6 ms·

The biggest most successful and best run organizations I've worked for have not worried about hosting their software. They're concerned with delivering value to

by kaydub 5y ago

The biggest most successful and best run organizations I've worked for have not worried about hosting their software. They're concerned with delivering value to customers and doing it quickly. The most fractured and worst run companies have been concerned with self-hosting and frankly they sympathized with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on here. But I recognize we still need people self-hosting because it drives innovation and competition. I believe there are ways of doing things well while self-hosting, but I'm not sure what those ways are.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
donmcronald 5y ago
I don't think it's a yes or no, right or wrong kind of thing. For an independent / small developer I think there's value in self hosting your tools, but I think it would be crazy to self host a customer facing app. There's scaling and redundancy that you can take advantage that you could never come close to hosting on your own. However, for tooling like VCS and CI, I think maintaining control is extra important when you don't have any negotiating power. For mid-sized companies where you're paying someone to maintain things, whether that's an employee or a 3rd party, I think you need to assess your tools in terms of your negotiating power and how important it is to maintain control of everything. What if GitHub bans you? I don't think I'd try to self host a customer facing app at this scale either. I think you can be short-term successful by throwing caution to the wind and using every shortcut available, but will the first to market advantage be enough to offset the price competition of people that aren't locked in to some proprietary API gateway or WAF? For example, what if I take extra time to build on OpenFaaS and you build on AWS everything. Who wins long term? You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors. Or is the idea of switching hosting vendors detached from reality at this point? Is hosting cost so negligible it doesn't matter? All I know is that everything looks crazy expensive from where I am.
- kaydub 5y ago
  > What if GitHub bans you? This is one of those things that I was talking about them sympathizing with. It's unrealistic. If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing. > You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors. Okay, but AWS isn't expensive as it is. If you build to the way these resources are meant to be built you can seriously minimize your costs. I've seen plenty of lift and shifted apps get their costs dramatically reduced once redesigned in a "cloud native" architecture. The lift and shifted design was in the thousands of dollars a month. Rebuilding for AWS resources brought our costs to almost literally nothing on this same app. I'm talking $5,000 a month to $5 per month. So I have a hard time following the premise that you'll do it cheaper with an on-prem or self-managed system.
  - smashedtoatoms 5y ago
    Why is this getting downvoted?
    - anjbe 5y ago
      Probably for this line: > If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing. That’s a sentiment popular among Big Tech types (such as Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”), and distinctly unpopular among those who consider the cloud providers’ decisionmaking arbitrary, capricious, or dangerous.
      - rnotaro 5y ago
        Exactly. I had to migrate a legal canadian gun business website from Shopify to Magento because Shopify changed their policies years ago. There's still some topics that are taboo and that some businesses refuses to touch.
        kaydub 5y ago
novok 5y ago
I agree, when my company moved from self hosted mattermost to slack, it was a definite productivity boost.
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  Was the Mattermost instance badly managed? Because for us it was different. We got rid of Slack and decided to just use basic Google Chat we already had with Google mail. It was definitely a productivity boost and insanely decreased the number of times people messages each other. It was helpful. So what, in your case, it had to with self hosting? Or did you mean it was just the magical effect of Slack being Slack?
  - novok 5y ago
    There was a lot of frictional jank related to mattermost that just made it less smooth to use and more annoying, with the occasional missed notification and so on. Slack has a lot more product thought and nice features that keep on getting added. Our competency is not managing mattermost, it's doing what the company is made to do. If you want to reduce communication, well that is a different thing altogether and you can choose if you want chatroom software for your company or not.
    - dijit 5y ago
      > Our competency is not managing mattermost, it's doing what the company is made to do. The thing though; is that this argument can be used to outsource everything. Office space, HR, recruitment, even making coffee. At some point the externality puts restrictions on your maneuverability, in the case of office space it's because you might not be able to just run a few power cables somewhere, for HR (imagining a scenario where it's outsourced) there's limitations on speed, or in the worst cases limitations on how you can even interface with the HR department. Making coffee is one of the cheapest things you can do, outsourcing it may mean, though, that you lose choice of what beans you have, or what types of milks you want to stock, and there's a premium on the price because another company wants to make a profit supplying this service. This is a contrived example, but overall my point is: there are times that in-sourcing your tools actually gives you the time and freedom later. It's a gamble you make.
graton 5y ago
> The most fractured and worst run companies have been concerned with self-hosting and frankly they sympathized with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on here. Self-hosted organizations that I think of off the top of my head are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Backblaze, Microsoft, Stack Overflow, and possibly Wal-Mart & CloudFlare.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  …and Dropbox. They moved everything including the hardware and the data in house, and next year they’ve doubled the provided storage (to 1TB) with no additional cost. Lastly, they’ve doubled the storage to 2TB and added some features for $20 more.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mehdix 5y ago
As a person who selfhost a lot, I'd guess the advice in the article targets individual and communities first and foremost, not commercial entities.

by kaydub 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

donmcronald 5y ago

I don't think it's a yes or no, right or wrong kind of thing. For an independent / small developer I think there's value in self hosting your tools, but I think it would be crazy to self host a customer facing app. There's scaling and redundancy that you can take advantage that you could never come close to hosting on your own. However, for tooling like VCS and CI, I think maintaining control is extra important when you don't have any negotiating power. For mid-sized companies where you're paying someone to maintain things, whether that's an employee or a 3rd party, I think you need to assess your tools in terms of your negotiating power and how important it is to maintain control of everything. What if GitHub bans you? I don't think I'd try to self host a customer facing app at this scale either. I think you can be short-term successful by throwing caution to the wind and using every shortcut available, but will the first to market advantage be enough to offset the price competition of people that aren't locked in to some proprietary API gateway or WAF? For example, what if I take extra time to build on OpenFaaS and you build on AWS everything. Who wins long term? You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors. Or is the idea of switching hosting vendors detached from reality at this point? Is hosting cost so negligible it doesn't matter? All I know is that everything looks crazy expensive from where I am.

kaydub 5y ago
> What if GitHub bans you? This is one of those things that I was talking about them sympathizing with. It's unrealistic. If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing. > You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors. Okay, but AWS isn't expensive as it is. If you build to the way these resources are meant to be built you can seriously minimize your costs. I've seen plenty of lift and shifted apps get their costs dramatically reduced once redesigned in a "cloud native" architecture. The lift and shifted design was in the thousands of dollars a month. Rebuilding for AWS resources brought our costs to almost literally nothing on this same app. I'm talking $5,000 a month to $5 per month. So I have a hard time following the premise that you'll do it cheaper with an on-prem or self-managed system.
- smashedtoatoms 5y ago
  Why is this getting downvoted?
  - anjbe 5y ago
    Probably for this line: > If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing. That’s a sentiment popular among Big Tech types (such as Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”), and distinctly unpopular among those who consider the cloud providers’ decisionmaking arbitrary, capricious, or dangerous.
    - rnotaro 5y ago
      Exactly. I had to migrate a legal canadian gun business website from Shopify to Magento because Shopify changed their policies years ago. There's still some topics that are taboo and that some businesses refuses to touch.
      - kaydub 5y ago

novok 5y ago

I agree, when my company moved from self hosted mattermost to slack, it was a definite productivity boost.

crossroadsguy 5y ago
Was the Mattermost instance badly managed? Because for us it was different. We got rid of Slack and decided to just use basic Google Chat we already had with Google mail. It was definitely a productivity boost and insanely decreased the number of times people messages each other. It was helpful. So what, in your case, it had to with self hosting? Or did you mean it was just the magical effect of Slack being Slack?
- novok 5y ago
  There was a lot of frictional jank related to mattermost that just made it less smooth to use and more annoying, with the occasional missed notification and so on. Slack has a lot more product thought and nice features that keep on getting added. Our competency is not managing mattermost, it's doing what the company is made to do. If you want to reduce communication, well that is a different thing altogether and you can choose if you want chatroom software for your company or not.
  - dijit 5y ago
    > Our competency is not managing mattermost, it's doing what the company is made to do. The thing though; is that this argument can be used to outsource everything. Office space, HR, recruitment, even making coffee. At some point the externality puts restrictions on your maneuverability, in the case of office space it's because you might not be able to just run a few power cables somewhere, for HR (imagining a scenario where it's outsourced) there's limitations on speed, or in the worst cases limitations on how you can even interface with the HR department. Making coffee is one of the cheapest things you can do, outsourcing it may mean, though, that you lose choice of what beans you have, or what types of milks you want to stock, and there's a premium on the price because another company wants to make a profit supplying this service. This is a contrived example, but overall my point is: there are times that in-sourcing your tools actually gives you the time and freedom later. It's a gamble you make.

graton 5y ago

> The most fractured and worst run companies have been concerned with self-hosting and frankly they sympathized with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on here. Self-hosted organizations that I think of off the top of my head are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Backblaze, Microsoft, Stack Overflow, and possibly Wal-Mart & CloudFlare.

bayindirh 5y ago
…and Dropbox. They moved everything including the hardware and the data in house, and next year they’ve doubled the provided storage (to 1TB) with no additional cost. Lastly, they’ve doubled the storage to 2TB and added some features for $20 more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mehdix 5y ago

As a person who selfhost a lot, I'd guess the advice in the article targets individual and communities first and foremost, not commercial entities.