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All the problems you consider solved are only solved if you have the tooling from AWS/Google or half solved if you have VMWare. With physical hardware, the sys

All the problems you consider solved are only solved if you have the tooling from AWS/Google or half solved if you have VMWare. With physical hardware, the sysadmin will spend a lot of his time fighting the hardware supplier and the colo to get hardware in place and running, then reinvent the tooling. Any trip to the facility is half a day lost.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Many organizations run their own hardware successfully without the tooling I mention. There are problems, just different problems from cloud with significant cost savings realized. Why would you be fighting your hardware supplier or your colo? I have never had a hardware vendor "fight me", and only once had challenging negotiations with a colo provider. Have you never lost half a day of getting work done because Amazon's EC2 API was failing to launch new instances? I have! [1] To simply hand wave away hosting your own hardware as infeasible and more costly (especially when it's been proven to be more costly) is unproductive at best. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity... (HN search of "AWS Outage")
- user5994461 8y ago
  The cost savings have never been proven. If anything, they're proven to be miscalculated every time someones gives his numbers. Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place. DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. I've had the API down about 4 times in a year, always for specific types of instance, if I remember the count well. Never more than a few hours. It's nothing in comparison to the weeks it takes to ship and setup physical hardware.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place." There are plenty of companies with their own datacenters of hundreds or even thousands of machines. Yes, these companies usually have deep pockets and their own dedicated staff to take care of these servers. This is how it was done before AWS existed, and is likely to continue long after AWS ceases to exist.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      And that’s just the point. AWS lets you not only cut down on “dedicated” staff. You can also share a lot of the staff you do need by using a Managed Service Provider.
  - snark42 8y ago
    > DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. You need to get a Dell sales rep you deal with everytime you order. You'll get better pricing too.
  - nasalgoat 8y ago
    Funny, I managed to run a globally-dispersed on-prem system with over 300 individual physical machines (well, blades in racks) with one other guy no problem for many years. I was dealing with four different hosting providers doing remote hands and never had any issues whatsoever. About the most complicated tooling we had was Anaconda. I think I lost three hard drives in that time and all three were hotswapped with zero downtime under warranty. No other failures. And that's not an outlier - I've been doing this 25+ years and the hardware failure rate has been pretty consistently low.
    - user5994461 8y ago
ahartmetz 8y ago
Computing power on AWS costs 3x+ as much as the naively calculated cost of buying and running servers. Of course there are situations where running your own servers actually is cheaper. You are arguing the impossibility of something people are doing right now, so...?!

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Many organizations run their own hardware successfully without the tooling I mention. There are problems, just different problems from cloud with significant cost savings realized. Why would you be fighting your hardware supplier or your colo? I have never had a hardware vendor "fight me", and only once had challenging negotiations with a colo provider. Have you never lost half a day of getting work done because Amazon's EC2 API was failing to launch new instances? I have! [1] To simply hand wave away hosting your own hardware as infeasible and more costly (especially when it's been proven to be more costly) is unproductive at best. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AWS%20outage&sort=byPopularity... (HN search of "AWS Outage")

user5994461 8y ago
The cost savings have never been proven. If anything, they're proven to be miscalculated every time someones gives his numbers. Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place. DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. I've had the API down about 4 times in a year, always for specific types of instance, if I remember the count well. Never more than a few hours. It's nothing in comparison to the weeks it takes to ship and setup physical hardware.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Self hosting is doable up to 2 or 3 servers with a very few services. Beyond that it's really suffering from the lack of tooling, the lack of isolation and the lead time of weeks to get anything more in place." There are plenty of companies with their own datacenters of hundreds or even thousands of machines. Yes, these companies usually have deep pockets and their own dedicated staff to take care of these servers. This is how it was done before AWS existed, and is likely to continue long after AWS ceases to exist.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And that’s just the point. AWS lets you not only cut down on “dedicated” staff. You can also share a lot of the staff you do need by using a Managed Service Provider.
- snark42 8y ago
  > DELL wants to re verify by phone 3 times before they bill or ship anything. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I keep begging them to stop doing that. You need to get a Dell sales rep you deal with everytime you order. You'll get better pricing too.
- nasalgoat 8y ago
  Funny, I managed to run a globally-dispersed on-prem system with over 300 individual physical machines (well, blades in racks) with one other guy no problem for many years. I was dealing with four different hosting providers doing remote hands and never had any issues whatsoever. About the most complicated tooling we had was Anaconda. I think I lost three hard drives in that time and all three were hotswapped with zero downtime under warranty. No other failures. And that's not an outlier - I've been doing this 25+ years and the hardware failure rate has been pretty consistently low.
  - user5994461 8y ago

ahartmetz 8y ago

Computing power on AWS costs 3x+ as much as the naively calculated cost of buying and running servers. Of course there are situations where running your own servers actually is cheaper. You are arguing the impossibility of something people are doing right now, so...?!