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With SaaS and as a business owner and operator, I see the value in a specialised company offering hosted X and charging for it. My general purpose sysadmin empl

With SaaS and as a business owner and operator, I see the value in a specialised company offering hosted X and charging for it. My general purpose sysadmin employee will never be as good at looking after whatever niche tool than the SaaS company offering it and charging me $500/mo or whatever. Even at several thousand/month (approaching thr salary of a sysadmin), the economics can work out fine as you're being more productive and the sysadmin can be working on the really custom things that are core to your business like specific CI pipelines or monitoring and optimising our own software. It's the same argument as AWS. EC2 is really expensive, but it's still usually cheaper than actually running your own hardware at the same service level as AWS can provide. Scale of operation changes things, but the vast majority of companies are small enough that spending money on SaaS and IaaS is usually better than building a local team of commodity staff doing nothing unique for the business.

jondubois 8y ago
The idea that it's difficult to self-host these open source solutions is often part of the marketing but it often isn't true. Many times, I've seen companies host their own HTTP servers but outsource their WebSocket servers even though they don't require much additional DevOps skills if they used the right open source tools. Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to integrate their backend systems more closely. Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1 person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the company operated the server themselves.
- jondubois 8y ago
  Big for-profit companies have always been marketing against open source software; before, they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality. Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to manage and scale" open source software.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    >>> they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality. It's not free, it costs money to setup and keep running. It's also often abandoned and unmaintained.

jondubois 8y ago

The idea that it's difficult to self-host these open source solutions is often part of the marketing but it often isn't true. Many times, I've seen companies host their own HTTP servers but outsource their WebSocket servers even though they don't require much additional DevOps skills if they used the right open source tools. Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to integrate their backend systems more closely. Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1 person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the company operated the server themselves.

jondubois 8y ago
Big for-profit companies have always been marketing against open source software; before, they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality. Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to manage and scale" open source software.
- user5994461 8y ago
  >>> they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality. It's not free, it costs money to setup and keep running. It's also often abandoned and unmaintained.