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> They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Man, I get this now esp with AWS services and everyone recommending

> They do not know nor often do they care initially about using a non-open, non-free thing. Man, I get this now esp with AWS services and everyone recommending how "easy" it is to x with y service, and why it we should use to too and it will magically solve all the problems… and I'm like: "no, i'm going to use this open source software that we'll have the code for and be able to tweak to do whatever we want to do and see how it all works (oh and is free to use), and unless you are going to be willing to hack around all the edge cases yourself that with y service without me getting involved at all" and then that usually works, though I suspect once I leave, the costs of running infrastructure are going to go through to roof and no one else is going to have any clue as to why that's so (but more likely, think that its impossible to have it any other way than paying to have y)… Moments like these are great opportunities for folks that just don't accept "the non-open proprietary" by default, but its only an opportunity because most choose to accept "the non-open proprietary" by default… we all have to pay for the choices we make… some just want to pay more to not have to think about things… tradeoffs.

Galanwe 6y ago
To answer on your AWS example. Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work. At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here. - Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance. - Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself - Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself - etc. With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues. Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  A small company in an EM country, I don't think infra spend will ever come close to those in the US to being within the budget without significantly affecting margins… and considering that a lot of companies in the US are funded with either massive amounts of debt and on E rounds of funding… I don't think most can afford it either… Though saying this, even at a small corp level, are still affordable proprietary solutions out there (not necessarily in AWS), but most people trend towards whats trendy…

Galanwe 6y ago

To answer on your AWS example. Honestly, it really depends on which stage of life your company is at, and the resources you can allocate to infrastructure work. At the very beginning of my company, we did exactly what you mentioned here. - Pay for a managed NAT gateway? No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance. - Pay for a managed NFS? No thanks I can do it myself - Pay for managed VPN? No thanks I can setup IPsec myself - etc. With time though, as the company starts to gain money, and the number of users increase, we switched back to more managed services. The key here is that you want to refocus your infrastructures efforts on more business centric issues. Also, most of the time, the time spent to maintain a service is exponential with its scaling. NFS is a good example here. Setting up a number of NFS shares for 5/10 users is fine. Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.

cinquemb 6y ago
A small company in an EM country, I don't think infra spend will ever come close to those in the US to being within the budget without significantly affecting margins… and considering that a lot of companies in the US are funded with either massive amounts of debt and on E rounds of funding… I don't think most can afford it either… Though saying this, even at a small corp level, are still affordable proprietary solutions out there (not necessarily in AWS), but most people trend towards whats trendy…