5 ms·

Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading. "Don't go to the cloud, just buy your own servers" completely ignores the rea

Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading. "Don't go to the cloud, just buy your own servers" completely ignores the reason anyone rents cloud servers in the first place. If I could easily say "I need exactly this much capacity, no more no less, with no unexpected scaling needs and no code/infrastructure changes" then I'd be sitting pretty. Now for a show of hands, how many companies does this describe? And of those companies that raised their hand, how many can say "I'm fine with just having a server in Germany" who will then go on to say "and I don't need a CDN to serve customers in other regions"? >keep running live/live setup...This is very critical Oh I didn't know it was that easy. If all you have to do to keep a server running is say "stay running, it's very critical" then of course no one needs any managed services. Outages are solved forever. Completely worthless advice from a text file written by... I'm sorry who is this person and what authority do they have?

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
so much wrong
ggg3 7y ago
not buying into aws and not having a cdn are completely different questions. I'd downvote your comment even before reaching the ad hominem attack at the end.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
A $200 DIY hardware cost (equivalent cloud price quoted as $5000 in the article) suggests that, for $4800/mo, you too can do Dev Ops yourself. For a lot of people, that proposition is a hard pass. You want enterprise-grade backups. If your availability drops, your business will lose credibility. Also, good luck finding a Dev Ops engineer for $57,600 a year.
- ElFitz 7y ago
  Not even really 57,600$. Over here, a person costs their company 1.5x the salary written in their contract (and nearly 2x their "take-home" salary). And most developed countries have something similar (more or less). So the salary we're really talking about actually is less than 40k a year. Good luck ^^'
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- gbuk2013 7y ago
  Good luck finding a Cloud Engineer for that money to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. ;) Because it’s not going to manage itself, not if you are doing anything remotely complex. And even if you are not doing complex things, DYI is only for techies, cloud or not.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    That depends on your definition of 'cloud'. If your app fits into existing PaaS models (Google App Engine, Heroku, et al) then you can dispense with the ops/devops team entirely. Yeah, they're expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as hiring.
  - derefr 7y ago
    You’ll have infrastructure deployment engineers no matter what you do. But you’ll only need infra ops staff (as opposed to application ops staff) if you’re running your own infra. There’s nobody you pay, in your own company, to sit around watching S3 or Lambda or SQS for degradation. That ops service is part of AWS’s job that you pay for through each service’s fee structure.
    - gbuk2013 7y ago
      Except, TFA talks about renting a server rather than running your own infrastructure. ;) Sure, with AWS there is less work to do (if you have the skills to set it up in the first place, or it’s £££ time) but TFA is right in that you get much worse performance per £.
- ht85 7y ago
  Comparing it to a full time job is not really fair. From my experience, doing sysadmin for a single server only takes time initially. You might spend a couple weeks full time to get everything going, but 6 months in it's probably only a couple hours a week.
macspoofing 7y ago
>Now for a show of hands, how many companies does this describe? Honestly? Lots.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Luckily my comment did not end there and I continued with several more rebuttals.
ryandrake 7y ago
I’m glad HN doesn’t have downvoting for articles. It’s probably one of the reasons we still have such a good diverse range of article topics, including controversial ones. Add downvoting and the article queue would quickly become the same groupthink-swamp that the comments section has become. One of the nice things about HN is you can still find articles that are against the grain and have topics that challenge the comments section’s “one correct opinion”.
- symmitchry 7y ago
  Incredibly ironic that your perfectly useful & reasonable reply is being downvoted.
jumpman500 7y ago
I think you’re right. But I think you and the OP are probably coming from different perspectives. Yes if you have frequent scaling issues you probably need the cloud. But a lot of companies shouldn’t have ever have scaling issues and are buying into the cloud to be hip. Just like Hadoop and other big data technologies they didn’t need in 2014. Ya just gotta know your business needs.
- notatoad 7y ago
  But how many companies are never going to have scaling issues, and also have the resources to hire a good in-house sysadmin to manage their servers? And sure, maybe you have somebody on staff who can handle the sysadmin duties now, but what if they leave? Do you still have the resources to maintain your own servers? The author's advice is good for basically one scenario: a personal hobby project run by somebody who already knows they would prefer to run their own servers instead of use a cloud host.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jumpman500 7y ago
    > But how many companies are never going to have scaling issues, and also have the resources to hire a good in-house sysadmin to manage their servers? The ones that know how hire good people. If a company can’t hold on to talent then they’ll probably fail eventually. Cloud won’t fix bad management.
    - eridius 7y ago
      You need good people before you can hire good people. If you don't already have any sysadmins on your staff, how are you supposed to identify the good sysadmin candidates from the bad ones?
      - jumpman500 7y ago
        Interviews and recommendations from other talented people in your company. Nothing is gonna be perfect. Not ever company is gonna succeed.
sandino 7y ago
I'm sorry who is this person and what authority do they have? His "homepage" is a raw directory dump with a high-contrast black background (the preferred color scheme of 10x engineers). Isn't that enough authority for you? BTW if anyone knows of more nuanced explorations of Cloud v. DIY tradeoffs -- we all know there's a tipping point in favor of the latter, somewhere -- please do share.
- freehunter 7y ago
  >more nuanced explorations of Cloud v. DIY tradeoffs 100% agree. This article goes so far as to be farcical, but that doesn't mean there isn't something worthwhile to be had in the conversation... as long as that conversation was framed appropriately. Especially around cloud value-adds like managed databases and Lambda and security technologies like CloudWatch/Trail. I'm the sole (part-time) dev-ops resource for a very small company and we (by which I mean I) DIY just about everything running on a small VPS on DigitalOcean. I run my own database and manage my own dokku and user access etc. I use S3 and have dipped my toes into Lambda but I always wonder if I'm missing out on something not using cloud technologies more heavily. I would absolutely love an analysis of what cloud technology companies SHOULD be using and at which point they become or are no longer worthwhile in favor of an alternative.
nostrademons 7y ago
I wouldn't go so far as the author when recommending tech stacks for startups or hobby projects. The main benefit of cloud providers is that you don't have to learn and pay attention to all the stuff he lists, and you can focus on building the software you want to build. But I do think he's performing a useful service in highlighting just how much you're paying for not having to hire a devops or sysadmin person. 10x performance differentials have been replicated not just by him but in other benchmarks. I remember seeing a chart when I was still working at Google and GCP was being justified that showed a graph of hard disk prices vs. S3 rates - since inception (2007-2012 at this time), S3 rates had gone down by a factor of about 2-3x, but price/GB of physical hard disk space had gone down by ~100x. Amazon is hiding all of this improvement in the physical hardware behind vCPUs and opaque billing, and it becomes pure profit to them. I'm surprised more mid-size companies - those with AWS bills in the 6-figure-per-month range - don't leave the cloud, get physical hardware, and pay some sysadmins. At that level you could easily afford them, and you probably can get old Linux greybeards cheap now that everyone thinks the job description is obsolete.
- spydum 7y ago
  because saying your business is built for and in the cloud gets you investors and street cred. further, if you are having a bad quarter, you can squeeze your infra to lower opex. If you built all onprem, you had to invest capex heavily upfront, and you can't slow down your opex very much in the bad times.
- Slartie 7y ago
  > I'm surprised more mid-size companies - those with AWS bills in the 6-figure-per-month range - don't leave the cloud, get physical hardware, and pay some sysadmins. I'm not surprised at all: that's thanks to the beauty of lock-in effects. Especially all those cloud-specific managed services make it really hard to switch, and even if you are treating the cloud as a pure VM platform, it is considerable work and risk to switch to a self-managed bare metal setup. Basically, if you don't start bare-metal (incurring having to assemble the necessary know-how to do so) you will have a hard time to get clean from the cloud drug later on, when you think you're ready to afford having the know-how. I think this aspect has been a main driver behind the linked article.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
x0x0 7y ago
I would bet the vast vast majority of aws customers are not there because of the dynamic resource scaling. Rather, they're there because aws has become the default system provider. At least for the sfbay startup. I agree, they are very expensive for what you get at any even modest scale. (Except for s3 which is absolutely amazing). However, if you want to run your own stuff, you're buying into knowing the details of how it works. eg you better understand what vacuum is for pg, and how it interacts with availability, and be willing to create backups, etc. AWS does do real work; it's just expensive.
- themattress 7y ago
  At one of my previous gigs there was a big push to get out of the colo and into the cloud, part of which because of perceived “cost savings” vs running our own hardware. I think most of it was “everyone else is moving to AWS”. All I know is we never had a $30,000 “oopsie” in the data center because a dev left a bunch of stuff running they should have shut down.
tfha 7y ago
There are many aspects of our business that are in the cloud today that I am confident do not have scaling challenges, would be just fine running out of a single VPS. We aren't going to suddenly have 20x employees one day, a lot of our infrastructure is highly predicable and stable in load and demand. Some things need instant scaling, sure. But not everything that's in the cloud does.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Scaling is not the only thing a cloud offers. And you can get a single VM from any cloud.
m463 7y ago
Some people buy cars, some people lease them, some people rent them, some people uber. I think there are valid reasons for each viewpoint.
segmondy 7y ago
The internet worked pretty well without Cloud. I reckon a good 90% of the businesses out there don't need cloud, and all that crap about capacity. The issue is that admin cost is very expensive. To get your own network pipe, have someone wire it up, setup your routers, firewall, do backups, etc. That costs tons of money. So even for a small business that can run fine of a raspberry pi, the knowledge to run onprem is so expensive that it's cheaper for them to pay $1000 a month and go to the cloud than pay network/sysadmin $50k a year.
ay 7y ago
Their point (in my interpretation) is with bare metal you can get more capacity than you need, for cheaper. With some cloudflare-ing you could quite easily get away with a single origin server in Germany, too. The latency from a rails app is probably higher anyway. My anecdata with hetzner - 1.5 decades of lightly used servers for hobby project. One power supply failure resolved in a day. They have some quirks, but. If you truly have to scale out, sure, cloud is great (sort of). But you can engineer your solution to take the benefit of both, you win.
intc 7y ago
> Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading. I have to strongly disagree with this sentiment. Thoughts which are against mainstream deserve to be visible and thus open for debate. My company for example decided to go with our own production hardware. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's doable. And very educational. =) One has to remember that running your systems on 3rd party cloud provider will not strip you from responsibility and/or software maintenance cycle which usually presents most of the "human workload". Their nines are not yours. According to my experience with two reliable machines (redundant PSU's etc) one can create a very reliable service platform. Using correct kind of management tools of course is essential. RAID disk system and a reliable backup arrangement are essential too. We used Ganeti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganeti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganeti) in our 1st generation setup. The next generation will use our own manager (Deux).
adito 7y ago
> Completely worthless advice from a text file written by... I'm sorry who is this person and what authority do they have? I know you hate their opinion, but also attacking the character is kinda unnecessary. Can we just not?
- rolph 7y ago
  the OP is the person who wrote the blog. or zulgan on HN
rolph 7y ago
RE: >> I'm sorry who is this person<< https://github.com/jackdoe/txt.black/#start-of-content https://github.com/jackdoe/txt.black/#start-of-content https://txt.black/~jack/ https://txt.black/~jack/ In other words this is the OP "zulgan" user: zulgan created: July 11, 2018 karma: 530 about: https://scrambled-eggs.xyz https://scrambled-eggs.xyz https://baxx.dev https://baxx.dev https://github.com/jackdoe https://github.com/jackdoe

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

so much wrong

ggg3 7y ago

not buying into aws and not having a cdn are completely different questions. I'd downvote your comment even before reaching the ad hominem attack at the end.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

A $200 DIY hardware cost (equivalent cloud price quoted as $5000 in the article) suggests that, for $4800/mo, you too can do Dev Ops yourself. For a lot of people, that proposition is a hard pass. You want enterprise-grade backups. If your availability drops, your business will lose credibility. Also, good luck finding a Dev Ops engineer for $57,600 a year.

ElFitz 7y ago
Not even really 57,600$. Over here, a person costs their company 1.5x the salary written in their contract (and nearly 2x their "take-home" salary). And most developed countries have something similar (more or less). So the salary we're really talking about actually is less than 40k a year. Good luck ^^'
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gbuk2013 7y ago
Good luck finding a Cloud Engineer for that money to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. ;) Because it’s not going to manage itself, not if you are doing anything remotely complex. And even if you are not doing complex things, DYI is only for techies, cloud or not.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  That depends on your definition of 'cloud'. If your app fits into existing PaaS models (Google App Engine, Heroku, et al) then you can dispense with the ops/devops team entirely. Yeah, they're expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as hiring.
- derefr 7y ago
  You’ll have infrastructure deployment engineers no matter what you do. But you’ll only need infra ops staff (as opposed to application ops staff) if you’re running your own infra. There’s nobody you pay, in your own company, to sit around watching S3 or Lambda or SQS for degradation. That ops service is part of AWS’s job that you pay for through each service’s fee structure.
  - gbuk2013 7y ago
    Except, TFA talks about renting a server rather than running your own infrastructure. ;) Sure, with AWS there is less work to do (if you have the skills to set it up in the first place, or it’s £££ time) but TFA is right in that you get much worse performance per £.
ht85 7y ago
Comparing it to a full time job is not really fair. From my experience, doing sysadmin for a single server only takes time initially. You might spend a couple weeks full time to get everything going, but 6 months in it's probably only a couple hours a week.

macspoofing 7y ago

>Now for a show of hands, how many companies does this describe? Honestly? Lots.

freehunter 7y ago
Luckily my comment did not end there and I continued with several more rebuttals.

ryandrake 7y ago

I’m glad HN doesn’t have downvoting for articles. It’s probably one of the reasons we still have such a good diverse range of article topics, including controversial ones. Add downvoting and the article queue would quickly become the same groupthink-swamp that the comments section has become. One of the nice things about HN is you can still find articles that are against the grain and have topics that challenge the comments section’s “one correct opinion”.

symmitchry 7y ago
Incredibly ironic that your perfectly useful & reasonable reply is being downvoted.

jumpman500 7y ago

I think you’re right. But I think you and the OP are probably coming from different perspectives. Yes if you have frequent scaling issues you probably need the cloud. But a lot of companies shouldn’t have ever have scaling issues and are buying into the cloud to be hip. Just like Hadoop and other big data technologies they didn’t need in 2014. Ya just gotta know your business needs.

notatoad 7y ago
But how many companies are never going to have scaling issues, and also have the resources to hire a good in-house sysadmin to manage their servers? And sure, maybe you have somebody on staff who can handle the sysadmin duties now, but what if they leave? Do you still have the resources to maintain your own servers? The author's advice is good for basically one scenario: a personal hobby project run by somebody who already knows they would prefer to run their own servers instead of use a cloud host.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jumpman500 7y ago
  > But how many companies are never going to have scaling issues, and also have the resources to hire a good in-house sysadmin to manage their servers? The ones that know how hire good people. If a company can’t hold on to talent then they’ll probably fail eventually. Cloud won’t fix bad management.
  - eridius 7y ago
    You need good people before you can hire good people. If you don't already have any sysadmins on your staff, how are you supposed to identify the good sysadmin candidates from the bad ones?
    - jumpman500 7y ago
      Interviews and recommendations from other talented people in your company. Nothing is gonna be perfect. Not ever company is gonna succeed.

sandino 7y ago

I'm sorry who is this person and what authority do they have? His "homepage" is a raw directory dump with a high-contrast black background (the preferred color scheme of 10x engineers). Isn't that enough authority for you? BTW if anyone knows of more nuanced explorations of Cloud v. DIY tradeoffs -- we all know there's a tipping point in favor of the latter, somewhere -- please do share.

freehunter 7y ago
>more nuanced explorations of Cloud v. DIY tradeoffs 100% agree. This article goes so far as to be farcical, but that doesn't mean there isn't something worthwhile to be had in the conversation... as long as that conversation was framed appropriately. Especially around cloud value-adds like managed databases and Lambda and security technologies like CloudWatch/Trail. I'm the sole (part-time) dev-ops resource for a very small company and we (by which I mean I) DIY just about everything running on a small VPS on DigitalOcean. I run my own database and manage my own dokku and user access etc. I use S3 and have dipped my toes into Lambda but I always wonder if I'm missing out on something not using cloud technologies more heavily. I would absolutely love an analysis of what cloud technology companies SHOULD be using and at which point they become or are no longer worthwhile in favor of an alternative.

nostrademons 7y ago

I wouldn't go so far as the author when recommending tech stacks for startups or hobby projects. The main benefit of cloud providers is that you don't have to learn and pay attention to all the stuff he lists, and you can focus on building the software you want to build. But I do think he's performing a useful service in highlighting just how much you're paying for not having to hire a devops or sysadmin person. 10x performance differentials have been replicated not just by him but in other benchmarks. I remember seeing a chart when I was still working at Google and GCP was being justified that showed a graph of hard disk prices vs. S3 rates - since inception (2007-2012 at this time), S3 rates had gone down by a factor of about 2-3x, but price/GB of physical hard disk space had gone down by ~100x. Amazon is hiding all of this improvement in the physical hardware behind vCPUs and opaque billing, and it becomes pure profit to them. I'm surprised more mid-size companies - those with AWS bills in the 6-figure-per-month range - don't leave the cloud, get physical hardware, and pay some sysadmins. At that level you could easily afford them, and you probably can get old Linux greybeards cheap now that everyone thinks the job description is obsolete.

spydum 7y ago
because saying your business is built for and in the cloud gets you investors and street cred. further, if you are having a bad quarter, you can squeeze your infra to lower opex. If you built all onprem, you had to invest capex heavily upfront, and you can't slow down your opex very much in the bad times.
Slartie 7y ago
> I'm surprised more mid-size companies - those with AWS bills in the 6-figure-per-month range - don't leave the cloud, get physical hardware, and pay some sysadmins. I'm not surprised at all: that's thanks to the beauty of lock-in effects. Especially all those cloud-specific managed services make it really hard to switch, and even if you are treating the cloud as a pure VM platform, it is considerable work and risk to switch to a self-managed bare metal setup. Basically, if you don't start bare-metal (incurring having to assemble the necessary know-how to do so) you will have a hard time to get clean from the cloud drug later on, when you think you're ready to afford having the know-how. I think this aspect has been a main driver behind the linked article.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

x0x0 7y ago

I would bet the vast vast majority of aws customers are not there because of the dynamic resource scaling. Rather, they're there because aws has become the default system provider. At least for the sfbay startup. I agree, they are very expensive for what you get at any even modest scale. (Except for s3 which is absolutely amazing). However, if you want to run your own stuff, you're buying into knowing the details of how it works. eg you better understand what vacuum is for pg, and how it interacts with availability, and be willing to create backups, etc. AWS does do real work; it's just expensive.

themattress 7y ago
At one of my previous gigs there was a big push to get out of the colo and into the cloud, part of which because of perceived “cost savings” vs running our own hardware. I think most of it was “everyone else is moving to AWS”. All I know is we never had a $30,000 “oopsie” in the data center because a dev left a bunch of stuff running they should have shut down.

tfha 7y ago

There are many aspects of our business that are in the cloud today that I am confident do not have scaling challenges, would be just fine running out of a single VPS. We aren't going to suddenly have 20x employees one day, a lot of our infrastructure is highly predicable and stable in load and demand. Some things need instant scaling, sure. But not everything that's in the cloud does.

manigandham 7y ago
Scaling is not the only thing a cloud offers. And you can get a single VM from any cloud.

m463 7y ago

Some people buy cars, some people lease them, some people rent them, some people uber. I think there are valid reasons for each viewpoint.

segmondy 7y ago

The internet worked pretty well without Cloud. I reckon a good 90% of the businesses out there don't need cloud, and all that crap about capacity. The issue is that admin cost is very expensive. To get your own network pipe, have someone wire it up, setup your routers, firewall, do backups, etc. That costs tons of money. So even for a small business that can run fine of a raspberry pi, the knowledge to run onprem is so expensive that it's cheaper for them to pay $1000 a month and go to the cloud than pay network/sysadmin $50k a year.

ay 7y ago

Their point (in my interpretation) is with bare metal you can get more capacity than you need, for cheaper. With some cloudflare-ing you could quite easily get away with a single origin server in Germany, too. The latency from a rails app is probably higher anyway. My anecdata with hetzner - 1.5 decades of lightly used servers for hobby project. One power supply failure resolved in a day. They have some quirks, but. If you truly have to scale out, sure, cloud is great (sort of). But you can engineer your solution to take the benefit of both, you win.

intc 7y ago

> Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading. I have to strongly disagree with this sentiment. Thoughts which are against mainstream deserve to be visible and thus open for debate. My company for example decided to go with our own production hardware. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's doable. And very educational. =) One has to remember that running your systems on 3rd party cloud provider will not strip you from responsibility and/or software maintenance cycle which usually presents most of the "human workload". Their nines are not yours. According to my experience with two reliable machines (redundant PSU's etc) one can create a very reliable service platform. Using correct kind of management tools of course is essential. RAID disk system and a reliable backup arrangement are essential too. We used Ganeti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganeti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganeti) in our 1st generation setup. The next generation will use our own manager (Deux).

adito 7y ago

> Completely worthless advice from a text file written by... I'm sorry who is this person and what authority do they have? I know you hate their opinion, but also attacking the character is kinda unnecessary. Can we just not?

rolph 7y ago
the OP is the person who wrote the blog. or zulgan on HN

rolph 7y ago

RE: >> I'm sorry who is this person<< https://github.com/jackdoe/txt.black/#start-of-content https://github.com/jackdoe/txt.black/#start-of-content https://txt.black/~jack/ https://txt.black/~jack/ In other words this is the OP "zulgan" user: zulgan created: July 11, 2018 karma: 530 about: https://scrambled-eggs.xyz https://scrambled-eggs.xyz https://baxx.dev https://baxx.dev https://github.com/jackdoe https://github.com/jackdoe