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And this comment makes you look incredibly naive and narrow minded. Running some code on a CPU != running a startup. Great you can buy a Dell server on eBay, o

And this comment makes you look incredibly naive and narrow minded. Running some code on a CPU != running a startup. Great you can buy a Dell server on eBay, or you can build a powerful desktop, or rent a VM or get a droplet or scrape on lowendbox. These are not a secret and there is a great reason no one does this other than hobbyists and neckbeards. You do your testing and it works, then what? You have to deliver scalable reliable systems in production that require identity management, security, backups, resiliency, reliability, various networking services and a million other supporting services and all the systems that come with it. Never-mind actually scaling the application, monitoring it and all the tools, systems and processes needed to run reliable systems in production. The eBay servers provide you exactly zero of that and you've just wasted time setting up an environment that is a snowflake and doesn't represent reality. Testing on the cloud on exactly the same platform you would use for production has a lot of benefits when you look at value as limited developer time delivering value to customers and the business. Whilst the $1200 server on eBay might be cheap today, you are entirely missing the hidden cost of lost time when your team of developers costing $M/year are wasting on testing in an environment that doesn't help them find and solve production issues. You don't need many hours of wasted time or downtime to lose all of your so called cost gains. Optimising for absolute minimum cost is a fools errand that only slows down actually delivering production systems that deliver value to your customers. Please spend some time thinking bigger about the opportunity cost and value delivery of technology beyond the immediate dollars and cents - it might surprise you.

1337shadow 6y ago
Really, "a million other supporting services and all the systems that come with it" ? You get a server with SSH, then you need something expose your container stacks over HTTPS like Traefik (which auto configures), and something for alerting such as Netdata (which auto configures too!), both of which are just a single binary to configure and setup, and probably it won't take long before you have scripts to automate that like we do[0] Not only do you get amazing prices[1] but ... You get to be part of an amazing community running the world on Free Software But yeah, maybe I'm "missing the bigger picture" by "not locking myself in proprietary frameworks" [0] https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops-hacking-operations/ https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-d... [1] https://oneprovider.com/ https://oneprovider.com/
- salmonlogs 6y ago
  I'm a huge fan of open source and open standards, in fact I always push for and expect portability and avoid proprietary systems where possible. Abstractions like Kubernetes are a fantastic middle ground to provide portability across platforms whilst taking advantage of cloud provider services where they exist. The same for apps and frameworks built on open standards like Kubeflow and Apache Beam. The supporting services and systems come when you run services that require strong guarantees for reliability and resiliency, and meeting the needs of different lines of business. If I think of a mid-size company that wants to run these kind of workloads and demands minimal downtime, resilience against local disaster and minimal data loss: - Customer facing applications in a reasonable scalable manner to meet peaks and troughs of demand without needing to size of peak demand - CRM/ERP systems to manage customer data, payments, sales processes and inventory that CANNOT have corrupted or lost data - Data platforms for running reasonable scale analytics and analysis on reasonable size volumes of data (say a few Petabytes online accessible, analyse 10s of Terabytes per quer) - Capability for mid-level machine learning and access to modern acceleration hardware, up to date GPUs and maybe some NVIDIA Ampere type equipment - Tools and platforms for operations and security that can capture, store and analyse all the logs produced by all those systems, plus some half decent cyber services - network level netflow analysis, maybe IDS if you are feeling fancy, endpoint scanning and analysis, threat intelligence capabilities to correlate against all of that data - Tooling and platforms for developers - source control, artifact repositories, container registries, CI platforms like Jenkins ideally with automated security scanning integrated, CD for deployments like Spinnaker to canary and deploy your releases safely - Networking for all of that equipment, ideally private backbones, leased Ethernet or MPLS - and that all needs to be resilience, redundant and duplicated - Storage for all of the above that meets performance and cost needs, replicated, and backed up offline Yes, you can do all of that yourself! But let's be clear, buying a server on eBay is not even a fraction of 1% of the reality of running real infrastructure for real systems for real businesses. There ARE reasons why you might do this but that is increasingly the exception due to either extreme scale, regulatory and privacy requirements typically from data sovereignty or very unique hardware requirements.
  - 1337shadow 6y ago

1337shadow 6y ago

Really, "a million other supporting services and all the systems that come with it" ? You get a server with SSH, then you need something expose your container stacks over HTTPS like Traefik (which auto configures), and something for alerting such as Netdata (which auto configures too!), both of which are just a single binary to configure and setup, and probably it won't take long before you have scripts to automate that like we do[0] Not only do you get amazing prices[1] but ... You get to be part of an amazing community running the world on Free Software But yeah, maybe I'm "missing the bigger picture" by "not locking myself in proprietary frameworks" [0] https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops-hacking-operations/ https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-d... [1] https://oneprovider.com/ https://oneprovider.com/

salmonlogs 6y ago
I'm a huge fan of open source and open standards, in fact I always push for and expect portability and avoid proprietary systems where possible. Abstractions like Kubernetes are a fantastic middle ground to provide portability across platforms whilst taking advantage of cloud provider services where they exist. The same for apps and frameworks built on open standards like Kubeflow and Apache Beam. The supporting services and systems come when you run services that require strong guarantees for reliability and resiliency, and meeting the needs of different lines of business. If I think of a mid-size company that wants to run these kind of workloads and demands minimal downtime, resilience against local disaster and minimal data loss: - Customer facing applications in a reasonable scalable manner to meet peaks and troughs of demand without needing to size of peak demand - CRM/ERP systems to manage customer data, payments, sales processes and inventory that CANNOT have corrupted or lost data - Data platforms for running reasonable scale analytics and analysis on reasonable size volumes of data (say a few Petabytes online accessible, analyse 10s of Terabytes per quer) - Capability for mid-level machine learning and access to modern acceleration hardware, up to date GPUs and maybe some NVIDIA Ampere type equipment - Tools and platforms for operations and security that can capture, store and analyse all the logs produced by all those systems, plus some half decent cyber services - network level netflow analysis, maybe IDS if you are feeling fancy, endpoint scanning and analysis, threat intelligence capabilities to correlate against all of that data - Tooling and platforms for developers - source control, artifact repositories, container registries, CI platforms like Jenkins ideally with automated security scanning integrated, CD for deployments like Spinnaker to canary and deploy your releases safely - Networking for all of that equipment, ideally private backbones, leased Ethernet or MPLS - and that all needs to be resilience, redundant and duplicated - Storage for all of the above that meets performance and cost needs, replicated, and backed up offline Yes, you can do all of that yourself! But let's be clear, buying a server on eBay is not even a fraction of 1% of the reality of running real infrastructure for real systems for real businesses. There ARE reasons why you might do this but that is increasingly the exception due to either extreme scale, regulatory and privacy requirements typically from data sovereignty or very unique hardware requirements.
- 1337shadow 6y ago