5 ms·

Short answer: generally it costs more money for worse results. Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside your core competencies and/or value creati

by gav 6y ago

Short answer: generally it costs more money for worse results. Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside your core competencies and/or value creation model is a poor use of scarce resources (both capital and human—predominantly management bandwidth) and increases risk carried. To give a concrete example: imagine you need to host your source code repository. You can pay for something like Bitbucket for $6/month/user and not have to worry about it. It’s a price that scales linearly with your team size and is a tiny fraction of their total cost. Doing it in-house: you have to pay for hardware, storage, worry about backups, have somebody support it, have somebody manage the person that supports it, deal with users, find a solution to remote access, and so on. But all these miss the big cost—risk—what happens if the server dies or your office burns down? Nobody used to get fired for buying IBM, nobody now gets fired for buying a popular SaaS product. You aren’t Google, at some point scale changes the equation, but that’s a rare spot to be in.

toast0 6y ago
At my last job, we hosted our own git repo with gitolite. That doesn't give you a ticketing system of course, but it was fairly easy to administer. And it sat on a miscelanous jobs server we already needed and didn't use up too much resources. Remote access followed production norms, so no extra work there (other than a lot more people need access to git than other production servers). Maybe a few hours one time to lock down permissions for git etc, probably less fuss than getting SSO setup for a git SaaS.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Now repeat that for your mail server, your expense tracking system, your HR system, your project manager system, various collaboration software.... And what happens when that one server goes down or becomes overloaded?
  - toast0 6y ago
    Some of these are better to outsource than others. Mail probably needs more active upkeep, but you could more easily block links to reduce spear phishing if you were running it yourself. Expense tracking needs detailed knowledge of accounting to ensure only proper expenses are approved (possibly by an outside consultant) I don't even know if there are low cost software options here. HR systems (includes payroll?) is also specialized and high effort and not core competency. I've got opinions on collaboration software (why not put text files in git), but ignoring that, I don't really want to run a wiki, so sure, maybe your email provider offers something anyway. > And what happens when that one server goes down or becomes overloaded? You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully you have people who can fix production, hopefully you monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider fixes it, and you call and yell at them.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      > You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully you have people who can fix production, hopefully you monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider fixes it, and you call and yell at them. Well, in my case. I just clicked on “minimum” and increase it by 1 in my autoscaling group or I scale vertically and change the server from 2xlarge to 4xlarge. Can you get another server shipped to your colo in 5 minutes, brought online and roll over and go back to sleep? Like I did at my last job. Most of the time by the time the notification alarm woke me up, scaling has already taken place. But, depending on the service, part of “monitoring” is bringing up another server automatically when CPU usage spikes. But I think my current employer knows just a little about managing servers/services at scale. As far as I know, my current employer manages more servers than anyone else on the planet and has more experts on staff than anyone. Even that being said, we outsource a lot of the services that aren’t in our core competencies to other companies. I couldn’t say that about my previous employer who had 50 people in all.

by gav 6y ago

toast0 6y ago

At my last job, we hosted our own git repo with gitolite. That doesn't give you a ticketing system of course, but it was fairly easy to administer. And it sat on a miscelanous jobs server we already needed and didn't use up too much resources. Remote access followed production norms, so no extra work there (other than a lot more people need access to git than other production servers). Maybe a few hours one time to lock down permissions for git etc, probably less fuss than getting SSO setup for a git SaaS.

scarface74 6y ago
Now repeat that for your mail server, your expense tracking system, your HR system, your project manager system, various collaboration software.... And what happens when that one server goes down or becomes overloaded?
- toast0 6y ago
  Some of these are better to outsource than others. Mail probably needs more active upkeep, but you could more easily block links to reduce spear phishing if you were running it yourself. Expense tracking needs detailed knowledge of accounting to ensure only proper expenses are approved (possibly by an outside consultant) I don't even know if there are low cost software options here. HR systems (includes payroll?) is also specialized and high effort and not core competency. I've got opinions on collaboration software (why not put text files in git), but ignoring that, I don't really want to run a wiki, so sure, maybe your email provider offers something anyway. > And what happens when that one server goes down or becomes overloaded? You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully you have people who can fix production, hopefully you monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider fixes it, and you call and yell at them.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    > You fix it? Same like when production breaks; hopefully you have people who can fix production, hopefully you monitor your important tools. What happens when it gets overloaded and its outsourced? You hope your provider fixes it, and you call and yell at them. Well, in my case. I just clicked on “minimum” and increase it by 1 in my autoscaling group or I scale vertically and change the server from 2xlarge to 4xlarge. Can you get another server shipped to your colo in 5 minutes, brought online and roll over and go back to sleep? Like I did at my last job. Most of the time by the time the notification alarm woke me up, scaling has already taken place. But, depending on the service, part of “monitoring” is bringing up another server automatically when CPU usage spikes. But I think my current employer knows just a little about managing servers/services at scale. As far as I know, my current employer manages more servers than anyone else on the planet and has more experts on staff than anyone. Even that being said, we outsource a lot of the services that aren’t in our core competencies to other companies. I couldn’t say that about my previous employer who had 50 people in all.