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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#211

Post by awholescammy »

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 is a whole ecosystem that pushes cloud to ignorant/fresh graduates/developers. Just take a look at the sponsors for all the most popular frameworks. When your system is super complex and depends on the cloud they make more money. Just look at the PHP ecosystem, Laravel needs 4 times the servers to server something that a pure PHP system would need. Most projects don't need the cloud. Only around 10% of projects actually need what the cloud provides. But they were able to brainwash a whole generation of developers/managers to think that they do. And so it goes.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#212

Post by pphysch »

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.

That's essentially why "platform engineering" is a hot topic. There are great FOSS tools for this, largely in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

To be clear, authentication could still be outsourced, but authorizing access to (on-prem) resources in a multi-tenant environment is something that "platforms" are frequently designed for.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#213

Post by the_arun »

jeffbee wrote: post #133
zosima wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is similar to cooking at home vs ordering cooked food everyday. If some guarantees the taste & quality people would happy to outsource it.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#214

Post by sgarland »

marcosdumay wrote: post #134
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…

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?

> Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics.

It's related to the first part. Re: the second, IME if you let dev teams run wild with "managing their own infra," the org as a whole eventually pays for that when the dozen bespoke stacks all hit various bottlenecks, and no one actually understands how they work, or how to troubleshoot them.

I keep being told that "reducing friction" and "increasing velocity" are good things; I vehemently disagree. It might be good for short-term profits, but it is poison for long-term success.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#215

Post by noprocrasted »

dpe82 wrote: post #201
noprocrasted wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the risk you're trying to protect against, that a "better" (which one?) way would mitigate that this one wouldn't? > IPA Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeIPA ? That seems like a huge amalgamation of complexity in a non-memory-safe language that I feel like would introduce a much bigger security liability than the problem it's trying to solve. I'd rather pony up the money and use Teleport at that p…

It's basically Kerberos and an LDAP server, which are technologies old and reliable as dirt. This sort of FUD is why people needlessly spend so much money on cloud.

> which are technologies old and reliable as dirt.

Technologies, sure. Implementations? Not so much.

I can trust OpenSSH because it's deployed everywhere and I can be confident all the low-hanging fruits are gone by now, and if not, its widespreadness means I'm unlikely to be the most interesting target, so I am more likely to escape a potential zero-day unscathed.

What't the marketshare of IPA in comparison? Has it seen any meaningful action in the last decade years, and the same attention, from both white-hats (audits, pentesting, etc) as well as black-hats (trying to break into every exposed service)? I very much doubt it, so the safe thing to assume is that it's nowhere as bulletproof as OpenSSH and that it's more likely for a dedicated attacker to find a vuln there.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#216

Post by Aachen »

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…

AWS is so complicated, we usually find more impactful permission problems than in any company using their own hardware

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#217

Post by irunmyownemail »

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…

> If I didn't already self-host email, I'd consider using Fastmail.

Same sentiment all of what you said.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#218

Post by rmbyrro »

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…

about security, most businesses using AWS invest little to nothing in securing their software, or even adopt basic security practices for their employees

having the most secure data center doesn't matter if you load your secrets as env vars in a system that can be easily compromised by a motivated attacker

so i don't buy this argument as a general reason pro-cloud

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#219

Post by throw0101b »

> So after the success of our initial testing, we decided to go all in on ZFS for all our large data storage needs. We’ve now been using ZFS for all our email servers for over 3 years and have been very happy with it. We’ve also moved over all our database, log and backup servers to using ZFS on NVMe SSDs as well with equally good results.

If you're looking at ZFS on NVMe you may want to look at Alan Jude's talk on the topic, "Scaling ZFS for the future", from the 2024 OpenZFS User and Developer Summit:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA6hL4opG4I

* https://openzfs.org/wiki/OpenZFS_Developer_Summit_2024

There are some bottlenecks that get in the way of getting all the performance that the hardware often is capable of.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#220

Post by adamtulinius »

the_arun wrote: post #203
j45 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The cloud is someone else’s computer Isn’t it more like leasing in a public property? Meaning it is yours as long as you are paying the lease? Analogous to renting an apartment instead of owning a condo?

Not at all. You can inspect the apartment you rent. The cloud is totally opaque in that regard.
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