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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#331

Post by justsomehnguy »

pixelesque wrote: post #319
stefan_ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Erm, 99%'s clearly wrong and I think you know it, even if you are falling into the typical trap of "only Americans matter"... As someone in New Zealand, latency does really matter sometimes, and is painfully obvious at times. HN's ping for me is around: 330 ms. Anyway, ping doesn't really describe the latency of the full DNS lookup propogation, TCP connection establishment and TLS handshake: full responses for HN are…

> latency does really matter sometimes

Yes, sometimes.

You know what matters way more?

If you throw 12MBytes to the client in a multiple connections on multiple domains to display 1KByte of information. Eg: 'new' Reddit.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#332

Post by jjeaff »

TheFlyingFish wrote: post #317

Lots of people here mentioning reasons to both use and avoid the cloud. I'll just chip in one more on the pro-cloud side: reliability at low scale. To expand: At $dayjob we use AWS, and we have no plans to switch because we're tiny , like ~5000 DAU last I checked. Our AWS bill is Meanwhile, RDS (for example) has given us something like one unexplained 15-minute outage in the last six years. Obviously every situation…

This is a common false dichotomy I see constantly. Cloud vs, buy and build your own hardware from scratch and colocate/build own datacenter.

Very few non-cloud users are buying their own hardware. You can simply rent dedicated hardware in a datacenter. For significantly cheaper than anything in the cloud. That being said, certain things like object storage, if you don't need very large amounts of data, are very handy and inexpensive from cloud services considering the redundancy and uptime they offer.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#333

Post by scrose »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #311
UltraSane wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypting data is easy, securely managing keys is the hard part. KMS is the Key Management Service. And AWS put a lot of thought and work into it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/cryptographic-details...

It's now been two years since I used KMS, but at the time it seemed little more than S3 API interface with Twitter size limitations Fundamentally why would KMS be more secure than S3 anyway? Both ultimately have the same fundamental security requirements and do the same thing. So the big whirlydoo is KMS has hardware keygen. im sorry, that sounds like something almost guaranteed to have nsa backdoor, or has so much n…

If your threat model is the NSA and you’re worried about backdoors then don’t use any cloud provider?

Maybe I’m just jaded from years doing this, but two things have never failed me for bringing me peace of mind in the infrastructure/ops world:

1. Use whatever your company has already committed to. Compare options and bring up tradeoffs when committing to a cloud-specific service(ie. AWS Lambdas) versus more generic solutions around cost, security and maintenance.

2. Use whatever feels right to you for anything else.

Preventing the NSA from cracking into your system is a fun thought exercise, but life is too short to make that the focus of all your hosting concerns

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#334

Post by ttul »

TheFlyingFish wrote: post #317

Lots of people here mentioning reasons to both use and avoid the cloud. I'll just chip in one more on the pro-cloud side: reliability at low scale. To expand: At $dayjob we use AWS, and we have no plans to switch because we're tiny , like ~5000 DAU last I checked. Our AWS bill is Meanwhile, RDS (for example) has given us something like one unexplained 15-minute outage in the last six years. Obviously every situation…

This works even at $1M/mo AWS spend. As you scale, the discounts get better. You get into the range of special pricing where they will make it work against your P&L. If you’re venture funded, they have a special arm that can do backflips for you.

I should note that Microsoft also does this.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#335

Post by ttul »

I think mailbox hosting is a special use case. The primary cost is storage and bandwidth and you can indeed do better on storage and bandwidth than what Amazon offers. That being said, if Fastmail asked Amazon for special pricing to make the move, they would get it.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#337

Post by kasey_junk »

xorcist wrote: post #209
rtfusgihkuj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, using Ansible to distribute public keys does not get you very far. It's fine for a personal project or even a team of 5-6 with a handful, but beyond that you really need a better way to onboard, offboard, and modify accounts. If you're doing anything but a toy project, you're better off starting off with something like IPA for host access controls.

Why do think that? I did something similar at a previous work for something bordering on 1k employees. User administration was done by modifying a yaml file in git. Nothing bad to say about it really. It sure beats point-and-click Active Directory any day of the week. Commit log handy for audits. If there are no externalities demanding anything else, I'd happily do it again.

There is nothing _wrong_ with it, and so long as you can prove that your offboarding is consistent and quick then feel free to use it.

But a central system that uses the same identity/auth everywhere is much easier to keep consistent and fast. That’s why auditors and security professionals will harp on idp/sso solutions as some of the first things to invest in.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#338

Post by likeabatterycar »

UltraSane wrote: post #151
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…

"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 hires the same cretins that inhabit every other IT department, they just usually happen to be more technically capable. That doesn't make them any more or less trustworthy or reliable.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#339

Post by nine_k »

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

If you don't want your data to be accessible to "various agencies", don't share it with corporations, full stop. Corporations are obliged by law to make it available to the agencies, and the agencies often overreach, while the corporations almost never mind the overreach. There are limitations for stuff like health or financial data, but these are not impenetrable barriers.

I would just consider all your hosted data to be easily available to any security-related state agency; consider them already having a copy.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#340

Post by szundi »

throwawaysxcd0 wrote: post #289
dehrmann wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)_/¯

Hey boss, I go to sleep now, site should be up anytime. Cheers
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