I've just shifted to Hetzner, no regret
Don't rent the cloud, own instead
231–240 of 516 posts
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#232One thing I don't really understand here is why they're incurring the costs of having this physically in San Diego, rather than further afield with a full-time server tech essentially living on-prem, especially if their power numbers are correct. Is everyone being able to physically show up on site immediately that much better than a 24/7 pair of remote hands + occasional trips for more team members if needed?
Coolness factor of having a datacenter right in your office.
... and you can be one good earthquake away from insolvency.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have. It is a different skillset. SRE is also an under-valued/paid (unless one is in FAANGO).
It’s all downside. If nothing goes wrong, then the company feels like they’re wasting money on a salary. If things go wrong they’re all your fault.
Correct
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much companies pay yearly in order to avoid having an employee pick up a drive from a local store, drive to the data center, pull the disk drive, screw out the failing hard drive and put in the new one, add it in the raid, verify the repair process has started, and then return to the office.
I don't think I've ever seen a non-hot-swap disk in a normal server. The oldest I dealt with had 16 HDDs per server, and only 12 were accessible from the outside, bu the 4 internal ones were still hot-swap after taking the cover off. Even some really old (2000s-era) junk I found in a cupboard at work was all hot-swap drives. But more realistically in this case, you tell the data centre "remote hands" person that a ne…
Yes, I did write that a bit hasty. I changed above to the normal process. As it happened we just installed a server without hotswap disk, but to be fair that is the first one I have personally seen in the last 20 years.
Remote hands is a thing indeed. Servers also tend to be mostly pre-built now days by server retailers, even when buying more custom made ones like servermicro where you pick each component. There isn't that many parts to a generic server purchase. Its a chassi, motherboard, cpu, memory, and disks. PSU tend to be determined by the motherboard/chassi choice, same with disk backplanes/raid/ipmi/network/cables/ventilation/shrouds. The biggest work is in doing the correct purchase, not in the assembly. Once delivered you put on the rails, install any additional item not pre-built, put it in the rack and plug in the cables.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end result of all this is that the percentage of people who know how to implement systems without AWS/Azure will be a single digit. From that point on, this will be the only "economic" way, it doesn't matter what the prices are.
That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand…
> and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#236I would suggest to use both on-premise hardware and cloud computing. Which is probably what comma is doing. For critical infrastructure, I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues. Maintaining one server room in the headquarters is something, but two servers rooms in different locations, with resilient power and network is a bit too much effort IMHO. For running many s…
> I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues. Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.
Because when I’m running a busy site and I can’t figure out what went wrong, I freak out. I don’t know whether the problem will take 2 hours or 2 days to diagnose.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand…
> The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it. But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.
Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#238This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…
I don't know. I rent a bare metal server for $500 a month, which is way overkill. It takes almost no time to manage -- maybe a few hours a year -- and can handle almost anything I throw at it. Maybe my needs are too simple though?
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#239If it were me, instead of writing all these bespoke services to replicate cloud functionality, I'd just buy oxide.computer systems.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#240This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…
We looked at option 4. And colocation is not cheap. It was cheaper for us to lease VMs from Hetzner than to buy boxes and colocate at Equinix.