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Why we use our own hardware
541–547 of 547 posts
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#542The 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…
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Re: Why we use our own hardware
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. They seemed orders of magnitude more expensive for something that was more complex to manage and would have locked us into a specific vendor's tooling. But everyone seemed to be flocking to them. In 2006 when the first aws instances showed up it would take you two years of on demand…
AWS was built on hordes of VC backed startups drowning in heaps of cash and very little operational expertise.
And now we've got a generation of IT professionals coming up the ranks who have no idea how to operate their own infrastructure.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fro…
A datacenter being soc2 compliant doesn’t mean any of your systems are. Same with pci. Same with hipaa. Cloud providers usually have offerings that help meet those requirements as well, but again, you can host bare metal, colo, cloud, or a tower under your bed, their compliance doesn’t do anything to cover your compliance.
They do cover your physical security requirements, which is still important.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#545The 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…
AWS is only expensive if you intend to run a lot of workloads and have a large, competent technical team. For businesses with I can teach someone from accounting how to restore the entire VM farm in an afternoon using the AWS web console. I've never seen an on prem setup where a similar feat is possible. There's always some weird arcane exceptions due to economic compromises that Amazon was not forced to make. When y…
> For businesses with If your infrastructure consists of ten t2.micro instances vs ten Raspberry Pis, then sure. In any other case, migrating VM or bare metal workloads from your own hardware straight onto EC2 is one of the most effective ways in the world to incinerate money.
You can do well if you've got a workload well suited to 'native' PaaS services like S3 and Lambda, but EC2 costs a fortune.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
For smaller shops I'd argue storage is the hardest part. I've done several OpenStack and baremetal K8s deployments on prem and the part that always stressed me out the most was storage. I'd happily pay a markup for that vs just about anything else that would be more economical to do on prem for smaller simpler workloads.
Also encrypted storage on AWS is so simple. Encrypted root file systems on prem is not easy.
How so?
If you're a Windows shop, Bitlocker has been available to you since 2008.
If you're a Red Hat shop, Clevis + Tang has made this a no brainer since 2014.
If you have lots of money and run your root filesystems via FC or iSCSI from NetApp filers, then NSE has been around for close to 20 years now.
Re: Why we use our own hardware
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from my own colocated 1U running Mailcow to Fastmail and don't regret it one bit. This was an interesting read, glad to see they think things through nice and carefully. The only things I wish FM had are all software: 1. A takeout-style API to let me grab a complete snapshot once a week with one call 2. The ability to be an IdP for Tailscale.
1. hoping to have a JMAP archive format at some point which should cover that. I'd hope that normally you'd be fetching a delta update rather than the whole thing. We've got enough bandwidth for a few people do to it, but I wouldn't want every customer pulling their entire archive every week of 99% the same immutable data; that would be kinda sucky. 2. yeah, I'd love that too - we're keen to integrate with everything…
When I back up machines I only pull a full backup 3-4 times a year and then I stack weekly deltas on top of those.
I'd start with that and see how it seemed to work when trying to look through backups and test-restore things.