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Oh, with cloud services you defiantly need devops. Without AWS you also need dedicated infrastructure, networking and hardware people as well as devops. You n

by UK-AL 11y ago

Oh, with cloud services you defiantly need devops. Without AWS you also need dedicated infrastructure, networking and hardware people as well as devops. You need people who know how to configure cisco networking gear, who understand SAN's, iSCSI, Fibrechannel, Racks, blades lots of stuff even devops people don't think about.

latch 11y ago
No. This is true for colocated, but absolutely false for dedicated.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  You are correct! If you're just colocating, you need your own people to manage your gear. Dedicated equipment is managed by the service provider. Disclaimer: Provided hosting services for ~8 years.
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    Companies that provide managed hosting for hardware tend be just as expensive as cloud providers. These comparisons tend to be, oh look you can buy the the Dell Server for cheap, and shove it in data centre and it's a lot cheaper. If you start going route where you ask the provider to do it, the charges tend to be a lot more. It usually the sort thing where you need to do a phone call before you can even get a quote.
    - latch 11y ago
      Again, this is demonstrably false. What's commonly meant by "dedicated hosting" is essentially the same service level you get from EC2 - they they care of the network and hardware, you take care of the software (1). The cost here is 2x-4x lower. In another comment, I quoted E5-2620 v3 w/64GB for $400 which is exactly this type of setup. This is offered by a company that's been in business for longer than AWS has existed and who, in web hosting circles, is well respected. You could definitely go cheaper. You could definitely go to IBM and rackspace and pay as much as EC2, sure...but there are literally thousands of providers in the US, which have been in business for over a decade that'll beat EC2/Rackspace/Softlayer by a wide margin. Some that I've personally used: WebNX (LA), NetDepot (Atlanta), ReliableSite (NY), HiVelocity (Florida). I've also done it on the cheap with OVH (both Quebec and France) and Hetzner (Germany), as well as on the expensive side with Softlayer (you can negotiate softlayer down considerably even on a small order). (1) That's disservice to dedicated hosting, because the quality of the network is often better, and you won't get termination emails from your hosting provider or noisy neighbours the way like you do on EC2.
      - UK-AL 11y ago
        Will those guys provide you with SQL Server cluster with at least 2 servers, Setup AlwaysOn, Setup failover clustering with Quorums, Optimal Disk Partition Alignment, DTC, setup subnets, ACLS to secure your cluster and lots of MSSQL Specific stuff I don't know about and then monitor it for you. Because that's what managed service is. And most ask a lot for this because of the specialists it requires. If you pay for RDS, Amazon does this for you, and it would already be well setup below the application level. They have guys monitoring it, and keeping it up. And they can do this cheap because of the benefits of scale across all their customers. If you just ask for machine than yes, that's going to be cheap. But your forgetting you need databases, Application delivery controllers, firewalls, VPN appliances. All of which may require niche vender knowledge to setup, and then they would charge a lot of consultancy fee's to design a solution for you. Amazon puts this stuff behind simple API's where you don't need to know all those vender specific skills.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        I don't mean to be rude, but Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia all run their own physical environments. Its easy to demonstrate that the cost savings you indicate in AWS don't exist. AWS helps you prototype and iterate faster. It is not cheaper.
        UK-AL 11y ago
        And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting because they were charging so much to look after it. Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia probably have very good dedicated specialists who salaries only make sense when you operate on their scale.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting. Can you provide a citation? Because AWS tools _are managed hosting_. They're just managed hosting without support (unless you're paying AWS for it on top of the service cost).
tristor 11y ago
What exactly is "DevOps" to you? I ask, because almost everyone has a different answer. I've been doing "DevOps" for more than ten years, and all of the items you listed as required skill-sets are within my capabilities and have been used at many of the places I've worked. I'd be hard pressed to call someone an ops person if they don't understand the basics of server hardware, networking, and storage. These are essential components which the system relies on, the same system you are responsible for the uptime of. I often hear things like your statements and can't help but wonder if the general quality of ops people is so bad in our industry and I just haven't encountered it, or if the reason ops people are treated so poorly in most organizations is just that developers automatically assume we don't know anything rather than asking.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  Devops for me would be things like puppet, networking(subnets, load balancing, firewalls etc) deployments, Cloud Formation templates, ARM Templates rather than directly setting up hardware. Where a dedicated networking would know specifics of certain vender. You can make career out of just knowing how to set up CISCO hardware and CISCO's embedded os. Devop's people tend to be broader than that.
  - tristor 11y ago
    All of the items you listed fall under my definition of "DevOps" as well. I loosely define it in two ways: 1) "DevOps is a philosophy, not a title" (this is mostly because of managers thinking otherwise) 2) "DevOps is about focusing on automation of systems infrastructure to improve reliability, flexibility, and security." Regarding #2, though, since my past experience includes building public clouds, my perspective does not limit "DevOps" to only utilizing public clouds. You can automate the build-out of physical hardware too. It's not really possible to automate rack n stack, but you can abstract that away through external logistics vendors that pre-rack/cable gear for you at a certain scalability point. Things like OpenStack Ironic, Dell Crowbar, Cobbler, Foreman, etc. are definitely DevOps tools, yet they are specifically focused on handling automation of physical hardware deployments. As a further example, many networking vendors now provide APIs, but even when they didn't they had SSH interfaces. It was very possible to automate the deployment of large quantities of networking gear using remote-execution tools like Ansible or even just Ruby or BASH scripts. There's no need necessarily to have a dedicated networking person. Of course, as you scale up to a certain point in physical gear, it pays to have specialization. But that's true even in the cloud, where you may need to hire a specialist to deal with your databases, a specialist to deal with complexities of geographical scale/distributed systems, a specialist to deal with complex cloud networking (VPC et al). Just because something is abstracted away into a virtual space doesn't necessarily reduce its complexity or the base skillsets required to operate that infrastructure.
beachstartup 11y ago
you don't need any of this stuff, there are providers out there that will give you all of this for a cost less than amazon's. the problem is nobody wants to do it because it's not sexy, or name brand / won't-get-fired-for-hiring-IBM.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  Well you do want it, if your running 30 million a year website off it. A little amount of downtime can cost a lot.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    talk about missing the point. it's hard to sign up to a provider nobody has ever heard of. doesn't matter if you're making 30 mil or 3 thousand dollars.

by UK-AL 11y ago

latch 11y ago

No. This is true for colocated, but absolutely false for dedicated.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
You are correct! If you're just colocating, you need your own people to manage your gear. Dedicated equipment is managed by the service provider. Disclaimer: Provided hosting services for ~8 years.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  Companies that provide managed hosting for hardware tend be just as expensive as cloud providers. These comparisons tend to be, oh look you can buy the the Dell Server for cheap, and shove it in data centre and it's a lot cheaper. If you start going route where you ask the provider to do it, the charges tend to be a lot more. It usually the sort thing where you need to do a phone call before you can even get a quote.
  - latch 11y ago
    Again, this is demonstrably false. What's commonly meant by "dedicated hosting" is essentially the same service level you get from EC2 - they they care of the network and hardware, you take care of the software (1). The cost here is 2x-4x lower. In another comment, I quoted E5-2620 v3 w/64GB for $400 which is exactly this type of setup. This is offered by a company that's been in business for longer than AWS has existed and who, in web hosting circles, is well respected. You could definitely go cheaper. You could definitely go to IBM and rackspace and pay as much as EC2, sure...but there are literally thousands of providers in the US, which have been in business for over a decade that'll beat EC2/Rackspace/Softlayer by a wide margin. Some that I've personally used: WebNX (LA), NetDepot (Atlanta), ReliableSite (NY), HiVelocity (Florida). I've also done it on the cheap with OVH (both Quebec and France) and Hetzner (Germany), as well as on the expensive side with Softlayer (you can negotiate softlayer down considerably even on a small order). (1) That's disservice to dedicated hosting, because the quality of the network is often better, and you won't get termination emails from your hosting provider or noisy neighbours the way like you do on EC2.
    - UK-AL 11y ago
      Will those guys provide you with SQL Server cluster with at least 2 servers, Setup AlwaysOn, Setup failover clustering with Quorums, Optimal Disk Partition Alignment, DTC, setup subnets, ACLS to secure your cluster and lots of MSSQL Specific stuff I don't know about and then monitor it for you. Because that's what managed service is. And most ask a lot for this because of the specialists it requires. If you pay for RDS, Amazon does this for you, and it would already be well setup below the application level. They have guys monitoring it, and keeping it up. And they can do this cheap because of the benefits of scale across all their customers. If you just ask for machine than yes, that's going to be cheap. But your forgetting you need databases, Application delivery controllers, firewalls, VPN appliances. All of which may require niche vender knowledge to setup, and then they would charge a lot of consultancy fee's to design a solution for you. Amazon puts this stuff behind simple API's where you don't need to know all those vender specific skills.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        I don't mean to be rude, but Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia all run their own physical environments. Its easy to demonstrate that the cost savings you indicate in AWS don't exist. AWS helps you prototype and iterate faster. It is not cheaper.
        UK-AL 11y ago
        And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting because they were charging so much to look after it. Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia probably have very good dedicated specialists who salaries only make sense when you operate on their scale.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting. Can you provide a citation? Because AWS tools _are managed hosting_. They're just managed hosting without support (unless you're paying AWS for it on top of the service cost).

tristor 11y ago

What exactly is "DevOps" to you? I ask, because almost everyone has a different answer. I've been doing "DevOps" for more than ten years, and all of the items you listed as required skill-sets are within my capabilities and have been used at many of the places I've worked. I'd be hard pressed to call someone an ops person if they don't understand the basics of server hardware, networking, and storage. These are essential components which the system relies on, the same system you are responsible for the uptime of. I often hear things like your statements and can't help but wonder if the general quality of ops people is so bad in our industry and I just haven't encountered it, or if the reason ops people are treated so poorly in most organizations is just that developers automatically assume we don't know anything rather than asking.

UK-AL 11y ago
Devops for me would be things like puppet, networking(subnets, load balancing, firewalls etc) deployments, Cloud Formation templates, ARM Templates rather than directly setting up hardware. Where a dedicated networking would know specifics of certain vender. You can make career out of just knowing how to set up CISCO hardware and CISCO's embedded os. Devop's people tend to be broader than that.
- tristor 11y ago
  All of the items you listed fall under my definition of "DevOps" as well. I loosely define it in two ways: 1) "DevOps is a philosophy, not a title" (this is mostly because of managers thinking otherwise) 2) "DevOps is about focusing on automation of systems infrastructure to improve reliability, flexibility, and security." Regarding #2, though, since my past experience includes building public clouds, my perspective does not limit "DevOps" to only utilizing public clouds. You can automate the build-out of physical hardware too. It's not really possible to automate rack n stack, but you can abstract that away through external logistics vendors that pre-rack/cable gear for you at a certain scalability point. Things like OpenStack Ironic, Dell Crowbar, Cobbler, Foreman, etc. are definitely DevOps tools, yet they are specifically focused on handling automation of physical hardware deployments. As a further example, many networking vendors now provide APIs, but even when they didn't they had SSH interfaces. It was very possible to automate the deployment of large quantities of networking gear using remote-execution tools like Ansible or even just Ruby or BASH scripts. There's no need necessarily to have a dedicated networking person. Of course, as you scale up to a certain point in physical gear, it pays to have specialization. But that's true even in the cloud, where you may need to hire a specialist to deal with your databases, a specialist to deal with complexities of geographical scale/distributed systems, a specialist to deal with complex cloud networking (VPC et al). Just because something is abstracted away into a virtual space doesn't necessarily reduce its complexity or the base skillsets required to operate that infrastructure.

beachstartup 11y ago

you don't need any of this stuff, there are providers out there that will give you all of this for a cost less than amazon's. the problem is nobody wants to do it because it's not sexy, or name brand / won't-get-fired-for-hiring-IBM.

UK-AL 11y ago
Well you do want it, if your running 30 million a year website off it. A little amount of downtime can cost a lot.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  talk about missing the point. it's hard to sign up to a provider nobody has ever heard of. doesn't matter if you're making 30 mil or 3 thousand dollars.