Why we use our own hardware • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#181

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #167

tomrod wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I strongly agree with this and also strongly lament it.

I find IAM to be a terrible implementation of a foundationally necessary system. It feels tacked on to me, except now it's tacked onto thousands of other things and there's no way out.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#182

Post by gooosle » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #151

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," This is false. AWS infrastructure is vastly more secure than almost all company data centers. AWS has a rule that the same person cannot have logical access and physical access to the same storage device. Very few companies have enough IT people to have this rule. The AWS KMS is vastly m…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#183

Post by ayuhito » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

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.

My company used to do everything on-prem. Until a literal earthquake and tsunami took down a bunch of systems.

After that, yeah we’ll let AWS do the hard work of enabling redundancy for us.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#184

Post by JOnAgain » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:32 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…

As someone who ran a startup with 100’s of hosts. As soon as I start to count the salaries, hiring, desk space, etc of the people needed to manage the hosts AWS would look cheap again. Yea, hardware costs they are aggressively expensive. But TCO wise, they’re cheap for any decent sized company.

Add in compliance, auditing, etc. all things that you can set up out of the box (PCI, HIPPA, lawsuit retention). Gets even cheaper.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#185

Post by xorcist » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:32 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…

There is a large gap between "own the hardware" and "use cloud hosting". Many people rent the hardware, for example, and you can use managed databases which is one step up than "starting a vm".

But your comparison isn't fair. The difference between running your own hardware and using the cloud (which is perhaps not even the relevant comparison but let's run with it) is the difference between:

1. Open up the cloud console, and

2. You already have the hardware so you just run "virsh" or, more likely, do nothing at all because you own the API so you have already included this in your Ansible or Salt or whatever you use for setting up a server.

Because ordering a new physical box isn't really comparable to starting a new VM, is it?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#186

Post by Symbiote » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:34 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…

You have omitted the option between the two, which is renting a server. No hardware to purchase, maintain or set up. Easily available in 15 minutes.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#187

Post by xorcist » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

> every minute messing with and monitoring servers

You're not monitoring your deployments because "cloud"?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#188

Post by j45 » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #151

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," This is false. AWS infrastructure is vastly more secure than almost all company data centers. AWS has a rule that the same person cannot have logical access and physical access to the same storage device. Very few companies have enough IT people to have this rule. The AWS KMS is vastly m…

The cloud is someone else’s computer.

It’s like putting something in someone’s desk drawer under the guise of convenience at the expense of security.

Why?

Too often, someone other than the data owner has or can get access to the drawer directly or indirectly.

Also, Cloud vs self hosted to me is a pendulum that has swung back and forth for a number of reasons.

The benefits of the cloud outlined here are often a lot of open source tech packaged up and sold as manageable from a web browser, or a command line.

One of the major reasons the cloud became popular was networking issues in Linux to manage volume at scale. At the time the cloud became very attractive for that reason, plus being able to virtualize bare metal servers to put into any combination of local to cloud hosting.

Self-hosting has become easier by an order of magnitude or two for anyone who knew how to do it, except it’s something people who haven’t done both self-hosting and cloud can really discuss.

Cloud has abstracted away the cost of horsepower, and converted it to transactions. People are discovering a fraction of the horsepower is needed to service their workloads than they thought.

At some point the horsepower got way beyond what they needed and it wasn’t noticed. But paying for a cloud is convenient and standardized.

Company data centres can be reasonably secured using a number of PaaS or IaaS solutions readily available off the shelf. Tools from VMware, Proxmox and others are tremendous.

It may seem like there’s a lot to learn, except most problems they are new to someone have often been thought of a ton by both people with and without experience that is beyond cloud only.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#189

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

I have never ever worked somewhere with one of these "cloud-like but custom on our own infrastructure" setups that didn't leak infrastructure concerns through the abstraction, to a significantly larger degree than AWS.

I believe it can work, so maybe there are really successful implementations of this out there, I just haven't seen it myself yet!

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#190

Post by browningstreet » Sun, Dec 22, 2024, 4:38 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…

Most companies severely understaff ops, infra, and security. Your talking points might be good but, in practice, won’t apply in many cases because of the intractability of that management mindset. Even when they should know better.

I’ve worked at tech companies with hundreds of developers and single digit ops staff. Those people will struggle to build and maintain mature infra. By going cloud, you get access to mature infra just by including it in build scripts. Devops is an effective way to move infra back to project teams and cut out infra orgs (this isn’t great but I see it happen everywhere). Companies will pay cloud bills but not staffing salaries.