Are those backups geographically distributed?
Yes.
Why we use our own hardware
291–300 of 547 posts
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#292Earlier 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…
OTOH: 1. big clouds are very lucrative targets for spooks, your data seem pretty likely to be hoovered up as "bycatch" (or maybe main catch depending on your luck) by various agencies and then traded around as currency 2. you never hear about security probems (incidents or exposure) in the platforms, there's no transparency 3. better than most coporate stuff is a low bar
> you never hear about security probems (incidents or exposure) in the platforms
Except that one time...
https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2023/04/how-a-...
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#293FYI - Fastmail web client has Offline support in beta right now. https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-in-beta/
And if anyone is curious, I actually live on their https://betaapp.fastmail.com release and find it just as stable as the "mainline" one but with the advantage of getting to play with all the cool toys earlier. Bonus points (for me) in that they will periodically conduct surveys to see how you like things
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#294Earlier 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.
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Re: Why we use our own hardware
#295The 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…
My take on this whole cloud fatigue is that system maintenance got overly complex over the last couple years/decades. So much that management people now think that it's too expensive in terms of hiring people that can do it compared to the higher managed hosting costs.
DevOps and kubernetes come to mind. A lot of people using kubernetes don't know what they're getting into, and k0s or another single machine solution would have been enough for 99% of SMEs.
In terms of cyber security (my field) everything got so ridiculously complex that even the folks that use 3 different dashboards in parallel will guess the answers as to whether or not they're affected by a bug/RCE/security flaw/weakness because all of the data sources (even the expensively paid for ones) are human-edited text databases. They're so buggy that they even have Chinese idiom symbols instead of a dot character in the version fields without anyone ever fixing it upstream in the NVD/CVE process.
I started to build my EDR agent for POSIX systems specifically, because I hope that at some point this can help companies to ditch the cloud and allows them to selfhost again - which in return would indirectly prevent 13 year old kids like from LAPSUS to pwn major infrastructure via simple tech support hotline calls.
When I think of it in terms of hosting, the vertical scalability of EPYC machines is so high that most of the time when you need its resources you are either doing something completely wrong and you should refactor your code or you are a video streaming service.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#296The 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 whole push to the cloud has always fascinated me. I get it - most people aren't interested in babysitting their own hardware.
For businesses, it's a very typical lease-or-own decision. There's really nothing too special about cloud.
> 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.
Nope. Not if you factor-in 24/7 support, geographic redundancy, and uptime guarantees. With EC2 you can break even at about $2-5m a year of cloud spending if you want your own hardware.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#297Earlier 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…
OTOH: 1. big clouds are very lucrative targets for spooks, your data seem pretty likely to be hoovered up as "bycatch" (or maybe main catch depending on your luck) by various agencies and then traded around as currency 2. you never hear about security probems (incidents or exposure) in the platforms, there's no transparency 3. better than most coporate stuff is a low bar
4. we keep hitting hypervisor bugs and having to work around the fact that your software coexists on the same machine with 3rdparty untrusted software who might in fact be actively trying to attack you. All this silliness with encrypted memory buses and the various debilitating workarounds for silicon bugs.
So yes, the cloud is very secure, except for the very thing that makes it the cloud that is not secure at all and has just been papered over because questioning it means the business model is bust.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#298Earlier 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…
> AWS infrastructure is vastly more secure than almost all company data centers Secure in what terms? Security is always about a threat model and trade-offs. There's no absolute, objective term of "security". > AWS has a rule that the same person cannot have logical access and physical access to the same storage device. Any promises they make aren't worth anything unless there's contractually-stipulated damages that…
> They've already got a track record of lying on their status pages, so it doesn't bode well.
???
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#299The 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…
> All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding,(...) This is where you lose all credibility. I'm going to focus on a single aspect: performance. If you're serving a global user base and your business, like practically all online businesses, is greatly impacted by performance problems, the only solution to a physics problem is to deplo…
Is everyone running online FPS gaming servers now? If you want your page to load faster, tell your shitty frontend engineers to use less of the latest frameworks. You are not limited by physics, 99% aren't.
I ping HN, it's 150ms away, it still renders in the same time that the Google frontpage does and that one has a 130ms advantage.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Under Settings => Domains you can add additional domains. If you use Fastmail as domain registrar you have to pay for each additional domain, of course.