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I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics. Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple

I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics. Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple times, if you want actual HA, you need to be using multiple vendors, regardless of what that vendor provides you - whether it's bare racks or a web GUI to "push a button to make it go now". I didn't explicitly state it, but I kind of assumed you'd realise that means different vendors in different physical DCs/locations. Complaining to me that using basic VMs in a "cloud" service is more expensive, is like complaining to a duck that water is wet. No shit, EC2 is more expensive than even a regular rented VPS/VM service from a more 'traditional' hosting service, and much more expensive than either renting or owning physical gear in a rack. I didn't suggest you use EC2 or AWS at all - but just because you use self-managed services doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the one thing a "cloud" service offers which traditional VM hosting doesn't: essentially instant spin up and time usage billing. If you want to split your workload across two or three cloud providers, and run resources split such that you have just slightly more than 100% of the resources you need for regular operations, and then when (not if) one of those providers has an outage, you increase the capacity at the other provider(s) to handle the increased load it'll handle. I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I don't know what motivations each company has when deciding what technologies they should use. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.

scarface74 7y ago
I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I didn’t say that you didn’t need any I said that you didn’t need “as many”. But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP. So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive. So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being “naive”? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don’t know?
- stephenr 7y ago
  Smaller companies don't necessarily need dedicated infra people regardless. My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know. .... You're either not reading what I wrote or being deliberately obtuse. I said multiple vendors, in different DCs. The same vendor in two DCs is not as good as two different vendors in two different DCs. I didn't say the companies are naive. I said you are being naive, if you think companies haven't made bad decisions.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know. It very much does change what they need to know. You don’t need to know how to set up a database with multi region failover, load balancers, server maintenance, switches, routers, storage, firewalls, etc. Have you ever used managed services at any scale? Yes I’ve done both - hosted our own servers in house.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      A good chunk of my work is getting clients out of shit situations with "The cloud" because someone drank too much of the "Cloud means no more ops" Kool aid. For most small to medium companies, the alternative to a managed AWS service is not "lets go buy some switches". It's "let's use open source software on rented virtual machines". The "cloud" model is only useful if your staff have no idea how a database server works. If they do, it's going to make a heap of basic tasks harder (and more expensive) because you don't have access to the software itself. I'm done discussing this with you. You can make all the same arguments everyone else does when trying to justify "the cloud", and you won't convince me, because your arguments are, as usual for this type of "discussion" comparing against the most extreme alternatives. Right from the start you've declared literally no cost of being at the complete mercy of a single vendor for your entire infrastructure (and one with a history for dirty tactics to "win" a market) If that approach works for you, good for you. I, and my clients once it's bitten them, aren't willing to do that.

scarface74 7y ago

I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved. I didn’t say that you didn’t need any I said that you didn’t need “as many”. But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP. So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive. So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being “naive”? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don’t know?

stephenr 7y ago
Smaller companies don't necessarily need dedicated infra people regardless. My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know. .... You're either not reading what I wrote or being deliberately obtuse. I said multiple vendors, in different DCs. The same vendor in two DCs is not as good as two different vendors in two different DCs. I didn't say the companies are naive. I said you are being naive, if you think companies haven't made bad decisions.
- scarface74 7y ago
  My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know. It very much does change what they need to know. You don’t need to know how to set up a database with multi region failover, load balancers, server maintenance, switches, routers, storage, firewalls, etc. Have you ever used managed services at any scale? Yes I’ve done both - hosted our own servers in house.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    A good chunk of my work is getting clients out of shit situations with "The cloud" because someone drank too much of the "Cloud means no more ops" Kool aid. For most small to medium companies, the alternative to a managed AWS service is not "lets go buy some switches". It's "let's use open source software on rented virtual machines". The "cloud" model is only useful if your staff have no idea how a database server works. If they do, it's going to make a heap of basic tasks harder (and more expensive) because you don't have access to the software itself. I'm done discussing this with you. You can make all the same arguments everyone else does when trying to justify "the cloud", and you won't convince me, because your arguments are, as usual for this type of "discussion" comparing against the most extreme alternatives. Right from the start you've declared literally no cost of being at the complete mercy of a single vendor for your entire infrastructure (and one with a history for dirty tactics to "win" a market) If that approach works for you, good for you. I, and my clients once it's bitten them, aren't willing to do that.