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A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.): I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn

A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.): I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).

sofixa 5y ago
Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.
- ericd 5y ago
  The capital costs are very easy to make back. For us, the payback period was <1 year, and our machines provided unbeatable performance with very good transparency into issues, which made it relatively easy to track down issues. Dedicated machines are really, really powerful now, and you can do with a few what it used to take racks. I feel like the perception of “it’s too hard” or “it’s actually more expensive” is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit - all those hosted services, the cloud providers, etc. And they make it easy for individual employees to appear more productive, but in exchange for costing their companies much more in the long run, and introducing a lot of inter-service latency and complexity. Misaligned incentives. The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >...is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit..." Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.
    - kazen44 5y ago
      this happens lower down the stack too. Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.
taf2 5y ago
IMO the thing to watch for is regulations around what rules you need to follow to be compliant in how you operate your data center or physical servers. It’s very likely big tech will lobby for rules that appear to be anti big tech but actually will make it harder to operate independent from a big tech provider… think net neutrality (not saying I don’t think we need it just as an example)
qchris 5y ago
I believe this has been stated to be the core thesis behind Oxide Computer Company's business model.
pdimitar 5y ago
Currently I work in a company that's very cost-conscious about hosting. They are generous in salaries but are mercilessly practical about IT costs and the abilities of computers -- especially the latter part is something that most of the programmers today have almost completely forgot. I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine. I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that. The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems. So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems. If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in the first place?
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent -- that would also mean to invest in relations with your employees and not alienating them. Shareholders prefer to sacrifice a little more of their profit so they deal with less potential problems. And the pull of the idea that every human in the org must be an inter-changeable cog is too strong (even if that idea continues to be absurd, and always was). Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kazen44 5y ago
but this is already the case for a LOT of companies. HN seems so focused on cloud and sillicon valley that they forget there are hundreds of datacenters filled with colocated space and connectivity. Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness. Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.
simonbarker87 5y ago
Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving companies to the cloud, I predict that in 10-20 years time there will be a lot of money to be made moving them out of that same cloud. I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you
xuki 5y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing recently. If you can setup and manage an infrastructure by yourself, you have pretty good advantage in term of cost.
ksec 5y ago
>I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.
ape4 5y ago
Are any companies selling a package to make this happen. Your Own Cloud Starter kit only $1.5M
0KnowledgeGoof 5y ago
On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the inconveniences. However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers. If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.

sofixa 5y ago

Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.

pdimitar 5y ago
I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.
- FpUser 5y ago
  I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.
ericd 5y ago
The capital costs are very easy to make back. For us, the payback period was <1 year, and our machines provided unbeatable performance with very good transparency into issues, which made it relatively easy to track down issues. Dedicated machines are really, really powerful now, and you can do with a few what it used to take racks. I feel like the perception of “it’s too hard” or “it’s actually more expensive” is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit - all those hosted services, the cloud providers, etc. And they make it easy for individual employees to appear more productive, but in exchange for costing their companies much more in the long run, and introducing a lot of inter-service latency and complexity. Misaligned incentives. The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >...is subtly encouraged and reinforced by the myriad companies that stand to benefit..." Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    this happens lower down the stack too. Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.

taf2 5y ago

IMO the thing to watch for is regulations around what rules you need to follow to be compliant in how you operate your data center or physical servers. It’s very likely big tech will lobby for rules that appear to be anti big tech but actually will make it harder to operate independent from a big tech provider… think net neutrality (not saying I don’t think we need it just as an example)

qchris 5y ago

I believe this has been stated to be the core thesis behind Oxide Computer Company's business model.

pdimitar 5y ago

Currently I work in a company that's very cost-conscious about hosting. They are generous in salaries but are mercilessly practical about IT costs and the abilities of computers -- especially the latter part is something that most of the programmers today have almost completely forgot. I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine. I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that. The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems. So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems. If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in the first place?
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent -- that would also mean to invest in relations with your employees and not alienating them. Shareholders prefer to sacrifice a little more of their profit so they deal with less potential problems. And the pull of the idea that every human in the org must be an inter-changeable cog is too strong (even if that idea continues to be absurd, and always was). Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kazen44 5y ago

but this is already the case for a LOT of companies. HN seems so focused on cloud and sillicon valley that they forget there are hundreds of datacenters filled with colocated space and connectivity. Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness. Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.

simonbarker87 5y ago

Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving companies to the cloud, I predict that in 10-20 years time there will be a lot of money to be made moving them out of that same cloud. I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you

xuki 5y ago

I was thinking the exact same thing recently. If you can setup and manage an infrastructure by yourself, you have pretty good advantage in term of cost.

ksec 5y ago

>I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity https://oxide.computer https://oxide.computer But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.

ape4 5y ago

Are any companies selling a package to make this happen. Your Own Cloud Starter kit only $1.5M

0KnowledgeGoof 5y ago

On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the inconveniences. However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers. If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.