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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#281

Post by jameshart »

j45 wrote: post #271
the_arun wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cloud is someone else’s computer Isn’t it more like leasing in a public property? Meaning it is yours as long as you are paying the lease? Analogous to renting an apartment instead of owning a condo?

Nope. It's literally putting private data in a shared drawer in someone else's desk where you have your area of the drawer.

Literally?

I would just like to point out that most of us who have ever had a job at an office, attended an academic institution, or lived in rented accommodation have kept stuff in someone else’s desk drawer from time to time. Often a leased desk in a building rented from a random landlord.

Keeping things in someone else’s desk drawer can be convenient and offer a sufficient level of privacy for many purposes.

And your proposed alternative to using ‘someone else’s desk drawer’ is, what, make your own desk?

I guess, since I’m not a carpenter, I can buy a flatpack desk from ikea and assemble it and keep my stuff in that. I’m not sure that’s an improvement to my privacy posture in any meaningful sense though.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#282

Post by [deleted] »

sgarland wrote: post #234
Cyph0n wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how deep you want to go. Equinix for one (I'm sure others as well, but I'm most familiar with them) offers managed cross-DC fiber. You will probably need to manage the networking, to be fair, and I will readily admit that's not trivial.

[deleted]

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#283

Post by dpe82 »

noprocrasted wrote: post #215
dpe82 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically Kerberos and an LDAP server, which are technologies old and reliable as dirt. This sort of FUD is why people needlessly spend so much money on cloud.

> which are technologies old and reliable as dirt. Technologies, sure. Implementations? Not so much. I can trust OpenSSH because it's deployed everywhere and I can be confident all the low-hanging fruits are gone by now, and if not, its widespreadness means I'm unlikely to be the most interesting target, so I am more likely to escape a potential zero-day unscathed. What't the marketshare of IPA in comparison? Has it…

MIT's Kerberos 5 implementation is 30 years old and has been very widely deployed.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#284

Post by jhwhite »

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…

> It makes me wonder: how do people get so sold on a thing that they'll go online and fight about it, even when they lack facts or often even basic understanding?

I feel like this can be applied to anything.

I had a manager take one SAFe for Leaders class then came back wanting to implement it. They had no previous AGILE classes or experience. And the Enterprise Agile Office was saying DON'T USE SAFe!!

But they had one class and that was the only way they would agree to structure their group.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#285

Post by steve_adams_86 »

qingcharles wrote: post #256
Beijinger wrote: post #207

I was told Fastmail is excellent, and I am not a big fan of gmail. Once locked out for good in gmail, your email and apps associated with it, are gone forever. Source? Personal experience. "A private inbox $60 for 12 months". I assume it is USD, not AU$ (AFAIK, Fastmail is based in Australia.) Still pricey. At https://www.infomaniak.com/ I can buy email service for an (in my case external) domain for 18 Euro a year a…

You can have as many domains as you want for free in your Fastmail account. There are no extra fees. I've used them for 20 years now. Highly recommended.

Wait, really? I pay for two separate domains. What am I missing?

I'm happy to pay them because I love the service (and it's convenient for taxes), but I feel like I should know how to configure multiple domains under one account.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#286

Post by SoftTalker »

layer8 wrote: post #162
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…

The SMB I work for runs a small on-premise data center that is shared between teams and projects, with maybe 3-4 FTEs managing it (the respective employees also do dev and other work). This includes self-hosting email, storage, databases, authentication, source control, CI, ticketing, company wiki, chat, and other services. The current infrastructure didn’t start out that way and developed over many years, so it’s no…

Your last paragraph identifies the reason that running their own hardware makes sense for Fastmail. The demand for email is pretty constant. Everyone does roughly the same amount of emailing every day. Daily load is predictable, and growth is predictable.

If your load is very spiky, it might make more sense to use cloud. You pay more for the baseline, but if your spikes are big enough it can still be cheaper than provisioning your own hardware to handle the highest loads.

Of course there's also possibly a hybrid approach, you run your own hardware for base load and augment with cloud for spikes. But that's more complicated.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#287

Post by aquariusDue »

Beijinger wrote: post #207

I was told Fastmail is excellent, and I am not a big fan of gmail. Once locked out for good in gmail, your email and apps associated with it, are gone forever. Source? Personal experience. "A private inbox $60 for 12 months". I assume it is USD, not AU$ (AFAIK, Fastmail is based in Australia.) Still pricey. At https://www.infomaniak.com/ I can buy email service for an (in my case external) domain for 18 Euro a year a…

Personally I prefer Migadu and tend to recommend them to tech savvy people. Their admin panel is excellent and straightforward to use, prices are based on usage limits (amount of emails sent/received) instead of number of mailboxes.

Migadu is just all around good, only downsides I can find are subjective. The fact that they're based in Switzerland and unless you're "good with computers" something like Fastmail will probably be better.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#288

Post by jrs235 »

bluedino wrote: post #200
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…

I want to see an article like this, but written from a Fortune 500 CTO perspective It seems like they all abandoned their VMware farms or physical server farms for Azure (they love Microsoft). Are they actually saving money? Are things faster? How's performance? What was the re-training/hiring like? In one case I know we got rid of our old database greybeards and replaced them with "DevOps" people that knew nothing a…

>we got rid of our old database greybeards and replaced them with "DevOps" people that knew nothing about performance etc

Seems a lot of those DevOps people just see Azures recommendations for adding indexes and either just allow auto applying them or just adding them without actually reviewing it understanding what use loads require them and why. This also lands a bit on developers/product that don't critically think about and communicate what queries are common and should have some forethought on what indexes should be beneficial and created. (Yes followup monitoring of actual index usage and possible missing indexes is still needed.) Too many times I've seen dozens of indexes on tables in the cloud where one could cover all of them. Yes, there still might be worthwhile reasons to keep some narrower/smaller indexes but again DBA and critical query analysis seems to be a forgotten and neglected skill. No one owns monitoring and analysing db queries and it only comes up after a fire has already broken out.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#289

Post by throwawaysxcd0 »

dehrmann wrote: post #229
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…

The other part is that when us-east-1 goes down, you can blame AWS, and a third of your customer's vendors will be doing the same. When you unplug the power to your colo rack while installing a new server, that's on you.

OTOH, when your company's web site is down you can do something about it. When the CEO asks about it, you can explain why its offline and more importantly what is being done to bring it back.

The equivalent situation for those who took a cloud based approach is often... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#290

Post by kwillets »

bartvk wrote: post #3

Such an awesome article. I like how they didn't just go with the Cloud wave but kept sysadmin'ing, like ol' Unix graybeards. Two interesting things they wrote about their SSDs: 1) "At this rate, we’ll replace these [SSD] drives due to increased drive sizes, or entirely new physical drive formats (such E3.S which appears to finally be gaining traction) long before they get close to their rated write capacity." and 2)…

SSD's are also a bit of an achilles heel for AWS -- they have their own Nitro firmware for wear levelling and key rotations, due to the hazards of multitenant. It's possible for one EC2 tenant to use up all the write cycles and then pass it to another, and encryption with key rotation is required to keep data from leaking across tenant changes. It's also slower.

We had one outage where key rotation had been enabled on reboot, so data partitions were lost after what should have been a routine crash. Overall, for data warehousing, our failure rate on on-prem (DC-hosted) hardware was lower IME.

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