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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#71

Post by Winsaucerer »

wongarsu wrote: post #37
tgv wrote: post #8

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…

I'm very interested in approaches that avoid cloud, so please don't read this as me saying cloud is superior. I can think of some other advantages of cloud:

- easy to setup different permissions for users (authorisation considerations).

- able to transfer assets to another owner (e.g., if there's a sale of a business) without needing to move physical hardware.

- other outsiders (consultants, auditors, whatever) can come in and verify the security (or other) of your setup, because it's using a standard well known cloud platform.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#72

Post by anotherhue »

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…

They spent time and career points learning cloud things and dammit it's going to matter!

You can't even blame them too much, the amount of cash poured into cloud marketing is astonishing.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#73

Post by cpursley »

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…

The fact is, managing your own hardware is a pita and a distraction from focusing on the core product. I loathe messing with servers and even opt for "overpriced" paas like fly, render, vercel. Because every minute messing with and monitoring servers is time not spent on product. My tune might change past a certain size and a massive cloud bill and there's room for full time ops people, but to offset their salary, it would have to be huge.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#74

Post by aimanbenbaha »

dewey wrote: post #34
mgaunard wrote: post #17

Why is it surprising? It's well known cloud is 3 times the price.

Nobody said it's surprising though, they are well aware of it having done it for more than two decades. Many newcomers are not aware of it though, as their default is "cloud" and they never even shopped for servers, colocation or looked around on the dedicated server market.

I don't think they're not just aware. But purely from scaling and distribution perspective it'd be wiser to start on cloud while you're still on the product-market fit phase. Also 'bare metal' requires more on the capex end and with how our corporate tax system is set it's just discouraging to go on this lane first and it'd be better off to spend on acquiring clients.

Also I'd guess a lot of technical founders are more familiar with cloud/server-side than with dealing or delegating sysadmin taks that might require adding members to the team.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#75

Post by jeffbee »

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…

The problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis. I reject a theory that requires that, because my ego just isn't that large.

I once worked for several years at a publicly traded firm well-known for their return-to-on-prem stance, and honestly it was a complete disaster. The first-party hardware designs didn't work right because they didn't have the hardware designs staffing levels to have de-risked to possibility that AMD would fumble the performance of Zen 1, leaving them with a generation of useless hardware they nonetheless paid for. The OEM hardware didn't work right because they didn't have the chops to qualify it either, leaving them scratching their heads for months over a cohort of servers they eventually discovered were contaminated with metal chips. And, most crucially, for all the years I worked there, the only thing they wanted to accomplish was failover from West Coast to East Coast, which never worked, not even once. When I left that company they were negotiating with the data center owner who wanted to triple the rent.

These experiences tell me that cloud skeptics are sometimes missing a few terms in their equations.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#76

Post by onli »

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…

The one convincing argument from technical people I saw, that would be repeated to your comment, is that by now, you dont find enough experienced engineers to reliably setup some really big systems. Because so much went to the cloud, a lot of the knowledge is buried there.

That came from technical people who I didn't perceive as being dogmatically pro-cloud.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#77

Post by dewey »

aimanbenbaha wrote: post #74
dewey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said it's surprising though, they are well aware of it having done it for more than two decades. Many newcomers are not aware of it though, as their default is "cloud" and they never even shopped for servers, colocation or looked around on the dedicated server market.

I don't think they're not just aware. But purely from scaling and distribution perspective it'd be wiser to start on cloud while you're still on the product-market fit phase. Also 'bare metal' requires more on the capex end and with how our corporate tax system is set it's just discouraging to go on this lane first and it'd be better off to spend on acquiring clients. Also I'd guess a lot of technical founders are mo…

I agree, the cloud definitely has a lot of use cases and when you are building more complicated systems it makes sense to just have to do a few clicks to get a new stack setup vs. having someone evaluate solutions and getting familiar with operating them on a deep level (backups etc.).

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#78

Post by amelius »

pavlov wrote: post #12
amelius wrote: post #11

[flagged]

There is a "Report Spam" function which is two clicks away (it's in the "More" menu).

I don't want to report everything as spam. For example, promotional emails from businesses that I bought something from. I don't want to punish those businesses; and those emails might contain vouchers that I could use later. But I want those emails moved out of the way without any action from my side.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#79

Post by cpursley »

cpursley wrote: post #73
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…

The fact is, managing your own hardware is a pita and a distraction from focusing on the core product. I loathe messing with servers and even opt for "overpriced" paas like fly, render, vercel. Because every minute messing with and monitoring servers is time not spent on product. My tune might change past a certain size and a massive cloud bill and there's room for full time ops people, but to offset their salary, it…

Anecdotal - but I once worked for a company where the product line I built for them after acquisition was delayed by 5 months because that's how long it took to get the hardware ordered and installed in the datacenter. Getting it up on AWS would have been a days work, maybe two.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#80

Post by oftenwrong »

wongarsu wrote: post #37
tgv wrote: post #8

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…

In small companies, cloud also provides the ability to work around technical debt and to reduce risk.

For example, I have seen several cases where poorly designed systems that unexpectedly used too much memory, and there was no time to fix it, so the company increased the memory on all instances with a few clicks. When you need to do this immediately to avoid a botched release that has already been called "successful" and announced as such to stakeholders, that is a capability that saves the day.

An example of de-risking is using a cloud filesystem like EFS to provide a pseudo-infinite volume. No risk of an outage due to an unexpectedly full disk.

Another example would be using a managed database system like RDS vs self-managing the same RDBMS: using the managed version saves on labor and reduces risk for things like upgrades. What would ordinarily be a significant effort for a small company becomes automatic, and RDS includes various sanity checks to help prevent you from making mistakes.

The reality of the industry is that many companies are just trying to hit the next milestone of their business by a deadline, and the cloud can help despite the downsides.

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