensive either to leave in place or unwind later, and it definitely behooves every company to keep that in mind when making architecture decisions, but lots of products never make it to that point, and very few of those teams regret the time they didn't spend building up their own infrastructure in order to save money later.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#169

Post by mmcwilliams » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:16 PM UTC

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…

It seems that the preference is less about understanding or misunderstanding the technical requirements but more that it moves a capital expenditure with some recurring operational expenditure entirely into the opex column.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#170

Post by rtfusgihkuj » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:17 PM UTC

noprocrasted wrote: post #149

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #84

I have seen a common sentiment that self hosting is almost always better than cloud. What these discussions does not mention is how to effectively run your business applications on this infrastructure. Things like identity management (AAD/IAM), provisioning and running VMs, deployments. Network side of things like VNet, DNS, securely opening ports etc. Monitoring setup across the stack. There is so much functionaliti…

> identity management (AAD/IAM) Do you mean for administrative access to the machines (over SSH, etc) or for "normal" access to the hosted applications? Admin access: Ansible-managed set of UNIX users & associated SSH public keys, combined with remote logging so every access is audited and a malicious operator wiping the machine can't cover their tracks will generally get you pretty far. Beyond that, there are commer…

No, using Ansible to distribute public keys does not get you very far. It's fine for a personal project or even a team of 5-6 with a handful, but beyond that you really need a better way to onboard, offboard, and modify accounts. If you're doing anything but a toy project, you're better off starting off with something like IPA for host access controls.