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Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

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Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#2
If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud?

It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs.

Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#3

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

Find me a list of customers on cloud who got hacked, vs folks on-prem. I've got 3k+ customers, I know which one I see 99.99% of the time...

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#4
They had an expensive, fractured, hard to maintain on-prem layout. Then they moved to the cloud. And it turned out the cloud was expensive, fractured, and hard to maintain. So they're moving to on-prem.

Any bets on what's going to happen next?

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#5
I feel like even in Geico's case, once they've paid salaries for everyone who's going to need to maintain this infra they're bringing in-house they're probably not saving that much. Then again, maybe they were already paying those salaries redundantly to all the services they were spending on, e.g. managed databases.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#6

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

It's not really about cloud vs. on-prem, it's the fact that people cut corners and lack knowledge on-prem, and don't have the budgets to do anything about it.

What you're referring to is mostly about elasticity, and it's true that if you don't need it, it doesn't make sense to pay for it.

But that doesn't mean that on-prem (which almost always turns into a virtual machine shitshow with crappy network design -- which will continue as long as nobody implements things like strong IAM and Security Groups in their on-prem setups) is 'the same' as cloud but just in a physical location you control.

The inverse is also true. If you just run some VMs 'in the cloud', you're doing it wrong. Playing datacenter is just as bad as not moving away from classic virtual machines, cloud or no cloud.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#7

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

Find me a list of customers on cloud who got hacked, vs folks on-prem. I've got 3k+ customers, I know which one I see 99.99% of the time...

I guess you don't count misconfigurations. But deciding between the cloud vs local is a choice between config or admin.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#9

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

If your data center isn't large enough to need at least 5 people full time admins then you should just go cloud. With a part time person you will see downtime when a machine fails. With 1 person that person will sometimes be on vacation when a zero day takes you down. With 2 people 1 will be on vacation when the second gets sick. You end up needing at least 5 people before you have enough people that you have redundancy for humans issues and the ability to train people in whatever is the latest needed.

Of course even in the cloud you still need to apply security patches to everything. However it still saves a lot of issues and thus money in all but the largest setups.

Re: Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

#10
post #6

If you don't have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud? It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs. Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

It's not really about cloud vs. on-prem, it's the fact that people cut corners and lack knowledge on-prem, and don't have the budgets to do anything about it. What you're referring to is mostly about elasticity, and it's true that if you don't need it, it doesn't make sense to pay for it. But that doesn't mean that on-prem (which almost always turns into a virtual machine shitshow with crappy network design -- which…

So when they are setting up config files for the cloud they don't cut corners? It is insane amount of work to follow safe practices to configure your cloud.

I don't see that much difference compared to doing actual admin tasks.

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