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But what about the cost and complexity of a room with the racks and the cooling needs of running these machines? And the uninterrupted power setup? The wiring mess behind the racks.
Yeah, Cloud is a bit of a scam innit? Oxide is looking more and more attractive every day as the industry corrects itself from overspending on capabilities they would never need.
It’s trading time for money
The heading in this space makes your think they're running custom FPGAs such as with Gmail, not just running on metal... As for drive failures, welcome to storage at scale. Build your solution so it's a weekly task to replace 10disks at a time not critical at 2am when a single disk dies...
Storing/Accessing tonnes of I love ZFS, it's great with per-disk redundancy but CEPH is really the only game in town for inter-rack/DC resilience which I would hope my email provider has.
gmail does spam filtering very well for me. fastmail on the other hands, puts lots of legit emails into spam folder. manually marking "not spam" doesn't help other than that, i'm happy with fastmail.
All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding, but serve to introduce doubt to non-technical people and to trick people who don't examine what they're told.
What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points. They don't seem to care much about data or facts, just that they love cloud and want everyone else to be in cloud, too. This happens much more often on sites like Reddit (r/sysadmin, even), but I wouldn't be surprised to see a little of it here.
It makes me wonder: how do people get so sold on a thing that they'll go online and fight about it, even when they lack facts or often even basic understanding?
I can clearly state why I advocate for avoiding cloud: cost, privacy, security, a desire to not centralize the Internet. The reason people advocate for cloud for others? It puzzles me. "You'll save money," "you can't secure your own machines," "it's simpler" all have worlds of assumptions that those people can't possibly know are correct.
So when I read something like this from Fastmail which was written without taking an emotional stance, I respect it. If I didn't already self-host email, I'd consider using Fastmail.
There used to be so much push for cloud everything that an article like this would get fanatical responses. I hope that it's a sign of progress that that fanaticism is waning and people aren't afraid to openly discuss how cloud isn't right for many things.
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…
2. People therefore repeat talking points which seem in their interest
3. With enough repetition these become their beliefs
4. People will defend their beliefs as theirs against attack
5. Goto 1
I'm a little surprised it seems they didn't have some existing compression solution before moving to zfs. With so much repetitive text across emails I would think there would be a LOT to gain, such as from dictionaries, compressing many emails into bigger blobs, and fine-tuning compression options.
Custom compression code can introduce bugs that can kill Fastmail's reputation of reliability.
It's better to use a well tested solution that cost a bit more.
Plugging https://BareMetalSavings.com in case you want to ballpark-estimate your move off of the cloud Bonus points: I'm a Fastmail customer, so it tangentially tracks ---- Quick note about the article: ZFS encryption can be flaky, be sure you know what you're doing before deploying for your infrastructure. Relevant Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/1f59zp6/is_zfs_encrypt... A spreadsheet of re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To avoid sysadmin tasks, and keep costs down, you've got to go so deep in the cloud, that it becomes just another arcane skill set. I run most of my stuff on virtual Linux servers, but some on AWS, and that's hard to learn, and doesn't transfer to GCP or Azure. Unless your needs are extreme, I think sysadmin'ing is the easier route in most cases.
For so many things the cloud isn't really easier or cheaper, and most cloud providers stopped advertising it as such. My assumption is that cloud adoption is mainly driven by 3 forces: - for small companies: free credits - for large companies: moving prices as far away as possible from the deploy button, allowing dev and it to just deploy stuff without purchase orders - self-perpetuating due to hype, cv-driven develo…