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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#521

Post by ylee »

beaugunderson wrote: post #506
ylee wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problems have you had? I also came over from pobox and thought that the transition was quite straightforward.

Anything erroneously marked as spam can not be released to the forwarding address—-meaning they fail at their one job, forwarding email. Pobox had a great interface for quickly releasing messages to the forwarding address.

Pre-Fastmail, I did not have mail storage space at Pobox; just forwarding ability. I did not use Pobox's own interface for releasing spam mail; I used the standard filter (can't remember the exact name) and almost never saw nonspam in there (not that I checked often).

Post-Fastmail, I still forward from Pobox/Fastmail to the same other Google Workspace account from which I pull mail to my local system with `fetchmail`. I have Fastmail send all mail, spam or not; while the settings UI does not allow setting the spam protection level to "Off" when forwarding is used, the same thing can be achieved by using "Custom" then disabling "Move messages with a score of ___ or higher to Spam". I thus can let Google's spam filter deal with the inflow and, if necessary, manually sort miscategorized mail with my IMAP client.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#522

Post by UltraSane »

portaouflop wrote: post #349
wslh wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have full security competence but be a rogue actor at the same time.

You can also have rogue actors in your company, you don’t need 3rd parties for that

And I bet AWS is better at detecting them.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#523

Post by UltraSane »

wslh wrote: post #360
portaouflop wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also have rogue actors in your company, you don’t need 3rd parties for that

That doesn't sum up my comments in the thread. A rogue actor in a datacenter could attack zillions of companies at the same time while rogue actors in a single company only once.

And I bet AWS is also better at detecting rogue actors.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#524

Post by Voultapher »

e12e wrote: post #401
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…

I used to help manage a couple of racks worth of on premise hw in early to mid 2000. We had some old Compaq (?) servers, most of the newer stuff was Dell. Mix of windows and Linux servers. Even with the Dell boxes, things wasn't really standard across different server generations, and every upgrade was bespoke, except in cases when we bought multiple boxes for redundancy/scaling of a particular service. What I'd like…

Yeah, having something like oxide but smaller would be awesome.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#525

Post by dijit »

UltraSane wrote: post #237
j45 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud is someone else’s computer. It’s like putting something in someone’s desk drawer under the guise of convenience at the expense of security. Why? Too often, someone other than the data owner has or can get access to the drawer directly or indirectly. Also, Cloud vs self hosted to me is a pendulum that has swung back and forth for a number of reasons. The benefits of the cloud outlined here are often a lot of…

> The cloud is someone else’s computer. And in the case of AWS it is someone else's extremely well designed and managed computer and network.

Extremely well designed? I doubt it.

Usually the larger the company and the more mission critical the product: the worse the implementation.

Twitch source code (which, I guess counts as Amazon already), Disney leaks- and my own experience working with very large companies. (Nokia, Ubisoft, Facebook, Activision/Blizzard).

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#526

Post by mariusor »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #519
mariusor wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion would be to try Purelymail. They don't offer much in the way of a web interface to email, but if you bring your own client, it's a very good provider. I'm paying something like $10 per year for multiple domains with multiple email addresses (though with little traffic). I've been using them for about 5 years and I had absolutely no issues.

Purelymail is just one person show. May that one person live long and prosper, but I am not putting my faith or email in that business.

Why do you need to put faith in them? Switching email providers is just a DNS change away, and email messages can be stored locally - actually it's encouraged to do so.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#527

Post by jedberg »

ldng wrote: post #520
jedberg wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those could count. But you'll still end up having to do some linux admin, which a lot of people can't do anymore. The whole point is that the closer you can get to "write code, run code", the faster you can launch and innovate.

Linux admin still exists. Except that they are better paid than ever at cloud provider. What you're describing is more payroll flexibility than technical.

How is it not technical flexibility? No matter what talent you have on payroll, you can't spin up a whole datacenter's worth of machines in Europe in less than a day without a cloud provider.

And I mean less than a day from "I think we should operate in Europe" to "we are operating production workloads in Europe".

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#528

Post by lobsterthief »

benterix wrote: post #358
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…

> As the fortunes of AWS et al rose and rose and rose, I kept looking at their pricing at features and kept wondering what I was missing. You are not the only one. There are several factors at play but I believe one of the strongest today is the generational divide: the people lost the ability to manage their own infra or don't know it well enough to do it well so it's true when they say "It's too much hassle". I say…

It’s also human capital/resource allocation. We thought about spinning up our own servers at my last gig; we had the talent in house but that talent was busy building the product, not managing servers. I suppose it depends on what your need is as well.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#529

Post by antihero »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #115
antihero wrote: post #36

I’ve started to host my own sites and stuff on an old MacBook in a cupboard with a shit old external hardware Ava microk8s and it’s great!

Another homelabber joins the ranks!!

Just implemented a dyndns system using K8s CronJobs + GitOps + CloudFlare Terraform, however next stage will be moving that over to CloudFlare tunnels which should be more reliable and nicer, fully within the Terraform and not relying on polling a random JSON IP service (which a terrifying SPOF)

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#530

Post by UltraSane »

dijit wrote: post #525
UltraSane wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cloud is someone else’s computer. And in the case of AWS it is someone else's extremely well designed and managed computer and network.

Extremely well designed? I doubt it. Usually the larger the company and the more mission critical the product: the worse the implementation. Twitch source code (which, I guess counts as Amazon already), Disney leaks- and my own experience working with very large companies. (Nokia, Ubisoft, Facebook, Activision/Blizzard).

Your comment tells me you have never read any of AWS many documents about how they engineer their components. They put an huge amount of effort into it. AWS is much more reliable that Azure. They have built the largest and most reliable storage system in the world with S3. AWS has stated that some customers have S3 buckets using over 1 million hard drives. Netflix relies heavily on AWS for its streaming services. Lyft runs its ride-sharing platform on AWS. Capital One migrated its entire infrastructure to AWS. Slack relies on AWS for its messaging platform. GE utilizes AWS for industrial IoT (Internet of Things) solutions, predictive maintenance, and data analytics. Twitch streams video to 31 million viewers from AWS.

https://www.amazon.science/publications/cloud-resource-prote...

https://www.amazon.science/tag/formal-verification

https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/resources/

https://www.amazon.science/blog/custom-policy-checks-help-de...

https://www.amazon.science/publications/formal-verification-...

AWS is an industry leader in using formal methods and automated reasoning to prove the security and reliability of critical software and detect insecure configurations

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