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Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent -- that would also mean to invest in relations with your employees and not alienating them. Shareholders pre

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.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Interesting. I am not intimately familiar with the subject matter, so I will be curious then to see how the next 10 years play out.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
What about scaling down? Once you bought hardware for self hosting you are stuck with it.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  What about it? We're talking small businesses here, this will not be a warehouse full of racks worth of machines to try and sell. We're likely talking 3 to 10 PC-sized machines in a closet or storage room. You can sell those on 2nd hand market pretty quickly and even if you sell them at 30-40% loss you are extremely likely to have already paid off the other 60-70% during the machines' service time.
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    old laptop is fine then :)
- naasking 5y ago
  The costs the OP described are pretty minimal.
  - JBlue42 5y ago
    You never know. While working in an ITAM role, I've had a manager point out a line item asking why we need 30 DisplayPort cables. This was in an org with multiple sites, 2000+ employees, using dual monitor setups both in house and remote. Whether physically, or in the cloud, companies whose primary business isn't tech-related see the IT side as an annoying cost center rather than a cost of doing business in the 21st century.
kazen44 5y ago
> Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent. Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly). The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..
nthj 5y ago
AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.
colechristensen 5y ago
This isn’t it, you might not know or if you haven’t been in an environment like it. Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never. You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction. A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  I used to be a big proponent of self-hosting. The raw hardware cost makes it look like a great deal. However in my experience hardware is less than 5% of salary cost and having enough admins on hand to make your infra reliable is usually going to end up costing you more in the end.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Don't some of those salary costs transfer over to the cloud. Someone still has to manage it
    - Jensson 5y ago
      You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10. The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?
BbzzbB 5y ago
I'm curious as a hosting and cloud noob, do you have an estimate how much that would cost monthly or yearly if hosted on a cloud?
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Not really, because AWS costs aren't transparent. You can't drill down properly and even where you can, the prices are disappointingly high. It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...
Lamad123 5y ago
This selfish outsourcing culture is killing all the Gilfoyles out there!

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Interesting. I am not intimately familiar with the subject matter, so I will be curious then to see how the next 10 years play out.

AzzieElbab 5y ago

What about scaling down? Once you bought hardware for self hosting you are stuck with it.

pdimitar 5y ago
What about it? We're talking small businesses here, this will not be a warehouse full of racks worth of machines to try and sell. We're likely talking 3 to 10 PC-sized machines in a closet or storage room. You can sell those on 2nd hand market pretty quickly and even if you sell them at 30-40% loss you are extremely likely to have already paid off the other 60-70% during the machines' service time.
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  old laptop is fine then :)
naasking 5y ago
The costs the OP described are pretty minimal.
- JBlue42 5y ago
  You never know. While working in an ITAM role, I've had a manager point out a line item asking why we need 30 DisplayPort cables. This was in an org with multiple sites, 2000+ employees, using dual monitor setups both in house and remote. Whether physically, or in the cloud, companies whose primary business isn't tech-related see the IT side as an annoying cost center rather than a cost of doing business in the 21st century.

kazen44 5y ago

> Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent. Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly). The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..

nthj 5y ago

AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.

colechristensen 5y ago

This isn’t it, you might not know or if you haven’t been in an environment like it. Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never. You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction. A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).

hallway_monitor 5y ago
I used to be a big proponent of self-hosting. The raw hardware cost makes it look like a great deal. However in my experience hardware is less than 5% of salary cost and having enough admins on hand to make your infra reliable is usually going to end up costing you more in the end.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Don't some of those salary costs transfer over to the cloud. Someone still has to manage it
  - Jensson 5y ago
    You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10. The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?

BbzzbB 5y ago

I'm curious as a hosting and cloud noob, do you have an estimate how much that would cost monthly or yearly if hosted on a cloud?

pdimitar 5y ago
Not really, because AWS costs aren't transparent. You can't drill down properly and even where you can, the prices are disappointingly high. It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...

Lamad123 5y ago

This selfish outsourcing culture is killing all the Gilfoyles out there!