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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#291

Post by Aromasin »

kevinkatzke wrote: post #276

Feels 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.

If this were cyclical, I'd be inclined to agree, but this seems to be more of a wave. I also think the push back is more than just one against rented compute. It is tied to a societal ennui that comes from the feeling that we no longer own anything, be it music, housing, movies, land, tools, phones, or cars. Everything is moving to either being rented or on credit. There's a push back against this self-made feudal revival, and that scales all the way from individuals through to corporations; in this case, against the idea that a mega-corporation gets to decide how and when you get to use your compute, and at what variable price.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#292

Post by ibejoeb »

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%…

Dead on. Recently, 3 and 4 have been compelling. Cloud costs have rocketed up. I started my casual transition to co-lo 2 years ago and just in december finished everything. I have more capacity at about 30% of the cost. If you go option 3, you even get the benefit of 6+ month retro pricing for RAM/storage. I'm running all DDR4, but I have so much of it I don't know what to do with it.

The flip side is that compliance is a little more involved. Rather than, say, carve out a whole swathe of SOC-2 ops, I have to coordinate some controls. It's not a lot, and it's still a lot lighter than I used to do 10+ years ago. Just something to consider.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#293

Post by redrove »

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…

We’re past the point in history where most engineers get to make even a recommendation about which platform to use to management.

In 99.999999% of cases management has already decided and is just informing you, because they know better.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#294

Post by sgarland »

vel0city wrote: post #261
sgarland wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick (I blame Amazon for their horrible naming): Aurora and RDS are separate products. What you’re asking for can mostly be pieced together, but no, it doesn’t exist as-is. Failover: this has been a thing for a long time. Set up a synchronous standby, then add a monitoring job that checks heartbeats and promotes the standby when needed. Optionally use something like heartbeat to have a floating IP that gets swappe…

> you can fairly closely replicate the experience of Aurora Nobody doubts one could build something similar to Aurora given enough budget, time, and skills. But that's not replicating the experience of Aurora. The experience of Aurora is I can have all of that , in like 30 lines of terraform and a few minutes. And then I don't need to worry about managing the zpools, I don't need to ensure the heartbeats are working…

The person I replied to said they wanted an open-source reimplementation of Aurora. My point - which was probably poorly-worded, or just implied - was that there's a lot of work that goes into something like that, and if you can't put the pieces together on your own, you probably shouldn't be running it for anything you can't afford downtime on.

Managed services have a clear value proposition. I personally think they're grossly overpriced, but I understand the appeal. Asking for that experience but also free / cheap doesn't make any sense.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#295

Post by seg_lol »

engelo_b wrote: post #262

[dead]

Using "big" cloud providers is often a mistake. You want to use rented assets to bootstrap and then start deploying on instances that are more and more under your control. With big cloud providers, it is easy to just succumb to their service offerings rather than do the right thing. Do your PoC on Hetzner and DigitalOcean then scale with purpose.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#296

Post by drnick1 »

nickorlow wrote: post #188

Even at the personal blog level, I'd argue it's worth it to run your own server (even if it's just an old PC in a closet). Gets you on the path to running a home lab.

Absolutely. I don't have a blog but run my own email, several game servers, Matrix instance, Nextcloud and other internal services on a retired gaming PC. The total cost of my cloud subscriptions is $0, and no one is snooping on me. It's a great setup when combined with Linux machines and GrapheneOS phones, completely private and free of Big Tech.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#297

Post by antonvs »

bojangleslover wrote: post #179
torginus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is 1) Senior engineer starts on AWS 2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't) 3) New engineer comes in and panics 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic 5) New engineer leaves 6) Second new engineer comes in and not only…

> 3) New engineer comes in and panics

> 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic

It's not as though this is unique to cloud.

I've seen multiple managers come in and introduce some SaaS because it fills a gap in their own understanding and abilities. Then when they leave, everyone stops using it and the account is cancelled.

The difference with cloud is that it tends to be more central to the operation, so can't just be canceled when an advocate leaves.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#298

Post by sciencejerk »

adamcharnock wrote: post #181
wulfstan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros. Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit…

FYI, AWS offers free Egress when leaving them (because they were forced to be EU regulation, but they chose to offer it globally): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i... But. Don't leave it until the last minute to talk to them about this. They don't make it easy, and require some warning (think months, IIRC)

Thank God for the EU regulations. USA has been too lax about cracking down on anti-competitive market practices

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#299

Post by Aurornis »

bojangleslover wrote: post #179
torginus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is 1) Senior engineer starts on AWS 2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't) 3) New engineer comes in and panics 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic 5) New engineer leaves 6) Second new engineer comes in and not only…

One of the biggest problems with the self-hosted situations I’ve seen is when the senior engineers who set it up leave and the next generation has to figure out how to run it all.

In theory with perfect documentation they’d have a good head start to learn it, but there is always a lot of unwritten knowledge involved in managing an inherited setup.

With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable and you can find people who have worked with that exact thing before.

Engineers also leave for a lot of reasons. Even highly paid engineers go off and retire, change to a job for more novelty, or decide to try starting their own business.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#300

Post by Aurornis »

drnick1 wrote: post #290

On premises isn't only about saving money (that's not always clear). The article neglects the most important benefits which are freedom (control) and privacy. It's basically the same considerations that apply to owning vs renting a house.

The entire second section is about different benefits of having your own data centers. Cost is listed as the last one, not the primary one.
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