5 ms·

I'll be the fly in the ointment here, the additional sand in your shorts, and say "This is why bare metal is better". Bare metal doesn't have to be VM/containe

I'll be the fly in the ointment here, the additional sand in your shorts, and say "This is why bare metal is better". Bare metal doesn't have to be VM/containerless. Roll your own. But at least in this case, you're dealing with your own issues, with things not hidden and abstracted away, and at literally 1/100th to 1/10000th the cost of AWS. And yes, that's with the hardware investment and wage costs rolled in. I feel like AWS and others created some sort of one ring, and just reeled admins in, pulling them from the wild, so that with a shortage of greybeards, people can't find those with the 'sysadmin temperament', and are therefore stuck with cloud. And it is indeed a specific temperament, to create stability, which means creating some constraint, yet to forge that constraint in the most effective way, whilst doing one's best to enable devs to work most effectively. AWS has constraints, but because it's a wall of "this is the way external corp does it", it gets far less flack than the guy that smells like onions, when he says "we can't do this safely" or "this policy must be followed". Yes, OK, this is a bit of a rant. Sorry.

jiggawatts 6y ago
Hardware has the exact same monitoring issues, worse even. The dinosaurs of the on-prem hardware world like Dell, HPE and IBM make the most atrocious systems management software that I have ever seen. Bargain basement quality at best. The cloud is eating their lunch for a reason. Everyone wants a single pane of glass, not a hundred unique and special vendor-specific consoles to manage one app. Everyone wants unified logging built-in, not Splunk on top of fifty different log formats, none of which can be easily correlated with each other. Everyone wants a unified IAM system, nobody likes to deal with expired SAML or LDAP certificates in the middle of a change. Etc, etc... Compared to having to deal with 10 different teams just to spin up a single VM and 15+ teams for a moderately complex application with HA/DR and monitoring, being able to simply click through a cloud portal is an absolute joy. It's the same thing that made VMware so popular. Nobody liked to have to get finance involved and order new kit six weeks ahead just to be able to spin up a tiny web server.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  With bare metal, you just have to roll your own monitoring. Primarily, only buy what you can work with easily. Mainly, esure raid monitoring can be scripted, and you really need not depend upon the manufacturer's horrid software (which I agree is just that). A bit of IPMI for failed power supplies, or what not. If a box dies, it dies, that's what failover is for. I don't your logging complain, you need it no matter what you do. Just use an rsyslog server, logcheck or other app, monitor for important events, done. I've never used anything off the shelf, and yet all I hear are complaints from those that do. I get how people might want to eschew the above for simple stuff, but once you start needing heavy monitoring, it's all the same ball of wax.

jiggawatts 6y ago

Hardware has the exact same monitoring issues, worse even. The dinosaurs of the on-prem hardware world like Dell, HPE and IBM make the most atrocious systems management software that I have ever seen. Bargain basement quality at best. The cloud is eating their lunch for a reason. Everyone wants a single pane of glass, not a hundred unique and special vendor-specific consoles to manage one app. Everyone wants unified logging built-in, not Splunk on top of fifty different log formats, none of which can be easily correlated with each other. Everyone wants a unified IAM system, nobody likes to deal with expired SAML or LDAP certificates in the middle of a change. Etc, etc... Compared to having to deal with 10 different teams just to spin up a single VM and 15+ teams for a moderately complex application with HA/DR and monitoring, being able to simply click through a cloud portal is an absolute joy. It's the same thing that made VMware so popular. Nobody liked to have to get finance involved and order new kit six weeks ahead just to be able to spin up a tiny web server.

bbarnett 6y ago
With bare metal, you just have to roll your own monitoring. Primarily, only buy what you can work with easily. Mainly, esure raid monitoring can be scripted, and you really need not depend upon the manufacturer's horrid software (which I agree is just that). A bit of IPMI for failed power supplies, or what not. If a box dies, it dies, that's what failover is for. I don't your logging complain, you need it no matter what you do. Just use an rsyslog server, logcheck or other app, monitor for important events, done. I've never used anything off the shelf, and yet all I hear are complaints from those that do. I get how people might want to eschew the above for simple stuff, but once you start needing heavy monitoring, it's all the same ball of wax.