5 ms·

Disagree, Consumer grade hardware is a fantastic idea because it's so bad it forces you to write robust software. Enterprise hardware is 3x the cost of consume

Disagree, Consumer grade hardware is a fantastic idea because it's so bad it forces you to write robust software. Enterprise hardware is 3x the cost of consumer hardware, but on average it's at the most twice as reliable. If your software robustness and redundancy is high enough, the total TCO will be lower and no less reliable. The real wtf with CamelCamelCamel is not that they were running consumer drives, it was they were running 3 replicas on consumer drives with what seemed to be a too heavy workload.

xfitm3 8y ago
Proper infrastructure is expensive, along with competent ops. Clearly not prioritized. If infra was neglected I would wager security is too.
- zepolen 8y ago
  Oh boy I got triggered, wall of text incoming. Competent ops being expensive wasn't part of the discussion, Good people are expensive period. In the long term, competent people provide better value. Competent ops would figure out to provide the same reliability guarantees at a lower price. Security likewise, nothing to do with it. That's just using circular logic to say using commodity hardware = bad security (wtf!?). Sofware and by extension infrastructure gets expensive because of incompetent dev/ops, who are too incompetent to implement efficient systems and use a 'hardware is cheap, throw hardware at the problem' mentality in ops. This especially shows today with the fact that we have have mobile phones with 1000x the processing power of desktops 20 years ago that are sluggish when running a simple TODO app. LET THAT SINK IN. Those same 20 year old computers running the first pentiums were running Quake 1(!). Back to ops, Google before they were "Google" were using custom built commodity hardware using a 'nodes die, deal with it' approach to software development. Obviously this pattern is a win with the popularity of k8s today / ephemeral nodes but it requires a more complicated development process. This extends to incompetent ops as well. Who are outsourcing all their work to the cloud, paying a crazy premium for it, calling it a day, whereas the competent guys are able to do it properly. Closer to the subject, Backblaze engineered a from scratch design to create a highly reliable/available/secure system based on non enterprise class storage that lets the offer storage at a fraction of existing solutions.

xfitm3 8y ago

Proper infrastructure is expensive, along with competent ops. Clearly not prioritized. If infra was neglected I would wager security is too.

zepolen 8y ago
Oh boy I got triggered, wall of text incoming. Competent ops being expensive wasn't part of the discussion, Good people are expensive period. In the long term, competent people provide better value. Competent ops would figure out to provide the same reliability guarantees at a lower price. Security likewise, nothing to do with it. That's just using circular logic to say using commodity hardware = bad security (wtf!?). Sofware and by extension infrastructure gets expensive because of incompetent dev/ops, who are too incompetent to implement efficient systems and use a 'hardware is cheap, throw hardware at the problem' mentality in ops. This especially shows today with the fact that we have have mobile phones with 1000x the processing power of desktops 20 years ago that are sluggish when running a simple TODO app. LET THAT SINK IN. Those same 20 year old computers running the first pentiums were running Quake 1(!). Back to ops, Google before they were "Google" were using custom built commodity hardware using a 'nodes die, deal with it' approach to software development. Obviously this pattern is a win with the popularity of k8s today / ephemeral nodes but it requires a more complicated development process. This extends to incompetent ops as well. Who are outsourcing all their work to the cloud, paying a crazy premium for it, calling it a day, whereas the competent guys are able to do it properly. Closer to the subject, Backblaze engineered a from scratch design to create a highly reliable/available/secure system based on non enterprise class storage that lets the offer storage at a fraction of existing solutions.