6 ms·

Only the most informed and rational companies will see how and why most of this "in the cloud" thing is a bad idea. Most will accept it as a fact of life and c

Only the most informed and rational companies will see how and why most of this "in the cloud" thing is a bad idea. Most will accept it as a fact of life and continue to pay for it both directly and indirectly, as long as there's cheap money going around the cloud business can't do wrong. But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor.

Flankk 5y ago
Are you arguing that purchasing and maintaining your own servers is cheaper than using AWS? Let's hear the rationale, then.
- mac-chaffee 5y ago
  Yes, on-prem is generally cheaper in the long-run. For example, my company recently purchased $400k worth of hardware that would cost $80k/month if it was all EC2. There's amortized costs of the supporting infra (cooling, power) and ongoing maintenance/depreciation, but paying for the hardware in 5 months can't be beat.
  - Flankk 5y ago
    You forgot the salaries of the network technicians you wouldn't have otherwise. You now have to manage attacks on your infrastructure yourself. You left out bandwidth costs as well. Your servers will need to be replaced entirely every 5 years, and partially as hardware fails. It sounds like you're at sufficient scale that it makes sense. For most people, it doesn't make sense.
eterm 5y ago
On the contrary, downtime is inevitable and I think I'd rather have downtime when all my competitors do too.
- cnity 5y ago
  How about having uptime while your competitors have downtime?
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Which, given that downtime is inevitable, leads to you having downtime while all your competitors have uptime. Have fun with that…
    - teitoklien 5y ago
      If your non-cloud uptime is even 50% more then the uptime cloud offers, then you’re throughout the year, up longer then others.
    - leghifla 5y ago
      If you are 3 competitors on your market and you might lose x orders while your are down, but gain 2*x orders when the other 2 are down, you are ahead (with the same probability of going down as the others). Real world is not so easy though...
  - the_af 5y ago
    If your system integrates with any external systems or APIs, it's likely they have downtime when one of the cloud giants are down, so sometimes being up is not so relevant. If your system is up but everything you depend on is down, how useful is that? For (almost) entirely self-contained systems it can still be useful, of course. But everything wants to be interconnected to everything these days...
    - spoils19 5y ago
      That's why we proudly don't integrate with any third-parties at all, and all of our stuff is developed and hosted in-house. Even "trivial" things like email or billing.
jeremyjh 5y ago
Do you think people who manage their own data-centers never have outages?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  When they do, they at least have the ability to do something about it.
  - jasonlotito 5y ago
    No, not necessarily.
  - newaccount2021 5y ago
    Until they need to order a replacement piece of hardware and there is a three month backorder lag
  - tiahura 5y ago
    Some us remember playing Chinese fire drill and it wasn’t fun.
  - whatever10 5y ago
    Like shout at your IT and vent?
    - smarx007 5y ago
      Which may not be good for your uptime: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4
  - mac-chaffee 5y ago
    My last outage was a power outage on a sunny day that lasted slightly longer than our battery backups. Without economies of scale, installing/maintaining extra generators for a small self-managed data center is prohibitively expensive. There's always a service provider somewhere in the chain who can drop the ball.
- 5y ago
papito 5y ago
Try calling "your ops guy" during Thanksgiving or when he is sloshed in a bar when your colocation servers stop responding. No one wants this job anymore. Current technology jobs have already enough unnecessary complexity to deal with uptime as well.
- emptybottle 5y ago
  On the other hand try calling "AWS" in the same scenario. My money is on sloshed guy coming back with the faster response.
41209 5y ago
Would you rather have to fix your own data center, or wait 4 hours. AWS works 99% of the time,plus it's someone else's problem
- iso1631 5y ago
  In my industry, five nines is the starting level. You're proposing something 1,000 times worse.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    If you have to have 5 9's starting with any cloud service is pretty tough sell at this point. You can build that type of system ontop of them. But it takes a willingness to also build your own and use competing services adding even more complexity. The BYO or competing services bit is so you can keep the lights on even when the cloud eats it, not if. Part of 5 9's is planning for catastrophic failure. Things like 'what if the load balancer/router/backhaul/dns burns out, you have a spare on hand? Then what happens to services where you had them sticky?' Even then what if both the primary and secondary are out? What then? Lots of planning and making sure you know what to do when each of those cases happen. The nice bit though is many services can go down. Yeah it stings a bit (money, reputation, time, etc). But overall it is not that big of deal. But for the places where you can not go down. Tons of planning and tons of backup plans with backup plans, and a different style of producing code.
  - Edman274 5y ago
    Besides the fact that they used "99 percent" in a colloquial, informal way ... is that really how calculations like that work, or should work? I mean, if you have 99 percent availability, and 99.999 percent availability, maybe it's valid to say that the former is 1000 times worse than the other, but that could also be true by saying that 99.999 percent availability is 10,000 times worse than 99.9999999 percent availability (where a service only goes down for a third of a second in the span of a decade), and that 99.9999999 percent availability is infinity times worse than something that hasn't had an outage within whatever monitored period (since 100 percent availability is the same as ninety nine dot nine repeating availability)
Jenk 5y ago
Have you heard about the "No True Scotsman" logical fallacy?
tyingq 5y ago
>But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor. As far as I can tell, there really hasn't been an AWS outage where you couldn't have avoided issues with multi-region and some careful selection of which products you're using. Which isn't much different from what you would have to do with your own infrastructure.
stunt 5y ago
I don't use Cloud for their uptime, it's all about their managed services for me.

Flankk 5y ago

Are you arguing that purchasing and maintaining your own servers is cheaper than using AWS? Let's hear the rationale, then.

mac-chaffee 5y ago
Yes, on-prem is generally cheaper in the long-run. For example, my company recently purchased $400k worth of hardware that would cost $80k/month if it was all EC2. There's amortized costs of the supporting infra (cooling, power) and ongoing maintenance/depreciation, but paying for the hardware in 5 months can't be beat.
- Flankk 5y ago
  You forgot the salaries of the network technicians you wouldn't have otherwise. You now have to manage attacks on your infrastructure yourself. You left out bandwidth costs as well. Your servers will need to be replaced entirely every 5 years, and partially as hardware fails. It sounds like you're at sufficient scale that it makes sense. For most people, it doesn't make sense.

eterm 5y ago

On the contrary, downtime is inevitable and I think I'd rather have downtime when all my competitors do too.

cnity 5y ago
How about having uptime while your competitors have downtime?
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Which, given that downtime is inevitable, leads to you having downtime while all your competitors have uptime. Have fun with that…
  - teitoklien 5y ago
    If your non-cloud uptime is even 50% more then the uptime cloud offers, then you’re throughout the year, up longer then others.
  - leghifla 5y ago
    If you are 3 competitors on your market and you might lose x orders while your are down, but gain 2*x orders when the other 2 are down, you are ahead (with the same probability of going down as the others). Real world is not so easy though...
- the_af 5y ago
  If your system integrates with any external systems or APIs, it's likely they have downtime when one of the cloud giants are down, so sometimes being up is not so relevant. If your system is up but everything you depend on is down, how useful is that? For (almost) entirely self-contained systems it can still be useful, of course. But everything wants to be interconnected to everything these days...
  - spoils19 5y ago
    That's why we proudly don't integrate with any third-parties at all, and all of our stuff is developed and hosted in-house. Even "trivial" things like email or billing.

jeremyjh 5y ago

Do you think people who manage their own data-centers never have outages?

marginalia_nu 5y ago
When they do, they at least have the ability to do something about it.
- jasonlotito 5y ago
  No, not necessarily.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  Until they need to order a replacement piece of hardware and there is a three month backorder lag
- tiahura 5y ago
  Some us remember playing Chinese fire drill and it wasn’t fun.
- whatever10 5y ago
  Like shout at your IT and vent?
  - smarx007 5y ago
    Which may not be good for your uptime: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4
- mac-chaffee 5y ago
  My last outage was a power outage on a sunny day that lasted slightly longer than our battery backups. Without economies of scale, installing/maintaining extra generators for a small self-managed data center is prohibitively expensive. There's always a service provider somewhere in the chain who can drop the ball.
5y ago

papito 5y ago

Try calling "your ops guy" during Thanksgiving or when he is sloshed in a bar when your colocation servers stop responding. No one wants this job anymore. Current technology jobs have already enough unnecessary complexity to deal with uptime as well.

emptybottle 5y ago
On the other hand try calling "AWS" in the same scenario. My money is on sloshed guy coming back with the faster response.

41209 5y ago

Would you rather have to fix your own data center, or wait 4 hours. AWS works 99% of the time,plus it's someone else's problem

iso1631 5y ago
In my industry, five nines is the starting level. You're proposing something 1,000 times worse.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  If you have to have 5 9's starting with any cloud service is pretty tough sell at this point. You can build that type of system ontop of them. But it takes a willingness to also build your own and use competing services adding even more complexity. The BYO or competing services bit is so you can keep the lights on even when the cloud eats it, not if. Part of 5 9's is planning for catastrophic failure. Things like 'what if the load balancer/router/backhaul/dns burns out, you have a spare on hand? Then what happens to services where you had them sticky?' Even then what if both the primary and secondary are out? What then? Lots of planning and making sure you know what to do when each of those cases happen. The nice bit though is many services can go down. Yeah it stings a bit (money, reputation, time, etc). But overall it is not that big of deal. But for the places where you can not go down. Tons of planning and tons of backup plans with backup plans, and a different style of producing code.
- Edman274 5y ago
  Besides the fact that they used "99 percent" in a colloquial, informal way ... is that really how calculations like that work, or should work? I mean, if you have 99 percent availability, and 99.999 percent availability, maybe it's valid to say that the former is 1000 times worse than the other, but that could also be true by saying that 99.999 percent availability is 10,000 times worse than 99.9999999 percent availability (where a service only goes down for a third of a second in the span of a decade), and that 99.9999999 percent availability is infinity times worse than something that hasn't had an outage within whatever monitored period (since 100 percent availability is the same as ninety nine dot nine repeating availability)

Jenk 5y ago

Have you heard about the "No True Scotsman" logical fallacy?

tyingq 5y ago

>But it's hilarious to see people indulging in byzantine "World scale" resilient systems that depend on a single vendor. As far as I can tell, there really hasn't been an AWS outage where you couldn't have avoided issues with multi-region and some careful selection of which products you're using. Which isn't much different from what you would have to do with your own infrastructure.

stunt 5y ago

I don't use Cloud for their uptime, it's all about their managed services for me.