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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#301

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

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…

> a desire to not centralize the Internet

> If I didn't already self-host email

this really says all that needs to be said about your perspective. you have an engineer and OSS advocate's mindset. which is fine, but most business leaders (including technical leaders like CTOs) have a business mindset, and their goal is to build a business that makes money, not avoid contributing to the centralization of the internet

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#302

Post by noprocrasted »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #292
fulafel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

If I remember right, the attacker’s AWS employment is irrelevant - no privileged AWS access was used in that case. The attacker working for AWS was a pure coincidence, it could’ve been anyone.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#303

Post by cyberax »

maccard wrote: post #175
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…

I work for a 50 person subsidiary of a 30k person organisation. I needed a domain name. I put in the purchase request and 6 months later eventually gave up, bought it myself and expensed it. Our AWS account is managed by an SRE team. It’s a 3 day turnaround process to get any resources provisioned, and if you don’t get the exact spec right (you forgot to specify the iops on the volume? Oops) 3 day turnaround. Already…

> Our AWS account is managed by an SRE team.

That's an anti-pattern (we call it "the account") in the AWS architecture.

AWS internally just uses multiple accounts, so a team can get their own account with centrally-enforced guardrails. It also greatly simplifies billing.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#304

Post by gjsman-1000 »

awholescammy wrote: post #211
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…

There is a whole ecosystem that pushes cloud to ignorant/fresh graduates/developers. Just take a look at the sponsors for all the most popular frameworks. When your system is super complex and depends on the cloud they make more money. Just look at the PHP ecosystem, Laravel needs 4 times the servers to server something that a pure PHP system would need. Most projects don't need the cloud. Only around 10% of projects…

Having worked with Laravel, this is absolutely bull.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#305

Post by amelius »

jorams wrote: post #161
amelius wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Your comment is confusing because you start this one saying your inbox is full of spam, but respond to a suggestion to mark it as spam by saying it's not actually spam. If something is not spam but you want it out of your inbox there's a few options: - click Unsubscribe next to the sender. This should be possible for essentially all promotional email. - click Actions -> click Block . Messages from this address will n…

I guess what's confusing is that I'm calling the promotional emails also "spam".

But thanks for your suggestions.

I see a few problems. When I receive a promotional email, I want to add a rule, and I have to click 7 times (including once for "Archive"), and use the scroll-wheel to select the "Promotions" label. Secondly, the rule is not applied directly. This is confusing, and cumbersome. Note: I don't want to Unsubscribe (because there may be vouchers), and I don't want to mark it as spam, for the same reason.

Another problem is that the amount of rules gets unwieldy this way. I have hundreds of rules already for promotional stuff and the rules I use for other (more important) stuff are hidden between them.

Maybe you think I am complaining too much, but in gmail it was all simple and automatic.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#306

Post by mardifoufs »

fulafel wrote: post #194
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…

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

Most corporations (which is the vast majority of cloud users) absolutely don't care about spooks, sadly enough. If that's the threat model, then it's a very very rare case to care about it. Most datacenters/corporations won't even fight or care about sharing data with local spooks/cops/three letter agencies. The actual threat is data leaks, security breaches, etc.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#307

Post by mardifoufs »

johnklos wrote: post #81
jeffbee wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis. I reject a theory that requires that, because my ego just isn't that large. I once worked for several years at a publicly traded firm well-known for their return-to-on-prem stance, and honestly it was a complete disaster. The first-party hardware designs didn't work right because they didn't have the har…

> The problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis. What's the market share of Windows again? ;)

You're proving their point though. Considering that there are tons of reasons to use windows, some people just don't see them and think that everyone else is crazy :^) (I know you're joking but some people actually unironically have the same sentiment)

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#308

Post by xerp2914 »

caidan wrote: post #14

I absolutely love Fastmail. I moved off of Gmail years ago with zero regrets. Better UI, better apps, better company, and need I say better service? I still maintain and fetch from a Gmail account so it all just works seamlessly for receiving and sending Gmail, so you don’t have to give anything up either.

100% this. I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail about 5 years ago and it has been rock solid. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#309

Post by ants_everywhere »

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…

...but your post reads like you do have an emotional reaction to this question and you're ready to believe someone who shares your views.

There's not nearly enough in here to make a judgment about things like security or privacy. They have the bare minimum encryption enabled. That's better than nothing. But how is key access handled? Can they recover your email if the entire cluster goes down? If so, then someone has access to the encryption keys. If not, then how do they meet reliability guarantees?

Three letter agencies and cyber spies like to own switches and firewalls with zero days. What hardware are they using, and how do they mitigate against backdoors? If you really cared about this you would have to roll your own networking hardware down to the chips. Some companies do this, but you need to have a whole lot of servers to make it economical.

It's really about trade-offs. I think the big trade-offs favoring staying off cloud are cost (in some applications), distrust of the cloud providers,and avoiding the US Government.

The last two are arguably judgment calls that have some inherent emotional content. The first is calculable in principle, but people may not be using the same metrics. For example if you don't care that much about security breaches or you don't have to provide top tier reliability, then you can save a ton of money. But if you do have to provide those guarantees, it would be hard to beat Cloud prices.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#310

Post by bobnamob »

graemep wrote: post #98
dietr1ch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If its an outage at AWS its their fault. Well, still your fault, but easy to judo the risk into clients saying supporting multi-cloud is expensive and not a priority.

Management in many places will not even know what multi-cloud is (or even multi-region). As Cloudstrike showed, if you follow the crowd and tick the right boxes you will not be blamed.

nit: Crowdstrike

Unless the incident is now being referred to as “Cloudstrike”, in which case, eww

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