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Strongly disagree. Hand-waving the initial setup period away hides a substantial footer cost (it is quite hard to learn how to safely, properly install a large

Strongly disagree. Hand-waving the initial setup period away hides a substantial footer cost (it is quite hard to learn how to safely, properly install a large database stack, especially if you're unfamiliar with it), and a substantial ongoing cost (updates etc.) that is often eliminated or ameliorated with cloud-hosted options. And the additional work after setting it up is much greater. You have to monitor uptime/load/etc. regardless, sure, but when running your own hardware you also need to monitor uptime and load of other things as well: internet connectivity to your servers, electrical power, human access to servers/physical security and so on. Especially for a small site, those are quite expensive; their cost decreases a bit when you're running or leasing a lot of hardware, but it's still quite high.

quicksilver03 9y ago
If you have to learn how to perform a proper setup, you're a good candidate for the kind of managed services provided by a cloud-based solution. As long as you're aware that you're paying a sort of "ignorance tax" for not knowing how to do things, that's perfectly fine. While researching for https://www.thecloudhostinghandbook.com/ https://www.thecloudhostinghandbook.com/ I discovered that there are as many possible setups as there are companies: the best solution depends on what kind of assumptions the developers have materialized in the code, how much the company wants to spend, and ultimately on the world view of the people running the system.
stephenr 9y ago
Why do "cloud" advocates always jump to the extreme opposite: you manage everything yourself down to mowing the lawn in front of your own custom built DC. You can buy and colo or even rent dedicated hardware. I've never heard of a DC that didn't offer a remote hands service for hardware issues that requires a physical presence.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  If cloud advocates don’t jump to the extreme, the benefits of cloud computing quickly fall apart (there’s a reason AWS’ margins are ridiculously high).
- zbentley 9y ago
  I have managed my own DC and colo'd. Some examples of issues that occurred: - Colo: unauthorized personnel tripped over a cable, killing network to a lot of our servers. This was in a huge colo hosting facility that was home to some fortune 500 companies' servers. - Own datacenter: local internet providers both had a planned maintenance/outage on the same day. This isn't "mowing the lawn in front of your DC", this is the most basic utility after power that needs to be available for your DC to work. - Colo: hard drive failure after hours. Colo security staff wouldn't let us disassemble hardware that wasn't ours. Had to wait 6hrs for a technician to show up to pop and swap a drive (this with a 1hr incident response in our contract and the same "highly reliable" colo; we got money back per our contract, but not the customers we lost, even after apologetic/refunding communications to them). - Own datacenter, third-party NAS appliance professionally installed by a vendor: persistent performance issues and service dropouts, eventually traced to the "professional installation" being at the bottom of a rack with a large, detachable rear panel mostly covering the fan intakes for the appliance, leading to persistent throttling due to heat. - Colo (rented hardware, managed OS install): When the business started, our sysadmins/DBAs (me and one other guy) were primarily experienced with RHEL and old school init. The colo only provisioned Debian/systemd servers. We learned, but it slowed us down for a week or so. Sure, it was only an extra few minutes per task, but it added up. - Own datacenter: management needed us to move into a new server room because of an ending lease, with a hard deadline. The air conditioning installation vendor showed up two weeks late; we had no cooling at all when we needed to cut over, causing days of service interruptions and downtime. I have also managed cloud services. Some examples of issues that occurred: - Amazon's S3-gate. That sucked. When it happened, we were able to email our customers a copy of Amazon's status, and links to reporting of exactly how wide-spread the issue was. We had impact nearly identical to the colo hard-drive-failure incident above (it was the same service, migrated to AWS/S3), but we didn't lose nearly as many customers. - The DNS DDoS that affected the East Coast of the US earlier this year. Same kind of service interruption, same communication. We even got replies back from customers saying "I couldn't get to Reddit either; I figured you guys might be in the same boat". I'm not a cloud evangelist. I think that there are very good reasons to host entirely locally, or colocate/rent, or anything in between. I do, however, think that businesses, especially small ones that are not typical software-centric startups, massively and regularly underestimate both the initial and ongoing costs of running their own infrastructure. There are significant technical benefits to being cloud-hosted (these benefits also apply, only a little less potently, to fully managed hosting operations a la Rackspace), but people often miss the political and financial benefits. The political benefits are things like "our customers are less pissed because widespread issues with AWS probably affected them in other ways that day as well, so not as many people will knee-jerk blame us". The financial benefits are primarily that there are fewer moments of the "oh shit, setting these servers up ended up costing way more than we thought it would", and "we thought this would take a day to turn up; it actually took two weeks" varieties. Those things still happen with cloud services, but much less often.
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  So I'm not a cloud advocate. For the present company we use the cloud because we, as a company do not have the skills or the ability to run our own infrastructure properly. We have three physical datacenters. in terms of cost for us, its about 3-8 times more expensive, side by side AWS vs hosted tin. The problem is this; Raw metal is much, much faster and more efficient. but the tooling to make it HA, scalable and monitored >> than the cost of hosting in AWS. (specifically migrating the ~3000 instances from 6+ config systems into a homogeneous platform) Having worked for a beautifully integrated high scale (36k servers, 15pb storage) company, where everything was real steel and well monitored and automated, it makes my heart bleed paying through the nose for shitty VMs with even shittier storage. However, Having to deal with half-arsed VMware/kvm integrations is far far worse than dealing with AWS. Or worse, dealing with a shitty puppet wrapper for tungsten.
dx034 9y ago
I was talking about dedicated servers, not running your data centre. Data centres are a scale business but cheap to run at reasonable scale. Dedicated servers are significantly cheaper than cloud instances and there's not much more to monitor than for the cloud. Compared to hosted DB clusters you need someone to set it up and run it but you'd also need an AWS expert for a production cluster in the cloud.

quicksilver03 9y ago

If you have to learn how to perform a proper setup, you're a good candidate for the kind of managed services provided by a cloud-based solution. As long as you're aware that you're paying a sort of "ignorance tax" for not knowing how to do things, that's perfectly fine. While researching for https://www.thecloudhostinghandbook.com/ https://www.thecloudhostinghandbook.com/ I discovered that there are as many possible setups as there are companies: the best solution depends on what kind of assumptions the developers have materialized in the code, how much the company wants to spend, and ultimately on the world view of the people running the system.

stephenr 9y ago

Why do "cloud" advocates always jump to the extreme opposite: you manage everything yourself down to mowing the lawn in front of your own custom built DC. You can buy and colo or even rent dedicated hardware. I've never heard of a DC that didn't offer a remote hands service for hardware issues that requires a physical presence.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
If cloud advocates don’t jump to the extreme, the benefits of cloud computing quickly fall apart (there’s a reason AWS’ margins are ridiculously high).
zbentley 9y ago
I have managed my own DC and colo'd. Some examples of issues that occurred: - Colo: unauthorized personnel tripped over a cable, killing network to a lot of our servers. This was in a huge colo hosting facility that was home to some fortune 500 companies' servers. - Own datacenter: local internet providers both had a planned maintenance/outage on the same day. This isn't "mowing the lawn in front of your DC", this is the most basic utility after power that needs to be available for your DC to work. - Colo: hard drive failure after hours. Colo security staff wouldn't let us disassemble hardware that wasn't ours. Had to wait 6hrs for a technician to show up to pop and swap a drive (this with a 1hr incident response in our contract and the same "highly reliable" colo; we got money back per our contract, but not the customers we lost, even after apologetic/refunding communications to them). - Own datacenter, third-party NAS appliance professionally installed by a vendor: persistent performance issues and service dropouts, eventually traced to the "professional installation" being at the bottom of a rack with a large, detachable rear panel mostly covering the fan intakes for the appliance, leading to persistent throttling due to heat. - Colo (rented hardware, managed OS install): When the business started, our sysadmins/DBAs (me and one other guy) were primarily experienced with RHEL and old school init. The colo only provisioned Debian/systemd servers. We learned, but it slowed us down for a week or so. Sure, it was only an extra few minutes per task, but it added up. - Own datacenter: management needed us to move into a new server room because of an ending lease, with a hard deadline. The air conditioning installation vendor showed up two weeks late; we had no cooling at all when we needed to cut over, causing days of service interruptions and downtime. I have also managed cloud services. Some examples of issues that occurred: - Amazon's S3-gate. That sucked. When it happened, we were able to email our customers a copy of Amazon's status, and links to reporting of exactly how wide-spread the issue was. We had impact nearly identical to the colo hard-drive-failure incident above (it was the same service, migrated to AWS/S3), but we didn't lose nearly as many customers. - The DNS DDoS that affected the East Coast of the US earlier this year. Same kind of service interruption, same communication. We even got replies back from customers saying "I couldn't get to Reddit either; I figured you guys might be in the same boat". I'm not a cloud evangelist. I think that there are very good reasons to host entirely locally, or colocate/rent, or anything in between. I do, however, think that businesses, especially small ones that are not typical software-centric startups, massively and regularly underestimate both the initial and ongoing costs of running their own infrastructure. There are significant technical benefits to being cloud-hosted (these benefits also apply, only a little less potently, to fully managed hosting operations a la Rackspace), but people often miss the political and financial benefits. The political benefits are things like "our customers are less pissed because widespread issues with AWS probably affected them in other ways that day as well, so not as many people will knee-jerk blame us". The financial benefits are primarily that there are fewer moments of the "oh shit, setting these servers up ended up costing way more than we thought it would", and "we thought this would take a day to turn up; it actually took two weeks" varieties. Those things still happen with cloud services, but much less often.
KaiserPro 9y ago
So I'm not a cloud advocate. For the present company we use the cloud because we, as a company do not have the skills or the ability to run our own infrastructure properly. We have three physical datacenters. in terms of cost for us, its about 3-8 times more expensive, side by side AWS vs hosted tin. The problem is this; Raw metal is much, much faster and more efficient. but the tooling to make it HA, scalable and monitored >> than the cost of hosting in AWS. (specifically migrating the ~3000 instances from 6+ config systems into a homogeneous platform) Having worked for a beautifully integrated high scale (36k servers, 15pb storage) company, where everything was real steel and well monitored and automated, it makes my heart bleed paying through the nose for shitty VMs with even shittier storage. However, Having to deal with half-arsed VMware/kvm integrations is far far worse than dealing with AWS. Or worse, dealing with a shitty puppet wrapper for tungsten.

dx034 9y ago

I was talking about dedicated servers, not running your data centre. Data centres are a scale business but cheap to run at reasonable scale. Dedicated servers are significantly cheaper than cloud instances and there's not much more to monitor than for the cloud. Compared to hosted DB clusters you need someone to set it up and run it but you'd also need an AWS expert for a production cluster in the cloud.