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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#81

Post by johnklos »

jeffbee wrote: post #75
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 har…

> The problem with your claims here is they can only be right if the entire industry is experiencing mass psychosis.

What's the market share of Windows again? ;)

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#82

Post by fhd2 »

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…

I'm with you there, with stuff like fly.io, there's really no reason to worry about infrastructure.

AWS, on the other hand, seems about as time consuming and hard as using root servers. You're at a higher level of abstraction, but the complexity is about the same I'd say. At least that's my experience.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#83

Post by zosima »

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…

Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics.

This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#84

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

I have seen a common sentiment that self hosting is almost always better than cloud. What these discussions does not mention is how to effectively run your business applications on this infrastructure.

Things like identity management (AAD/IAM), provisioning and running VMs, deployments. Network side of things like VNet, DNS, securely opening ports etc. Monitoring setup across the stack. There is so much functionalities that will be required to safely expose an application externally that I can't even coherently list them out here. Are people just using Saas for everything (which I think will defeat the purpose of on-prem infra) or a competent Sys admin can handle all this to give a cloud like experience for end developers?

Can someone share their experience or share any write ups on this topic?

For more context, I worked at a very large hedge fund briefly which had a small DC worth of VERY beefy machines but absolutely no platform on top of it. Hosting application was done by copying the binaries on a particular well known machine and running npm commands and restarting nginx. Log a ticket with sys admin to create a DNS entry to point a reserve and point a internal DNS to this machine (no load balancer). Deployment was a shell script which rcp new binaries and restarts nginx. No monitoring or observability stack. There was a script which will log you into a random machine for you to run your workloads (be ready to get angry IMs from more senior quants running their workload in that random machine if your development build takes up enough resources to effect their work). I can go on and on but I think you get the idea.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#85

Post by noprocrasted »

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…

That argument makes sense for PaaS services like the ones you mention. But for bare "cloud" like AWS, I'm not convinced it is saving any effort, it's merely swapping one kind of complexity with another. Every place I've been in had full-time people messing with YAML files or doing "something" with the infrastructure - generally trying to work around the (self-inflicted) problems introduced by their cloud provider - whether it's the fact you get 2010s-era hardware or that you get nickel & dimed on absolutely arbitrary actions that have no relationship to real-world costs.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#86

Post by briHass »

The biggest win with running your own infra is disk/IO speeds, as noted here and in DHH's series on leaving cloud (https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb)

The cloud providers really kill you on IO for your VMs. Even if 'remote' SSDs are available with configurable ($$) IOPs/bandwidth limits, the size of your VM usually dictates a pitiful max IO/BW limit. In Azure, something like a 4-core 16GB RAM VM will be limited to 150MB/s across all attached disks. For most hosting tasks, you're going to hit that limit far before you max out '4 cores' of a modern CPU or 16GB of RAM.

On the other hand, if you buy a server from Dell and run your own hypervisor, you get a massive reserve of IO, especially with modern SSDs. Sure, you have to share it between your VMs, but you own all of the IO of the hardware, not some pathetic slice of it like in the cloud.

As is always said in these discussions, unless you're able to move your workload to PaaS offerings in the cloud (serverless), you're not taking advantage of what large public clouds are good at.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#87

Post by glitchc »

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…

Cloud solves one problem quite well: Geographic redundancy. It's extremely costly with on-prem.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#88

Post by noprocrasted »

jeffbee wrote: post #75
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 har…

There's however a middle-ground between run your own colocated hardware and cloud. It's called "dedicated" servers and many hosting providers (from budget bottom-of-the-barrel to "contact us" pricing) offer it.

Those take on the liability of sourcing, managing and maintaining the hardware for a flat monthly fee, and would take on such risk. If they make a bad bet purchasing hardware, you won't be on the hook for it.

This seems like a point many pro-cloud people (intentionally?) overlook.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#90

Post by sgarland »

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…

> 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.

I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected.

Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of Linux (and of course, any services which previously would have been XaaS), and that’s a vanishing trait these days. So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration, serverless (lol) architectures, etc. it probably is seen as an affront to suggest that their skill set is lacking something fundamental.

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