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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#261

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Capital expenditures are kryptonite to financial engineers. The cloud selling point was to trade those costs for operational expenses and profit in phase 3.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#262

Post by irunmyownemail »

Cyph0n wrote: post #210
sgarland wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you’re literally running your own datacenters, which is in no way required for the majority of companies. Colo giants like Equinix already have the infrastructure in place, with a proven track record. If you enable Multi-AZ for RDS, your bill doubles until you cancel. If you set up two servers in two DCs, your initial bill doubles from the CapEx, and then a very small percentage of your OpEx goes up every mon…

But reliable connectivity between regions/datacenters remains a challenge, right? Compute is only one part of the equation. Disclaimer: I work on a cloud networking product.

I use Wireguard, pretty simple, where's the challenge?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#263

Post by yazzku »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #33
amelius wrote: post #11

[flagged]

This last week, gmail failed to filter as spam an email with subject "#T Anitra", body, > oF1 d 4440 - 2 B 32677 83 > R Teri E x E q > > k 50347733 Safoorabegum and an attachment "7330757559.pdf". It let through 8 similar emails in the same week, and many more even more egregiously gibberish emails over the years. I'm not pleased with the quality of gmail's spam filter.

[dead]

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#264

Post by tylerchurch »

Symbiote wrote: post #186
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…

You have omitted the option between the two, which is renting a server. No hardware to purchase, maintain or set up. Easily available in 15 minutes.

While I did say "VM" in my original comment, to me this counts as "cloud" because the UI is functionally the same.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#265

Post by irunmyownemail »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #125
sgarland wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points. I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected. Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of…

> So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration ... And running your own hardware is not incompatible with Kubernetes: on the contrary. You can fully well have your infra spin up VMs and then do container orchestration if that's your thing. And part your hardware monitoring and reporting tool can work perfectly fine from containers. Bare metal -> Hypervisor -> VM -> container orchestration -> a c…

I agree, I run PROD, TEST and DEV kube clusters all in VM's, works great.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#266

Post by wongarsu »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #71
wongarsu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For so many things the cloud isn't really easier or cheaper, and most cloud providers stopped advertising it as such. My assumption is that cloud adoption is mainly driven by 3 forces: - for small companies: free credits - for large companies: moving prices as far away as possible from the deploy button, allowing dev and it to just deploy stuff without purchase orders - self-perpetuating due to hype, cv-driven develo…

I'm very interested in approaches that avoid cloud, so please don't read this as me saying cloud is superior. I can think of some other advantages of cloud: - easy to setup different permissions for users (authorisation considerations). - able to transfer assets to another owner (e.g., if there's a sale of a business) without needing to move physical hardware. - other outsiders (consultants, auditors, whatever) can c…

Those are valid reasons, but not always as straight forward:

> easy to setup different permissions for users (authorisation considerations)

Centralized permission management is an advantage of the cloud. At the same time it's easy to do wrong. Without the cloud you usually have more piecemeal solutions depending on segmenting network access and using the permission systems of each service

> able to transfer assets to another owner (e.g., if there's a sale of a business) without needing to move physical hardware

The obvious solution here is to not own your hardware but to rent dedicated servers. Removes some of the maintenance burden, and the servers can be moved between entities as you like. The cloud does give you more granularity though

> other outsiders (consultants, auditors, whatever) can come in and verify the security (or other) of your setup, because it's using a standard well known cloud platform

There is a huge cottage industry of software trying to scan for security issues in your cloud setups. On the one hand that's an advantage of a unified interface, on the other hand a lot of those issues wouldn't occur outside the cloud. In any case, verifying security isn't easy in or out of the cloud. But if you have an auditor that is used to cloud deployments it will be easier to satisfy them there, that's certainly true

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#267

Post by irunmyownemail »

slothtrop wrote: post #231
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…

The bottom line > babysitting hardware. Businesses are transitioning to cloud because it's better for business.

Actually, there's been a reversal trend going on, for many companies, better is often on premises or hybrid now.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#268

Post by j45 »

UltraSane wrote: post #237
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. And in the case of AWS it is someone else's extremely well designed and managed computer and network.

Generally I look to people who could build an AWS on the value of it or doing it themselves because they can do both.

Happy to hear more.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#269

Post by dajonker »

rmbyrro wrote: post #218
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…

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

This exactly, most leaks don't involve any physical access. Why bother with something hard when you can just get in through an unmaintained Wordpress/SharePoint/other legacy product that some department can't live without.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#270

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

xiande04 wrote: post #236

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