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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#241

Post by belthesar »

mancerayder wrote: post #218
adamcharnock wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it plainly: We deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner dedicated servers and become your DevOps team (or a part thereof). It works because bare metal is about 10% the cost of cloud, and our value-add is in 1) creating a resilient platform on top of that, 2) supporting it, 3) being on-call, and 4) being or supporting your DevOps team. This starts with us providing a Kubernetes cluster which we manage, but we als…

You give customers root but you're on call when something goes tits up? You're a brave DevOps team. That would cause a lot of friction in my experience, since people with root or other administrative privileges do naughty things, but others are getting called in on Saturday afternoon.

From a platform risk perspective, each tenant has dedicated resources, so it's their platform to blow up. If a customer with root access blows up their own system, then the resources from the MSP to fix it are billable, and the after-action meetings would likely include a review of whether that access is appropriate, if additional training is needed to prevent those issues in the future (also billable), or if the customer-provider relationship is the right fit. Will the on-call resource be having a bad time fixing someone else's screw up? Yeah, and having been that guy before, I empathize. The business can and should manage this relationship however, so that it doesn't become an undue burden on their support teams. A customer platform that is always getting broken at 4pm on a Friday when an overzealous customer admin is going in and deciding to run arbitrary kubectl commands takes support capacity away from other customers when a major incident happens, regardless of how much you're making in support billing.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#242

Post by butterisgood »

I think this is how IBM is making tons of money on mainframes. A lot of what people are doing with cloud can be done on premises with the right levels of virtualization.

https://intellectia.ai/news/stock/ibm-mainframe-business-ach...

60% YoY growth is pretty excellent for an "outdated" technology.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#243

Post by IFC_LLC »

This is cool. Yet, there are levels of insanity and those depend on your inability to estimate things.

When I'm launching a project it's easier for me to rent $250 worth of compute from AWS. When the project consumes $30k a month, it's easier for me to rent a colocation.

My point is that a good engineer should know how to calculate all the ups and downs here to propose a sound plan to the management. That's the winning thing.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#244

Post by edge17 »

boplicity wrote: post #238
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This 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?

Just curious, what is the spec you pay $6000/year for? Where/what is the line between rent vs buy?

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#245

Post by MaKey »

tomcam wrote: post #236
olavgg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Usually you can figure out what went wrong pretty quickly. Freaking out doesn't help with the "quickly" part though.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#246

Post by piker »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #243

This is cool. Yet, there are levels of insanity and those depend on your inability to estimate things. When I'm launching a project it's easier for me to rent $250 worth of compute from AWS. When the project consumes $30k a month, it's easier for me to rent a colocation. My point is that a good engineer should know how to calculate all the ups and downs here to propose a sound plan to the management. That's the winni…

It goes further than this first order, though. If you're trying to build a business that attracts the types of talent who wants to know the stack up and down, starting with an AWS instance might give you a better shot at funding (and thus a better overall shot), but it's not clear that it gives you a shot a building the business you're aiming for. For the things that "don't make your beer better", sure, but we're talking about training ML models at an ML shop. Here it makes sense for this reason.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#248

Post by JKCalhoun »

Naive comment from a hobbyist with nothing close to $5M: I'm curious about the degree to which you build a "home lab" equivalent. I mean if "scaling" turned out to be just adding another Raspberry Pi to the rack (where is Mr. Geerling when you need him?) I could grow my mini-cloud month by month as spending money allowed.

(And it would be fun too.)

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#249

Post by infecto »

piker wrote: post #246
IFC_LLC wrote: post #243

This is cool. Yet, there are levels of insanity and those depend on your inability to estimate things. When I'm launching a project it's easier for me to rent $250 worth of compute from AWS. When the project consumes $30k a month, it's easier for me to rent a colocation. My point is that a good engineer should know how to calculate all the ups and downs here to propose a sound plan to the management. That's the winni…

It goes further than this first order, though. If you're trying to build a business that attracts the types of talent who wants to know the stack up and down, starting with an AWS instance might give you a better shot at funding (and thus a better overall shot), but it's not clear that it gives you a shot a building the business you're aiming for. For the things that "don't make your beer better", sure, but we're tal…

That last part is exactly it and I while I know the intro sentence nails it I don’t think compute resonates with people (everyone uses compute). If you are 24/7 running work at scale it absolutely makes sense past the initial first couple years to build out your own DC like this.
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