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I work with small businesses, and 90% of the time, they are better served by running a few VMs in a 1U Xeon-powered rackmount Synology or the like. Does it hav

I work with small businesses, and 90% of the time, they are better served by running a few VMs in a 1U Xeon-powered rackmount Synology or the like. Does it have a lot of compute power? No. Is it dirt-simple to admin, and have enough horsepower to do the simple things like run a QuickBooks server on a Windows VM, Fileshare on another, test on a third, etc that is all they usually need? Absolutely! It isn't uncommon at all that I make my initial IT inventory at a new client's business and find that they are spending hundreds to thousands/month unnecessarily in overblown costs, and AWS is a primary driver of that. A few kilobucks in to owned hardware, and the problem is essentially solved for a few years, and paid for in a few months. Everybody wins.

jariel 6y ago
"Is it dirt-simple to admin," Often it's not though. It's a pain to admin for someone who knows nothing about it, and it's also a pain to have to do anything at all! The power of the cloud for smaller shops is that the don't have to know what Synology is, or even give it a thought. That you click point-click and set up an EC2 with some S3 and get rid of most admin knowledge/know-how is like magic. That's the best reason to use it, even it costs 1-3x as much. Once there is A) stability and predictability in requirements and B) sufficient scale - then - we can hire smart people such as yourself who know better, to set up something relatively simple, that will be relatively low maintenance (i.e. whatever you bill) and save some $. Think Development vs. Operations cost. If in dev, we have to wait for, mess with, configure things, it's very expensive, delays etc. and we don't want that. Once there's enough predictability to determine 'unit cost' on the services side ... then you can 'cut costs' by moving to a slow-changing, custom solution, that is hopefully 'simple', as you say.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Even for that kind of small-scale business: what happens when that server has hardware trouble? Are they testing their backups regularly? Something like Heroku might cost them much more in an average month, but it eliminates a huge range of worst case scenarios.
    - Baeocystin 6y ago
      They have a contract with an IT professional to handle that sort of thing for them, same as they would have a contract with someone who uses Heroku or Amazon to fill their IT needs if they were using those servers instead.
      - lmm 6y ago
        If they've got an in-house sysadmin, you can get a lot of PaaS time for that price. If they've got an agency tasked with looking after their servers, in my experience that's not a great situation; you might get a little more personal attention than you would from a PaaS vendor, but you're always a client rather than a colleague, and you're pretty much paying for the same product that a PaaS would sell you; they might be cheaper, but the worst-case downtime is much longer. If you're outsourcing the whole package of software development and deployment then it's not really your problem any more. But in my experience a surprisingly large number of companies - especially those "family business" sized ones - fit into that window where a handful of in-house developers make sense, but an in-house sysadmin doesn't; sometimes they'll get lucky and one of those developers is happy being a part-time sysadmin, but if not then a PaaS can be a good tradeoff, even if on a per-unit basis it looks expensive.
        Baeocystin 6y ago
        Helping companies deal with that gap is what I do in a nutshell. It's rather enjoyable- I work directly with the owners to help develop a good IT/Data management plan, then offer monthly service/retainer contracts for the rest of it. No overhead of an agency to account for, so it's cheaper for them, good income for me.

jariel 6y ago

"Is it dirt-simple to admin," Often it's not though. It's a pain to admin for someone who knows nothing about it, and it's also a pain to have to do anything at all! The power of the cloud for smaller shops is that the don't have to know what Synology is, or even give it a thought. That you click point-click and set up an EC2 with some S3 and get rid of most admin knowledge/know-how is like magic. That's the best reason to use it, even it costs 1-3x as much. Once there is A) stability and predictability in requirements and B) sufficient scale - then - we can hire smart people such as yourself who know better, to set up something relatively simple, that will be relatively low maintenance (i.e. whatever you bill) and save some $. Think Development vs. Operations cost. If in dev, we have to wait for, mess with, configure things, it's very expensive, delays etc. and we don't want that. Once there's enough predictability to determine 'unit cost' on the services side ... then you can 'cut costs' by moving to a slow-changing, custom solution, that is hopefully 'simple', as you say.

Baeocystin 6y ago
The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.
- lmm 6y ago
  Even for that kind of small-scale business: what happens when that server has hardware trouble? Are they testing their backups regularly? Something like Heroku might cost them much more in an average month, but it eliminates a huge range of worst case scenarios.
  - Baeocystin 6y ago
    They have a contract with an IT professional to handle that sort of thing for them, same as they would have a contract with someone who uses Heroku or Amazon to fill their IT needs if they were using those servers instead.
    - lmm 6y ago
      If they've got an in-house sysadmin, you can get a lot of PaaS time for that price. If they've got an agency tasked with looking after their servers, in my experience that's not a great situation; you might get a little more personal attention than you would from a PaaS vendor, but you're always a client rather than a colleague, and you're pretty much paying for the same product that a PaaS would sell you; they might be cheaper, but the worst-case downtime is much longer. If you're outsourcing the whole package of software development and deployment then it's not really your problem any more. But in my experience a surprisingly large number of companies - especially those "family business" sized ones - fit into that window where a handful of in-house developers make sense, but an in-house sysadmin doesn't; sometimes they'll get lucky and one of those developers is happy being a part-time sysadmin, but if not then a PaaS can be a good tradeoff, even if on a per-unit basis it looks expensive.
      - Baeocystin 6y ago
        Helping companies deal with that gap is what I do in a nutshell. It's rather enjoyable- I work directly with the owners to help develop a good IT/Data management plan, then offer monthly service/retainer contracts for the rest of it. No overhead of an agency to account for, so it's cheaper for them, good income for me.