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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#221

Post by sgarland »

noprocrasted wrote: post #205
sgarland wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that depends on your RTO. With cloud providers, even on a bare VM, you can to some extent get away with having no IaC, since your data (and therefore config) is almost certainly on networked storage which is redundant by design. If an EC2 fails, or even if one of the drives in your EBS drive fails, it'll probably come back up as it was. If it's your own hardware, if you don't have IaC of some kind – even so…

Get two servers (or three, etc)?

Well, sure – I was trying to do a comparison in favor of cloud, because the fact that EBS Volumes can magically detach and attach is admittedly a neat trick. You can of course accomplish the same (to a certain scale) with distributed storage systems like Ceph, Longhorn, etc. but then you have to have multiple servers, and if you have multiple servers, you probably also have your application load balanced with failover.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#222

Post by xyst »

akpa1 wrote: post #135

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.

They are also active in contributing to cyrus-imap

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#223

Post by evantbyrne »

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…

Making API calls from a VM on shared hardware to KMS is vastly more secure than doing AES locally? I'm skeptical to say the least.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#225

Post by gauravphoenix »

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…

one of my greatest learnings in life is to differentiate between facts and opinions- sometimes opinions are presented as facts and vice-versa. if you think about it- the statement "this is false" is a response to an opinion (presented as a fact) but not a fact. there is no way one can objectively define and defend what does "real technical understanding" means. the cloud space is vast with millions of people having varied understanding and thus opinions.

so let's not fight the battle that will never be won. there is no point in convincing pro-cloud people that cloud isn't the right choice and vice-versa. let people share stories where it made sense and where it didn't.

as someone who has lived in cloud security space since 2009 (and was founder of redlock - one of the first CSPMs), in my opinion, there is no doubt that AWS is indeed superiorly designed than most corp. networks- but is that you really need? if you run entire corp and LOB apps on aws but have poor security practices, will it be right decision? what if you have the best security engineers in the world but they are best at Cisco type of security - configuring VLANS and managing endpoints but are not good at detecting someone using IMDSv1 in ec2 exposed to the internet and running a vulnerable (to csrf) app?

when the scope of discussion is as vast as cloud vs on-prem, imo, it is a bad idea to make absolute statements.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#226

Post by sgarland »

icedchai wrote: post #132
cpursley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A small app (or a larger one, for that matter) can quite easily run on infra that's instantiated from canned IaC, like TF AWS Modules [0]. If you can read docs, you should be able to quite trivially get some basic infra up in a day, even with zero prior experience managing it.

[0]: https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#227

Post by j45 »

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. Middle ground between the extremes of those pendulums of all cloud or physical metal.

You can start with using a cloud only for VMs and only run services on it using IaaS or PaaS. Very serviceable.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#228

Post by fulafel »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #225
UltraSane wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

one of my greatest learnings in life is to differentiate between facts and opinions- sometimes opinions are presented as facts and vice-versa. if you think about it- the statement "this is false" is a response to an opinion (presented as a fact) but not a fact. there is no way one can objectively define and defend what does "real technical understanding" means. the cloud space is vast with millions of people having v…

Great points. Also if you end up building your apps as rube goldberg machines living up to "AWS Well Architected" criteria (indoctrinated by staff lots of AWS certifications, leading to a lot of AWS certified staff whose paycheck now depends on following AWS recommended practices) the complexity will kill your security, as nobody will understand the systems anymore.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#229

Post by dehrmann »

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 other part is that when us-east-1 goes down, you can blame AWS, and a third of your customer's vendors will be doing the same. When you unplug the power to your colo rack while installing a new server, that's on you.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#230

Post by j45 »

maccard wrote: post #175
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…

I work for a 50 person subsidiary of a 30k person organisation. I needed a domain name. I put in the purchase request and 6 months later eventually gave up, bought it myself and expensed it. Our AWS account is managed by an SRE team. It’s a 3 day turnaround process to get any resources provisioned, and if you don’t get the exact spec right (you forgot to specify the iops on the volume? Oops) 3 day turnaround. Already…

Manageability of cloud without a dedicated resource is a form of resource creep, and shadow labour costs that aren’t factored in.

How many things don’t end up happening because of this? When they need a sliver of resources in the start?

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