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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 thin

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
        But you still went with a cloud hosted solution.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> 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 We see the ”scaling” argument a lot, but honestly it's overrated for most businesses: for 95%+ percents of the businesses you can run online, the traffic you have can easily be handled by a single cheap machine running a PHP backend, as long as everything is properly set up (caching, using a CDN for media, etc). Modern computers are fast! Same for redundancy: your business is unlikely to fail because your website is down for 2h every month (heck, this even that much worse than github /s). Independent developers almost never need to care about scaling and redundancy.

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
      But you still went with a cloud hosted solution.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> 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 We see the ”scaling” argument a lot, but honestly it's overrated for most businesses: for 95%+ percents of the businesses you can run online, the traffic you have can easily be handled by a single cheap machine running a PHP backend, as long as everything is properly set up (caching, using a CDN for media, etc). Modern computers are fast! Same for redundancy: your business is unlikely to fail because your website is down for 2h every month (heck, this even that much worse than github /s). Independent developers almost never need to care about scaling and redundancy.