So you wanna go on prem (2016)

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #3

Is it still very common to use VMs for this, as opposed to hosting your application in Kubernetes since it's stateless anyway?

Not answering the question, but k8s doesn't entirely solve this because of the DB. If you're a SaaS provider that reached this scale, there's a good chance your architecture isn't just stuffing everything in one Postgres instance, so shipping a VM with Mongo, Postgres, Zookeeper, and Cassandra sorta makes sense.

If you'd had ample foresight, it might have been nice to have an architecture where the DB is truly abstracted away. Or not. Maintaining two backend implementations is a pain and error-prone.

Re: So you wanna go on prem (2016)

#5

Post by alexpotato » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

I always think about the PagerDuty example:

They have their own datacenters, telco infra etc b/c if Amazon, Azure or GCP goes down they want to be able to say:

"They all went down but PagerDuty alerts still went out to our clients".

In other words, there are examples where managing your own infra IN ADDITION to using cloud services is adding extra tolerance for giant failures in the tech suppliers.

Re: So you wanna go on prem (2016)

#6

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: So you wanna go on prem (2016)

#7

Post by hackerthemonkey » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

alexpotato wrote: post #5

I always think about the PagerDuty example: They have their own datacenters, telco infra etc b/c if Amazon, Azure or GCP goes down they want to be able to say: "They all went down but PagerDuty alerts still went out to our clients". In other words, there are examples where managing your own infra IN ADDITION to using cloud services is adding extra tolerance for giant failures in the tech suppliers.

Interesting. I didn’t know they did. Though can’t help but thinking that this is all going be a lot less valuable if your ovservability platform is on those mainstream cloud providers.

Re: So you wanna go on prem (2016)

#8

Post by mrngm » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

Earlier discussion in 2016, with 102 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11757669

Re: So you wanna go on prem (2016)

#9

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

alexpotato wrote: post #5

I always think about the PagerDuty example: They have their own datacenters, telco infra etc b/c if Amazon, Azure or GCP goes down they want to be able to say: "They all went down but PagerDuty alerts still went out to our clients". In other words, there are examples where managing your own infra IN ADDITION to using cloud services is adding extra tolerance for giant failures in the tech suppliers.

The PagerDuty example seems really unique to me though.

That is, the entire point of PagerDuty is to notify you if your services go down. It seems like it would be colossally stupid if PagerDuty were to say "Sorry we weren't able to notify you about your cluster on AWS going down, because we're on AWS, too!"

For other businesses, I feel like the exact opposite incentives are in play. I've seen this in practice: "Yeah, sorry boss our service is down, but there is an AWS outage, so half of the Internet is down - not much we can do about that!"