Goes for small business and individuals as well. Sure, there are times that cloud makes sense, but you can and should do a lot on your own hardware.
Don't rent the cloud, own instead
271–280 of 516 posts
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#272This quote is gold: The cloud requires expertise in company-specific APIs and billing systems. A data center requires knowledge of Watts, bits, and FLOPs. I know which one I rather think about.
> Having your own data center is cool This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.
I'd argue that it is in the long-term interest of any genuinely innovative company to attract intellectually curious talent with some coolness factor.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cus…
This is essentially how it is. Additionally, the reality is that our customers don't often even need to think about using root access, but they have it if they want it. They are putting a lot of trust in us, so we also put trust in them.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#275This quote is gold: The cloud requires expertise in company-specific APIs and billing systems. A data center requires knowledge of Watts, bits, and FLOPs. I know which one I rather think about.
> Having your own data center is cool This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.
It kinda' does, doesn't it?
Re: the "hobby" part is where I agree with you the most. Where you say it's not solving genuine problems is where I differ the most.
It really feels to me like Comma is staffed by people who recognize that they never stopped enjoying playing with Lego -- their bricks just grew up, and they realized they can:
1) solve real-world problems
2) not be jerks about it
3) get paid to do it
Not everything has to be about optimizing for #3.
I'm a happy paying customer of Comma.ai (Comma four, baby!) -- their product is awesome, extremely consumer-friendly, and I hope they can grow in their success!
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#276Feels like I’ve lived through a full infrastructure fashion cycle already. I started my career when cloud was the obvious answer and on-prem was “legacy.”
Now on-prem is cool again.
Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heroku was popular with startups who didn’t have infrastructure skills but the price was high enough that anyone who wasn’t in that triangle of “lavish budget, small team, limited app diversity” wasn’t using it. Things like AWS IaaS were far more popular due to the lower cost and greater flexibility but even that was far from a majority service class.
I am not sure if you are trying to refute my lived experience or what exactly the point is. Heroku was wildly popular with startups at the time, not just those with lavish budgets. I was already touching RDS at this point and even before RDS came around no organization I worked at had me jumping on bare metal to provision services myself. There always a system in place where someone helped out engineering to deploy s…
A tricky thing on this site is that there are lots of different people with very different kinds of experience, which often results in people talking past each other. A lot of people here have experience as zero-to-one early startup engineers, and yep, I share your experience that Heroku was very popular in that space. A lot of other people have experience at later growth and infrastructure focused startups, and they have totally different experiences. And other people have experience as SREs at big tech, or doing IT / infrastructure for non-tech fortune 500 businesses. All of these are very different experiences, and very different things have been popular over the last couple decades depending on which kind of experience you have.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
No amount of money will make me maintain my own dbs. We tried it at first and it was a nightmare.
It's worth becoming good at.
Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#279This was one of the coolest job ads that I've ever read :). Congrats for what you have done with your infrastructure, team and product!
Agreed!
Gives a whole new level to the idea of "full stack developer"
Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead
#280Feels like I’ve lived through a full infrastructure fashion cycle already. I started my career when cloud was the obvious answer and on-prem was “legacy.” Now on-prem is cool again. Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.
Sometimes, I feel like this is indicative of the incredible waste present in IT and development. Granted the cost of this kind of infrastructure upheaval is orders of magnitude cheaper than something like manufacturing - but still, it feels ridiculous that established companies can swap back and forth on a whim.