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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#391

Post by rakoo »

swiftcoder wrote: post #198
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... don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding This is a very engineer-centric take. The cloud has some big advantages that are entirely non-technical: - You don't need to pay for hardware upfront. This is critical for many early-stage startups, who have no real ability to predict CapEx until they find product/market fit. - You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIP…

> You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at.

I would assume you still need to point auditors to your software in any case

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#392

Post by eddsolves »

lukevp wrote: post #351

To me, Cloud is all about the shift left of DevOps. It’s not a cost play. I’m a Dev Lead / Manager and have worked in both types of environments over the last 10 years. It’s immeasurable the velocity difference as far as system provisioning between the two approaches. In the hardware space, it took months to years to provision new machines or upgrade OSes. In the cloud, it’s a new terraform script and a CI deploy awa…

My first job in tech was building servers for companies when they needed more compute, physically building them from our warehouse of components, driving them to their site, and setting it up in their network.

You could get same day builds deployed on prem with the right support bundle!

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#393

Post by motorest »

jread wrote: post #388
motorest wrote: post #253

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 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…

If have a global user base, depending on your workload, a simple CDN in front of your hardware can often go a long ways with minimal cost and complexity.

> If have a global user base, depending on your workload, a simple CDN in front of your hardware can often go a long ways with minimal cost and complexity.

Let's squint hard enough to pretend a CDN does not qualify as "the cloud". That alone requires a lot of goodwill.

A CDN distributes read-only content. Any usecase that requires interacting with a service is automatically excluded.

So, no.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#394

Post by klysm »

jgb1984 wrote: post #62
klysm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s trading time for money

Fake news. I've got my bare metal server deployed and installed with my ansible playbook even before you manage to log into the bazillion layers of abstraction that is AWS.

In multiple regions?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#396

Post by Brian_K_White »

noprocrasted wrote: post #197
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…

> 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…

Physical access and logical root access can't hide things form each other. It takes both to hide an activity. If you only have one, then the other can always be used to uncover or detect in the first place, or at least diagnose after.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#397

Post by dijit »

packtreefly wrote: post #356
jph00 wrote: post #344

The original answer to "why does FastMail use their own hardware" is that when I started the company in 1999 there weren't many options. I actually originally used a single bare metal server at Rackspace, which at that time was a small scrappy startup. IIRC it cost $70/month. There weren't really practical VPS or SaaS alternatives back then for what I needed. Rob (the author of the linked article) joined a few months…

> although I was worried that folks are too locked in to SaaS stuff For some people the cloud is straight magic, but for many of us, it just represents work we don't have to do. Let "the cloud" manage the hardware and you can deliver a SaaS product with all the nines you could ask for... > teaching a course on how to do all this ... there might be interest in that after all? Idk about a course, but I'd be interested…

I’ve never visited a datacenter that wasn’t SOC2 compliant. Bahnhof, SAVVIS, Telecity, Equinox etc.

Of course, their SOC 2 compliance doesn't mean we are absolved of securing our databases and services.

Theres a big gap between throwing some compute in a closet and having someone “run the closet” for you.

There is, a significantly larger gap between having someone “run the closet” and building your own datacenter from scratch.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#398

Post by jread »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #375
jph00 wrote: post #344

The original answer to "why does FastMail use their own hardware" is that when I started the company in 1999 there weren't many options. I actually originally used a single bare metal server at Rackspace, which at that time was a small scrappy startup. IIRC it cost $70/month. There weren't really practical VPS or SaaS alternatives back then for what I needed. Rob (the author of the linked article) joined a few months…

You know how to set up a rock-solid remote hands console to all your servers, I take it? Dial-up modem to a serial console server, serial cables to all the servers (or IPMI on a segregated network and management ports). Then you deal with varying hardware implementations, OSes, setting that up in all your racks in all your colos. Compare that to AWS, where there are 6 different kinds of remote hands, that work on all…

> Hardware can fail for all kinds of reasons

Complex cloud infra can also fail for all kinds of reasons, and they are often harder to troubleshoot than a hardware failure. My experience with server grade hardware in a reliable colo with a good uplink is it's generally an extremely reliable combination.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#399

Post by justsomehnguy »

ksec wrote: post #353
jph00 wrote: post #344

The original answer to "why does FastMail use their own hardware" is that when I started the company in 1999 there weren't many options. I actually originally used a single bare metal server at Rackspace, which at that time was a small scrappy startup. IIRC it cost $70/month. There weren't really practical VPS or SaaS alternatives back then for what I needed. Rob (the author of the linked article) joined a few months…

>But everyone seemed to be flocking to them. To the point we have young Devs today that dont know what VPS and Colo ( Colocation) meant. Back to the article, I am surprised it was only a "A few years ago" Fastmail adopted SSD. Which certainly seems late in the cycle for the benefits of what SSD offers. Price for Colo on the order of $3000/2U/year. That is $125 /U/month.

> Which certainly seems late in the cycle for the benefits of what SSD offers.

90% of emails are never read, 9% are read once. What SSD could offer for this use case except at least 2x cost ?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#400

Post by likeabatterycar »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #375
jph00 wrote: post #344

The original answer to "why does FastMail use their own hardware" is that when I started the company in 1999 there weren't many options. I actually originally used a single bare metal server at Rackspace, which at that time was a small scrappy startup. IIRC it cost $70/month. There weren't really practical VPS or SaaS alternatives back then for what I needed. Rob (the author of the linked article) joined a few months…

You know how to set up a rock-solid remote hands console to all your servers, I take it? Dial-up modem to a serial console server, serial cables to all the servers (or IPMI on a segregated network and management ports). Then you deal with varying hardware implementations, OSes, setting that up in all your racks in all your colos. Compare that to AWS, where there are 6 different kinds of remote hands, that work on all…

> The number of failures you can have on-prem is insane. Hardware can fail for all kinds of reasons (you must know this)

Cloud vendors are not immune from hardware failure. What do you think their underlying infrastructure runs on, some magical contraption made from Lego bricks, Swiss chocolate, and positive vibes?

It's the same hardware, prone to the same failures. You've just outsourced worrying about it.

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