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Why we use our own hardware

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Re: Why we use our own hardware

#91

Post by dietr1ch »

graemep wrote: post #54
wongarsu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also CYA. If you run your own servers and something goes wrong its your fault. if its an outage at AWS its their fault. Also a huge element of follow the crowd, branding non-technical management are familiar with, and so on. I have also found some developers (front end devs, or back end devs who do not have sysadmin skills) feel cloud is the safe choice. This is very common for small companies as they may have limite…

> If its an outage at AWS its their fault.

Well, still your fault, but easy to judo the risk into clients saying supporting multi-cloud is expensive and not a priority.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#92

Post by luplex »

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…

In the public sector, cloud solves the procurement problem. You just need to go through the yearlong process once to use a cloud service, instead of for each purchase > 1000€.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#93

Post by nisa »

Love this article and I'm also running some stuff on old enterprise servers in some racks somehwere. Now over the last year I've had to dive into Azure Cloud as we have customers using this (b2b company) and I finally understood why everyone is doing cloud despite the price:

Global permissions, seamless organization and IaC. If you are Fastmail or a small startup - go buy some used dell poweredge with epycs in some Colo rack with 10Gbe transit and save tons of money.

If you are a company with tons of customers, ton's of requirements it's powerful to put each concern into a landing zone, run some bicep/terraform - have a ressource group to control costs and get savings on overall core-count and be done with it.

Assign permissions into a namespace for your employe or customer - have some back and forth about requirements and it's done. No need to sysadmin across servers. No need to check for broken disks.

I'm also blaming the hell of vmware and virtual machines for everything that is a PITA to maintain as a sysadmin but is loved because it's common knowledge. I would only do k8s on bare-metal today and skip the whole virtualization thing completly. I guess it's also these pains that are softened in the cloud.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#95

Post by sgarland »

glitchc wrote: post #87
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.

Only if you’re literally running your own datacenters, which is in no way required for the majority of companies. Colo giants like Equinix already have the infrastructure in place, with a proven track record.

If you enable Multi-AZ for RDS, your bill doubles until you cancel. If you set up two servers in two DCs, your initial bill doubles from the CapEx, and then a very small percentage of your OpEx goes up every month for the hosting. You very, very quickly make this back compared to cloud.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#96

Post by moltar »

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 is more than instances. If all you need is a bunch of boxes, then cloud is a terrible fit.

I use AWS cloud a lot, and almost never use any VMs or instances. Most instances I use are along the lines of a simple anemic box for a bastion host or some such.

I use higher level abstractions (services) to simplify solutions and outsource maintenance of these services to AWS.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#97

Post by sgarland »

anotherhue wrote: post #72
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.

The thing that frustrates me is it’s possible to know how to do both. I have worked with multiple people who are quite proficient in both areas.

Cloud has definite advantages in some circumstances, but so does self-hosting; moreover, understanding the latter makes the former much, much easier to reason about. It’s silly to limit your career options.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#98

Post by graemep »

dietr1ch wrote: post #91
graemep wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also CYA. If you run your own servers and something goes wrong its your fault. if its an outage at AWS its their fault. Also a huge element of follow the crowd, branding non-technical management are familiar with, and so on. I have also found some developers (front end devs, or back end devs who do not have sysadmin skills) feel cloud is the safe choice. This is very common for small companies as they may have limite…

> If its an outage at AWS its their fault. Well, still your fault, but easy to judo the risk into clients saying supporting multi-cloud is expensive and not a priority.

Management in many places will not even know what multi-cloud is (or even multi-region).

As Cloudstrike showed, if you follow the crowd and tick the right boxes you will not be blamed.

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#99

Post by jeffbee »

noprocrasted wrote: post #85
cpursley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - w…

In what sense is AWS "bare cloud"? S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, ECS?

Re: Why we use our own hardware

#100

Post by dietr1ch »

glitchc wrote: post #87
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.

Does it? I've seen outages around "Sorry, us-west_carolina-3 is down". AWS is particularly good at keeping you aware of their datacenters.
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