Ah, the debate between managing your own infrastructure or renting it from someone else. Always a fun debate, often centering around uptime far more so than co

Ah, the debate between managing your own infrastructure or renting it from someone else. Always a fun debate, often centering around uptime far more so than cost. I'll go ahead and make what will seem like a weird comparison. I sometimes think about this as I do about Microsoft Office. What? Over the years the MS Office suite has reached an asymptotic limit with regards to functionality users would actually be willing to pay for. I'll say that somewhere between 2013 and 2016 the suite had everything most users would need to do the usual stuff one does with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. In other words, it became good enough and maybe even better than good enough. This is the parallel I see with Linux servers and the Internet infrastructure needed to run a reliable site or service. Not just the OS, but the system as a whole has, over time, approached an asymptotic limit on functionality, reliability, uptime, ease of use, capacity, bandwidth, management, etc. Not sure we are at that limit yet. It sure feels like we must be close. As many have echoed, today one can deploy a range of servers in multiple configurations and achieve extremely good uptimes with as much functionality as needed without necessarily having to go to cloud service providers. Is it the same? Not sure. I haven't operated at the highest scales in building web services, so I don't know. My gut feeling is that short of things like seriously large DDoS attacks, a self-owned infrastructure could do just as well as something hosted by a cloud provider. With knowledgeable engineers running the show there should not be any issues in setting-up, managing, maintaining and supporting such a structure. Note that I am not hating on cloud services. No. What I am saying is that because technology tends to get better over time, it is only natural that the alternative approach has gotten better and better to the point that it would be perfectly sensible for a business to consider rolling their own rather than automatically resorting to cloud providers.