5 ms·

> A few minutes per month is the most devops any startup would need to do in reality running their own VMs or servers, after an hour or two of setup. Right up

> A few minutes per month is the most devops any startup would need to do in reality running their own VMs or servers, after an hour or two of setup. Right up until something crashes or some hardware fails.

jiggawatts 6y ago
> Right up until something crashes or some hardware fails. Unlike the public cloud where Nothing Ever Goes Wrong (tm). There are never brownouts. There are never latency spikes. No undocumented quota limits. Documented but confusing quota limits. Unexpected performance issues caused by other customers. Forced upgrades. Forced patching. Shock bills. No siree Bob, that kind of thing just doesn't go on in the public cloud! It's all rainbows and unicorns....
- rpedela 6y ago
  You have all that DIY too, except maybe shock bills, but it's your problem to fix. Like with everything, extremes are bad and all managed or all unmanaged are both bad. My personal guideline is use off-the-shelf services if they are cheaper than DIY, including labor, or if DIY provides no competitive advantage and off-the-shelf is cheap enough. But if DIY is much cheaper or gives a competitive advantage, do it yourself.
- empthought 6y ago
  I fail to see how this supports your claim that you can get by with "a few minutes per month" of devops. In fact, it's a classic red herring. Your original claim is quite unrealistic and you'd do well to retract it. It's bad advice both for public cloud and for self-managed efforts alike.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    When I used to work for an MSP, we would sell Dell servers to rural banking groups. We supported disaster recovery and high availability deployments. Any failed component, Dell would send us a replacement in less than 24 hours.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      24? I guess it's that long because it is rural? We use Dell servers and I sleep a bit better having seen their 4hr support replace a motherboard with a bad lifecycle controller within 2 hours of the initial call. Try calling Amazon and getting that kind of response for your problems.
      - daniellarusso 6y ago
        Yeah, my closest Target store and major airport is over 2 hours away. But, yeah, that is worse-case scenario.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    But it is a few minutes per month. A properly architected application won’t depend on a single server so a hardware failure will be as unimportant as it is the serverless world.
    - empthought 6y ago
      Architecting a system properly is one of the key functions of devops. You don’t get it by investing a few minutes per month, whether public cloud or bare metal.
FpUser 6y ago
I always have standby copy deployed elsewhere. And I make it a point not deploying production until a single script could rebuild new clean system by using backed up data, configs and software packages. So for me it is no a big deal at all. Well if the hardware died I have to pay for replacement which is not fun but it is a very rare occurrence.
tluyben2 6y ago
You do not notice that either with the right setup. I also rather hire a good SA and pay 10-100x less monthly (for which I can hire an army of devops here in the eu by the way) with the risk of all hardware dying at the same time (which does not happen, not now, not in the 90s when I started hosting). Sure serverless etc has it's upsides and in that case I do use it, I just encounter close to 0 companies per year that need it or benefit from it. Aws ways benefits.
grey-area 6y ago
The choice is not only serverless or hosting on bare metal - there are a lot of options in between. You can hire VMs and have the vendor transparently deal with hardware faults for example without downtime. Running your own VMs doesn’t mean running your own hardware. The original claim is not at all unrealistic, I’ve been running a small shop with about 20 VMs without issues for years, uptime seems to me about comparable with serverless or hosted services from big players who regularly have small outages and there really is very little work involved.

jiggawatts 6y ago

> Right up until something crashes or some hardware fails. Unlike the public cloud where Nothing Ever Goes Wrong (tm). There are never brownouts. There are never latency spikes. No undocumented quota limits. Documented but confusing quota limits. Unexpected performance issues caused by other customers. Forced upgrades. Forced patching. Shock bills. No siree Bob, that kind of thing just doesn't go on in the public cloud! It's all rainbows and unicorns....

rpedela 6y ago
You have all that DIY too, except maybe shock bills, but it's your problem to fix. Like with everything, extremes are bad and all managed or all unmanaged are both bad. My personal guideline is use off-the-shelf services if they are cheaper than DIY, including labor, or if DIY provides no competitive advantage and off-the-shelf is cheap enough. But if DIY is much cheaper or gives a competitive advantage, do it yourself.
empthought 6y ago
I fail to see how this supports your claim that you can get by with "a few minutes per month" of devops. In fact, it's a classic red herring. Your original claim is quite unrealistic and you'd do well to retract it. It's bad advice both for public cloud and for self-managed efforts alike.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  When I used to work for an MSP, we would sell Dell servers to rural banking groups. We supported disaster recovery and high availability deployments. Any failed component, Dell would send us a replacement in less than 24 hours.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    24? I guess it's that long because it is rural? We use Dell servers and I sleep a bit better having seen their 4hr support replace a motherboard with a bad lifecycle controller within 2 hours of the initial call. Try calling Amazon and getting that kind of response for your problems.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      Yeah, my closest Target store and major airport is over 2 hours away. But, yeah, that is worse-case scenario.
- kortilla 6y ago
  But it is a few minutes per month. A properly architected application won’t depend on a single server so a hardware failure will be as unimportant as it is the serverless world.
  - empthought 6y ago
    Architecting a system properly is one of the key functions of devops. You don’t get it by investing a few minutes per month, whether public cloud or bare metal.

FpUser 6y ago

I always have standby copy deployed elsewhere. And I make it a point not deploying production until a single script could rebuild new clean system by using backed up data, configs and software packages. So for me it is no a big deal at all. Well if the hardware died I have to pay for replacement which is not fun but it is a very rare occurrence.

tluyben2 6y ago

You do not notice that either with the right setup. I also rather hire a good SA and pay 10-100x less monthly (for which I can hire an army of devops here in the eu by the way) with the risk of all hardware dying at the same time (which does not happen, not now, not in the 90s when I started hosting). Sure serverless etc has it's upsides and in that case I do use it, I just encounter close to 0 companies per year that need it or benefit from it. Aws ways benefits.

grey-area 6y ago

The choice is not only serverless or hosting on bare metal - there are a lot of options in between. You can hire VMs and have the vendor transparently deal with hardware faults for example without downtime. Running your own VMs doesn’t mean running your own hardware. The original claim is not at all unrealistic, I’ve been running a small shop with about 20 VMs without issues for years, uptime seems to me about comparable with serverless or hosted services from big players who regularly have small outages and there really is very little work involved.