Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#331

Post by renewiltord »

teh_klev wrote: post #218
mekster wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because comments are usually far more intelligent and interesting to read and I set my app to open up comments than the story by default. I don't blame the others doing the same.

So how can you comment on, or have a critical thought about an article, if you're just reading a bunch of other comments likely left by others who also likely didn't read the article? I find that genuinely baffling, and somewhat worrying, especially on more serious topics.

Bro, you didn't read the article and you're leaving comments so I think maybe you don't find it that baffling or worrying.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#332

Post by teh_klev »

renewiltord wrote: post #331
teh_klev wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how can you comment on, or have a critical thought about an article, if you're just reading a bunch of other comments likely left by others who also likely didn't read the article? I find that genuinely baffling, and somewhat worrying, especially on more serious topics.

Bro, you didn't read the article and you're leaving comments so I think maybe you don't find it that baffling or worrying.

"Bro" I sure as hell did and even watched the video. There's enough in there to read between the lines that they've got a DR solution.

And to be honest the amount of nit-picking by AWS/Cloud fanbois is verging on comical.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#333

Post by didibus »

joana035 wrote: post #318
didibus wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing OS updates, configuring load balancers, DB backups, setting up firewall rules and OS user accounts, ssh access, archiving logs, configuring monitoring and alarms, assigning DNS, handling deployments, etc. I don't know, as an application developer, I'd rather not waste my time with stuff like that if I can avoid it.

You forgot to mention IAM roles and policies. > I don't know, as an application developer, I'd rather not waste my time with stuff like that if I can avoid it. Believe or not there are other roles besides "developer" within technology related jobs. The problem of cloud is that the heavy majority of supporters just echo the usual "scale", "maintenance" arguments without even willing to learn what those things are to t…

> Believe or not there are other roles besides "developer" within technology related jobs

I would assume much of AWS, at least the services I mentioned, are targetted at application developers though. So if you say running your own box is easier or better for running your application, you'd need to convince an application developer that it is.

And as an application developer myself, like I said, I don't find it so. Targeting Lambda for example is much simpler. If I need a DB, using RDS or DynamoDB or S3 is much simpler than spinning and maintaining my own instance on my own box. If I need to publish notifications, well I don't even want to think what I'd need to do to replace SNS or SQS. If I want to have application logs and have them archived for some longer period of time, and make sure they don't fill up my box's hard drive to the max, I can just use CloudLogs. Etc.

So again, you'd need to convince me it can be more convenient and less maintainance for me to use my own box instead of using those AWS services. That's even before we talk about availability and scale.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#334

Post by renewiltord »

teh_klev wrote: post #332
renewiltord wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, you didn't read the article and you're leaving comments so I think maybe you don't find it that baffling or worrying.

"Bro" I sure as hell did and even watched the video. There's enough in there to read between the lines that they've got a DR solution. And to be honest the amount of nit-picking by AWS/Cloud fanbois is verging on comical.

Don't even try. It's obvious you didn't. And I use GCP, homes.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#335

Post by anonfornoreason »

kroolik wrote: post #329
anonfornoreason wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.

You would rather have a team of specialists for every piece of technology you have. I'd rather have my team members not focus on nuissances of database replication, and instead solve our customers' problems. Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?

There isn't just one way, but from what I can tell AWS works great for the really small and the really big, and is a massive waste of money for the in-between. They have run an amazingly effective marketing campaign to make everyone feel like they are missing out if they aren't using it.

The learning curve for working with AWS is similar to the learning curve of working on bare metal. It honestly does not take a specialist to use MySQL, Postgres, etc. They are really quite easy to make a HA turnkey solution. It's as easy as learning how to effectively use an amazon service. We aren't talking about the days where you had to shard out which was a big pain in the ass, because machines are cheap now with 128 physical cores, 1tb of memory, massive fast storage, etc. You can run the nastiest largest database on a single machine and achieve a pretty large scale doing it.

One of these paths costs about $2500 a month with server purchase amortization, and on the other about $20,000 per month. Either way I need someone to manage it (unless you are talking heroku level of turn-key, then up that $20k a month to $50k a month).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#336

Post by teh_klev »

renewiltord wrote: post #334
teh_klev wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bro" I sure as hell did and even watched the video. There's enough in there to read between the lines that they've got a DR solution. And to be honest the amount of nit-picking by AWS/Cloud fanbois is verging on comical.

Don't even try. It's obvious you didn't. And I use GCP, homes.

And well done for you, I use Azure. Let's give us all a pat on the back.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#337

Post by philliphaydon »

joana035 wrote: post #319
philliphaydon wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting a box and forgetting about it is how you get hacked. There is more maintenance and operational burden with self hosting vs cloud. But going cloud doesn't mean there's no longer any burden.

> Renting a box and forgetting about it is how you get hacked. You get hacked in any compute model if you don't know what you doing. > There is more maintenance and operational burden with self hosting vs cloud. Renting a box is closer to dedicated hosts than to self hosting, which are two very different things. > But going cloud doesn't mean there's no longer any burden. Exactly, and it starts with the complexity an…

> Cloud is like chopping your both legs and being happy with it.

No it's not lol

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#338

Post by moltar »

Rantenki wrote: post #26
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

I have extensive infrastructure running across 3 separate org accounts for blast radius, with multiple separate VPCs per org, RDS databases across multiple AZs, and a large variety of instances. Everything is built up and torn down via Terraform, and ZERO maintenance tasks are done via the console. Changes to infrastructure configuration are managed via CAB which approves PRs on Github which are automatically deploye…

What’s CAB?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#339

Post by cultofmetatron »

nmfisher wrote: post #263
cultofmetatron wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firebase is probably the most hyped and overused tech I've seen. I've run into far too many startups that went to firebase because they wanted to scale fast and didn't realize how limited firebase was for queries. If you're starting a startup, use postgres for your database. it will handle damn near anything and you can spawn off functionality into microservices as they become bottle necks as you scale. Hell, postgre…

Two reasons I use Firebase for my app (although with an admittedly trivial schema/data): a) I have a thousand things to do that are higher priority than configuring/hosting a Postgres server. b) Integration with Firebase Auth is a godsend. I doubt people choose Firebase for technical or scaling reasons. More likely they choose it because it's trivial to integrate, so you can spend the limited hours you have in each d…

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/?aurora-whats-new.sort-by=...

https://www.heroku.com/postgres

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/

With all due respect, " they choose it because it's trivial to integrate" is a terrible reason for choosing a technology. Anyone choosing a database should be doing so based on the following.

1. does the insertion and querying mechanisms support the requirements of my app? 2. is it scalable? (ie first few thousand users, beyond that and any tech you pick is going to run into issues without a dedicated strategy) 3. can I afford it? (in terms of maintenance as well as licensing)

Postgres (and mysql) has plenty of standard tooling for integrating into your app and is no where near as limited. I would not take an engineer proposing firebase without making a STRONG logical case for why its the best choice as someone who's graduated out of junior status.

Then again, fixing messes caused by such engineers for several startups that started with firebase because its the easiest to get started with PAID for my galavanting around southeast Asia last year so I won't wag my finger too hard.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#340

Post by geon »

busterarm wrote: post #51
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

At work, we have our own “cloud”. It is a cluster running kubernetes, so if I need a bunch of vms I can just spin them up in house.
Post reply on HN