Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#241

Post by ldng »

candiodari wrote: post #82
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, AWS isn't for a smaller company. When you have a real finance department that vets each third party or have some governmental requirement to get three quotes for each new service (part of requirements set out to minimize grift in sourcing), having a single bill that can be expanded to include new projects and services makes it a little simple. This causes a problem during cost cutting because unless it's a prio…

And yet, AWS isn't for a really larger company either. At some point the bills become so huge that running your own IT and datacenters is cheaper. Usually a lot. Even when it means building some AWS services yourself. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/dropbox-aws/

Yes, it really is a curve bell but I get deride every time I say it ... the power of marketing.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#242

Post by busterarm »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #210
busterarm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm saying that you can use this cost effectively at smaller places too. When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basic…

> "they give you rope to hang yourself with." That's not a triviality - C++ has the same problem, if you have a single ezpert individual it's great, but if you have a team, and some are very green, it will be a nightmare.

Here we are in agreement.

Thing is though, people who well-understand AWS/Azure/Google are plentiful (but expensive) in the industry at this point.

Small startups can't afford to have junior talent.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#243

Post by AnthOlei »

For those of you who have a modern serverless architecture (lambda, dynamo, firebase etc.), how do the costs compare there? I’ve always thought serverless is cheaper, but I’ve never ran anything at scale.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#244

Post by busterarm »

ldng wrote: post #239
busterarm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm saying that you can use this cost effectively at smaller places too. When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basic…

Except that in smaller places time is of the essence I we don't have enough to learn the full extent of AWS and I'll save my time and money by using a droplet. Learning AWS does have a cost. Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

> Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

That's where Terraform comes in.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#245

Post by busterarm »

jjav wrote: post #213
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

> It's freedom. Being locked in to AWS (or GCP, or..) when costs are rising out of control is what I consider the opposite of freedom. I was with one startup that went full-in on AWS features, so it was very difficult to migrate. Sure, we got started real quick, that was nice. I argued early on that we need to be careful of not getting locked in to AWS in case we need to jump away once we have some customer growth, b…

That's where maturity comes in to play.

The reps from the major clouds constantly pester us to use their vendor-only features and we always politely have to say "no thanks".

We're up front about our multi-cloud strategy and only use the basic resources that are roughly equivalent/consistent between providers. We have the expertise to run whatever managed application they have ourselves and the engineers to build our own platforms.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#246

Post by busterarm »

collsni wrote: post #217
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

As a security architect, I hate you. I get the freedom but I don't want our corporate data floating on a insecure elastic search cluster. Thanks

Who says that there's no room for security here?

It's very easy to implement strict controls for who and how infrastructure gets created. Public companies have to use this too and we have all of the compliance requirements I'm sure you're aware of.

Automating this and automating the guardrails makes your job _easier_ not harder.

I have a DefCon black badge. I'm not a barbarian.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#247

Post by ldng »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #226
joana035 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"maintenance and operational burden" in the cloud is way higher than renting a box somewhere and forgetting about it. I can't understand why people keep using this as an argument against anything else other than cloud while playing catch-up with the rain of changes and suffering from fomo of last week's new stuff from cloud. Heck, when did infrastructure became like js landscape?

I disagree, managed K8s and managed Kafka are both far nicer to work with than doing it yourself. Of course, you have to accept the costs and the limitations to use it.

Neither k8s nor Kafta are clouds. They are tools you can use on premises or on droplets if you wish to.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#248

Post by busterarm »

dragonsh wrote: post #227
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

> It's freedom. AWS or any cloud service is anything but freedom. So please use the word freedom judiciously. If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon. You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers. You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services…

> If you are working with AWS your application and your whole organization is at the whims of Amazon.

Part of freedom is the freedom to do stupid things.

> You will not even be able to migrate if you are tied into those API's and services because they are not same across cloud providers.

VPCs, Instances, Load Balancers and Storage are roughly-equivalent everywhere and the differences between are mostly-trivial. For the rest of the "shinies" they offer, well, see above.

> You don't even own the data or compute resource hosted on such cloud services because just by a single notice from a government agency your account will be blocked without access to your own data or compute resources.

If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters, you've got another thing coming. Ask Lavabit.

Design for this in your strategy. You can still "own" your data and have it hosted in the cloud too. There's no reason to have to be exclusive.

> In terms of technical freedom you will have less of it and will be tied into proprietary extensions, API and services offered by those cloud providers.

As mentioned before, stick to running in instances and you're no differently off than anywhere else you can operate.

> On the other hand for self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules.

Absolutely not. With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit. They have guns. You don't. Ask Lavabit. Ask The Pirate Bay. Ask any blockchain drug pusher.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#249

Post by ldng »

drchopchop wrote: post #47
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Also, when it comes time to scale, it's a lot easier to bring up a relatively simple (but scalable) infrastructure on AWS than deal with: colo location, buying servers, buying spares, replacing failing hardware, imaging, setting up backups, etc etc. Those typically become concerns once you're at big scale where the cost savings are significant.

I love how AWS fanboys make it a back-or-white issue. OVH,Hetzner and others are providing bare metal server that are provionnable by API. The choice is not between full-AWS vs full-On-Premises-By-Hand.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#250

Post by t_sawyer »

dheera wrote: post #131
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Self hosting being cheaper is obvious. It's just a nightmare to manage reliability. With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical acce…

iDrac and similar devices can provide “physical” access without physical access.

People have been using them in collocations for years. Collocations also provide hardware swap services. They can replace a power supply for you.

Post reply on HN