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There is nothing hard about running hardware. The current VM trend gives you bare metal access. the only difference is you have to plug in your machines, and yo

There is nothing hard about running hardware. The current VM trend gives you bare metal access. the only difference is you have to plug in your machines, and you get to look at them every once in a while. Really, what software dev hasn't put together a desktop PC and plugged in some Ethernet jacks? That's all you need to Colocate. Your response echos what cloud providers want everyone to think. Hardware is too hard for us, let's pay someone to do it and make 50% profit margins on us

morgante 10y ago
I'm sorry, but your comments in this thread are incredibly out of touch. It's absolutely hard to run your own hardware. There's a reason that companies which run their own hardware have entire teams devoted to it. You seem to be thinking like an engineer, not a business person. For most businesses, cloud providers offer a substantial cost savings.
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field. The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs. In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong
  - morgante 10y ago
    Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings. There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs. bare metal and bare metal came out on top, that's fine. But don't assume that other mature businesses haven't also done so. For companies with AWS bills less than $10k/m, it'd be ludicrous to even consider bare metal.
    - tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
      I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. The hype will eventually die down and we'll see some kind of equilibrium. I've been experimenting with "cloud over" where I only use cloud servers for spare capacity. With docker it's getting easier. My baseline CoLo has the same performance as a super high end AWS instance and costs a third as much after my fixed investment. I still have the cloud if my box goes down or takes a big traffic hit, but I'm not paying for a bunch of cloud servers all the time either.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      I've seen businesses move to the cloud and cost themselves millions of dollars in doing so. I'm not sure where you're coming from believing that cloud always offers a massive savings. It's possible that in some circumstances, cloud will be cheaper, but I actually think that more often than not, it's more expensive. It's ludicrous that you suggest that anyone who is not willing to dive head-first into 100% cloud everything should be fired. The cloud has a place, but there's no reason that cloud should be the only option, as you appear to suggest.
      - morgante 10y ago
        I have not once said that cloud is the only option. You're arguing with a straw man. If you're spending millions on infrastructure, you should absolutely do a rigorous analysis of whether the cloud is better or worse.
        cookiecaper 10y ago
        Yeah, it's not a direct quote. However, that is how I interpret the sentiment that those who fight the cloud will be fired. You suggest that's an unfair interpretation? You can say "cloud may not be the only option" all you want, but "those who oppose cloud will be fired" ensures that somehow, everyone in your organization will believe the cloud to be a supremely good option. :)
        morgante 10y ago
bdamm 10y ago
As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy. Plugging in 150 machines is significantly more challenging. Providing disaster response, backups, stable power, and VLANs to secure services, quickly ratchets up the cost. And nobody wants to pay one engineer per machine to babysit one machine, x 150. That wouldn't even be a good idea, because engineers get bored and start mucking with stuff that needs to be left alone. Data center administration is a first class professional grouping. Software engineers who don't know that are a real hazard to any business.
- user5994461 10y ago
  > As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy. Till you're the guy in your 20 people startup who has to do it and crawl around the racks with 100kg of equipment to assemble, cable and power up everything.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  First, most of the time it's not a question of paying someone to run an entire data center, but rather some racks in someone else's data center. The data center has data center staff who handle a lot of this. It's unfair to pretend that going bare metal entails starting with an empty plot of land and building/managing a whole data center. While that may be the case for the largest companies, even moderately-sized companies won't do that. When you're a business, you have to pay people to handle hardware no matter what. The question is not whether you need to pay someone to administer the hardware -- the question is who you are going to pay. It can be an employee, contractor, or third-party service company like AWS or remote hands at a colo. I've seen multiple companies move to cloud merely because they were annoyed at having to go down to the rack to deal with hardware, often making oblique justifications about difficulty when they really meant that they don't like driving down to the colocation center. Those companies have spent millions more paying AWS than they would've if they just hired a couple of hardware jockeys. The argument basically becomes a question of whether you know how to hire someone who knows how to deal with hardware. If you don't, it's better to go with Amazon even though they're going to rake you over the coals cost-wise. If you do, then practically speaking, the differences should be small. Your hardware people will automatically fix the hardware issues just like Amazon's hardware people. The bulk of the work of running servers is at the OS admin level, which is still the customer's responsibility with cloud servers. These arguments about difficulty of administration would work for something like Heroku, but they don't work for Amazon.
throwtotheway 10y ago
You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it. Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I make sure not to touch anything running production sites
  - mynameisvlad 10y ago
    > You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to. Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more likely to happen when you run your own bare metal if you don't pump sufficient time and resources into it, than at the company that has hired thousands of engineers and ops people specifically to provide these services.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      This belief is the problem. Most cloud services are not automatically redundant. They have stuff that will allow you to make your stuff redundant if you know how to architect, configure, and deploy it, but you don't get these benefits just by becoming an AWS customer. You have to know how to set up an ELB just the same as you have to know how to set up haproxy on bare metal. Is it easier to configure an ELB than a haproxy instance? Probably, but it's not that much harder, and configuration is mostly a one-time cost. Pay someone on staff to spend a couple of hours testing and configuring haproxy or pay 3x more than you should every month to rent VMs on Amazon? Which one is cheaper over "the long term"? All you're doing is renting some space in a server. The configuration is still mostly up to the user. Hardware requires maintenance, yes, but people are really hamming up both the frequency and difficulty of hardware maintenance.

morgante 10y ago

I'm sorry, but your comments in this thread are incredibly out of touch. It's absolutely hard to run your own hardware. There's a reason that companies which run their own hardware have entire teams devoted to it. You seem to be thinking like an engineer, not a business person. For most businesses, cloud providers offer a substantial cost savings.

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field. The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs. In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong
- morgante 10y ago
  Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings. There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs. bare metal and bare metal came out on top, that's fine. But don't assume that other mature businesses haven't also done so. For companies with AWS bills less than $10k/m, it'd be ludicrous to even consider bare metal.
  - tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
    I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. The hype will eventually die down and we'll see some kind of equilibrium. I've been experimenting with "cloud over" where I only use cloud servers for spare capacity. With docker it's getting easier. My baseline CoLo has the same performance as a super high end AWS instance and costs a third as much after my fixed investment. I still have the cloud if my box goes down or takes a big traffic hit, but I'm not paying for a bunch of cloud servers all the time either.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I've seen businesses move to the cloud and cost themselves millions of dollars in doing so. I'm not sure where you're coming from believing that cloud always offers a massive savings. It's possible that in some circumstances, cloud will be cheaper, but I actually think that more often than not, it's more expensive. It's ludicrous that you suggest that anyone who is not willing to dive head-first into 100% cloud everything should be fired. The cloud has a place, but there's no reason that cloud should be the only option, as you appear to suggest.
    - morgante 10y ago
      I have not once said that cloud is the only option. You're arguing with a straw man. If you're spending millions on infrastructure, you should absolutely do a rigorous analysis of whether the cloud is better or worse.
      - cookiecaper 10y ago
        Yeah, it's not a direct quote. However, that is how I interpret the sentiment that those who fight the cloud will be fired. You suggest that's an unfair interpretation? You can say "cloud may not be the only option" all you want, but "those who oppose cloud will be fired" ensures that somehow, everyone in your organization will believe the cloud to be a supremely good option. :)
        morgante 10y ago

bdamm 10y ago

As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy. Plugging in 150 machines is significantly more challenging. Providing disaster response, backups, stable power, and VLANs to secure services, quickly ratchets up the cost. And nobody wants to pay one engineer per machine to babysit one machine, x 150. That wouldn't even be a good idea, because engineers get bored and start mucking with stuff that needs to be left alone. Data center administration is a first class professional grouping. Software engineers who don't know that are a real hazard to any business.

user5994461 10y ago
> As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy. Till you're the guy in your 20 people startup who has to do it and crawl around the racks with 100kg of equipment to assemble, cable and power up everything.
cookiecaper 10y ago
First, most of the time it's not a question of paying someone to run an entire data center, but rather some racks in someone else's data center. The data center has data center staff who handle a lot of this. It's unfair to pretend that going bare metal entails starting with an empty plot of land and building/managing a whole data center. While that may be the case for the largest companies, even moderately-sized companies won't do that. When you're a business, you have to pay people to handle hardware no matter what. The question is not whether you need to pay someone to administer the hardware -- the question is who you are going to pay. It can be an employee, contractor, or third-party service company like AWS or remote hands at a colo. I've seen multiple companies move to cloud merely because they were annoyed at having to go down to the rack to deal with hardware, often making oblique justifications about difficulty when they really meant that they don't like driving down to the colocation center. Those companies have spent millions more paying AWS than they would've if they just hired a couple of hardware jockeys. The argument basically becomes a question of whether you know how to hire someone who knows how to deal with hardware. If you don't, it's better to go with Amazon even though they're going to rake you over the coals cost-wise. If you do, then practically speaking, the differences should be small. Your hardware people will automatically fix the hardware issues just like Amazon's hardware people. The bulk of the work of running servers is at the OS admin level, which is still the customer's responsibility with cloud servers. These arguments about difficulty of administration would work for something like Heroku, but they don't work for Amazon.

throwtotheway 10y ago

You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it. Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I make sure not to touch anything running production sites
- mynameisvlad 10y ago
  > You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order. Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to. Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more likely to happen when you run your own bare metal if you don't pump sufficient time and resources into it, than at the company that has hired thousands of engineers and ops people specifically to provide these services.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    This belief is the problem. Most cloud services are not automatically redundant. They have stuff that will allow you to make your stuff redundant if you know how to architect, configure, and deploy it, but you don't get these benefits just by becoming an AWS customer. You have to know how to set up an ELB just the same as you have to know how to set up haproxy on bare metal. Is it easier to configure an ELB than a haproxy instance? Probably, but it's not that much harder, and configuration is mostly a one-time cost. Pay someone on staff to spend a couple of hours testing and configuring haproxy or pay 3x more than you should every month to rent VMs on Amazon? Which one is cheaper over "the long term"? All you're doing is renting some space in a server. The configuration is still mostly up to the user. Hardware requires maintenance, yes, but people are really hamming up both the frequency and difficulty of hardware maintenance.