3 ms·

> People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take knowledge. This. I always wonder how much of the "clouds" success (economic, that is) would have mate

> People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take knowledge. This. I always wonder how much of the "clouds" success (economic, that is) would have materialized, if the marketing term never got traction, and everyone just called it what it really is: "renting someone elses hardware without physical access, and less, if any, control over how the stack works from the metal up". In the good 'ol days, when people wanted to put a service online, they rented the racks at a colo, and either stuffed their own hardware in or, worst case, used rented hardware. Did that require some basic familiarity with hardware? Yes it did. Did people need to know how to setup, configure and administrate a LAMP stack? Sure. Was it guarded against sudden loadspikes by god-knows-how-many layers of abstraction? Nope. But it worked, and surprise, in 99% of cases, it was perfectly fine if a website ran at sub-optimal speed for a few hours, or went down every now and then. And the dirty little secret is: It still does, and it still is.

abakker 5y ago
No, no. The costs cloud saves are in staffing and opportunity costs. Everyone knows that it is more expensive than a comparable server, but...it is easy, standard, and available. If you want to a) not have real estate capex, b) not worry about the core ops part of your applications, and c) used to outsource infrastructure to a managed service provider anyway, then Cloud is a viable value prop. Plus, the more of the services you use, the more you app stack becomes "standard" parts with glue code. This is maybe an improvement at the large enterprise scale where home-built apps don't have a reputation for being future proof.
- laurent92 5y ago
  And better credibility when you say “Our vulnerability was on AWS and configuration is hard, but at least we had the default VPC config” rather than “We maintained our own stack and being sysadmin is hard, and the port was exposed on the web.”
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Modern cloud services such as S3 or let's say MongoDB seem to have a lot more security footguns than old-school bare-metal. An S3 bucket misconfiguration exposes your data to everyone even if there was never a reason for that data to ever be exposed to the outside world. On a bare-metal, chuck it in a directory outside your web root and someone will have to actually breach the server before they can steal the data.
- ryanjkirk 5y ago
  You're correct on staffing savings, but not on Ops savings. I delved into this pretty thoroughly last month - https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7c415cb1de1 https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7...
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > but...it is easy, standard, and available. So is a LAMP stack on a dedicated machine. > Plus, the more of the services you use, The thing is, most webapps don't use a lot of services. Backend-Logic in whateverlanguage, a database, and a webserver. Maybe hooked up to some CRM system. That's it for 99/100 webservices. Yes, the services cloud providers offer are amazing, they are complex, and it is natural for developers to be fascinated by complex things (I know it is for me). But it's important to realize when simple is simply enough.
dylan604 5y ago
Except in what minute of my day am I supposed to take off the hat I'm currently wearing to put on my IT Server Room hat? I don't have time to wrangle this stuff any more. I have multiple clients, I have side hustles, I have what's left of a social life after pandemic, I have family obligations. There are only so many hours in a day. If my time become more effecient by throwing a bit of money at the problem, then it is worth it to pay "experts" at something to relieve me of the burden.
- 7steps2much 5y ago
  There is a difference between freelancers/one person companies and big cooperations though. Honestly, the question you need to ask in regards to cloud is a relatively simple one: Can I hire a sysadmin for cheaper than using the cloud? The answer to that, once you start using enough resources, is more often than not yes. Sure, it takes a while to get to that point, but eventually you will reach break even and it would be cheaper to do it yourself/have your employee do it.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Yes, but these threads of "in house is cheaper than cloud" never qualify at what size company, at what revenue being generated, etc before their version of an answer is true. I have been on both sides. Large media production companies with very large amounts of fast and redundant storage located on-prem. These range from local attached RAIDs to large shared SAN pools. Their clients also tend to be the types that sue the crap out of you if any of their content is seen by people outside their control. Switching to cloud solutions was (still is) a huge uphill battle. However, the cloud storage needs are no where near the same (not editing content from s3), but storing approved masters for distribution totally makes sense for cloud. Now that the content is in the cloud, why not perform actions on that content in the cloud. Faster deployment, better equipment, blah blah. Next thing you know your entire workflow past editorial is in the cloud. You start to analyze your expenses and compare them to on-prem amortized expenses and you see that it could be cheaper on-prem. Also, take into consideration how long it takes to bring up that new data center. You also have to look at bandwidth expenses. Bandwidth to a new site not directly on the backbone tends to be expensive for non-residential connections. The additional power expenses of that new equipment plus the cooling is also a new expense. Power redundancy you ask? $$$ Now, you need that sysadmin and possibly a small team. At that point, you go back to your cloud rep, and renegotiate fees. You have now created an entirely new department at your company on managing the on-prem.

abakker 5y ago

No, no. The costs cloud saves are in staffing and opportunity costs. Everyone knows that it is more expensive than a comparable server, but...it is easy, standard, and available. If you want to a) not have real estate capex, b) not worry about the core ops part of your applications, and c) used to outsource infrastructure to a managed service provider anyway, then Cloud is a viable value prop. Plus, the more of the services you use, the more you app stack becomes "standard" parts with glue code. This is maybe an improvement at the large enterprise scale where home-built apps don't have a reputation for being future proof.

laurent92 5y ago
And better credibility when you say “Our vulnerability was on AWS and configuration is hard, but at least we had the default VPC config” rather than “We maintained our own stack and being sysadmin is hard, and the port was exposed on the web.”
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Modern cloud services such as S3 or let's say MongoDB seem to have a lot more security footguns than old-school bare-metal. An S3 bucket misconfiguration exposes your data to everyone even if there was never a reason for that data to ever be exposed to the outside world. On a bare-metal, chuck it in a directory outside your web root and someone will have to actually breach the server before they can steal the data.
ryanjkirk 5y ago
You're correct on staffing savings, but not on Ops savings. I delved into this pretty thoroughly last month - https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7c415cb1de1 https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7...
usrbinbash 5y ago
> but...it is easy, standard, and available. So is a LAMP stack on a dedicated machine. > Plus, the more of the services you use, The thing is, most webapps don't use a lot of services. Backend-Logic in whateverlanguage, a database, and a webserver. Maybe hooked up to some CRM system. That's it for 99/100 webservices. Yes, the services cloud providers offer are amazing, they are complex, and it is natural for developers to be fascinated by complex things (I know it is for me). But it's important to realize when simple is simply enough.

dylan604 5y ago

Except in what minute of my day am I supposed to take off the hat I'm currently wearing to put on my IT Server Room hat? I don't have time to wrangle this stuff any more. I have multiple clients, I have side hustles, I have what's left of a social life after pandemic, I have family obligations. There are only so many hours in a day. If my time become more effecient by throwing a bit of money at the problem, then it is worth it to pay "experts" at something to relieve me of the burden.

7steps2much 5y ago
There is a difference between freelancers/one person companies and big cooperations though. Honestly, the question you need to ask in regards to cloud is a relatively simple one: Can I hire a sysadmin for cheaper than using the cloud? The answer to that, once you start using enough resources, is more often than not yes. Sure, it takes a while to get to that point, but eventually you will reach break even and it would be cheaper to do it yourself/have your employee do it.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Yes, but these threads of "in house is cheaper than cloud" never qualify at what size company, at what revenue being generated, etc before their version of an answer is true. I have been on both sides. Large media production companies with very large amounts of fast and redundant storage located on-prem. These range from local attached RAIDs to large shared SAN pools. Their clients also tend to be the types that sue the crap out of you if any of their content is seen by people outside their control. Switching to cloud solutions was (still is) a huge uphill battle. However, the cloud storage needs are no where near the same (not editing content from s3), but storing approved masters for distribution totally makes sense for cloud. Now that the content is in the cloud, why not perform actions on that content in the cloud. Faster deployment, better equipment, blah blah. Next thing you know your entire workflow past editorial is in the cloud. You start to analyze your expenses and compare them to on-prem amortized expenses and you see that it could be cheaper on-prem. Also, take into consideration how long it takes to bring up that new data center. You also have to look at bandwidth expenses. Bandwidth to a new site not directly on the backbone tends to be expensive for non-residential connections. The additional power expenses of that new equipment plus the cooling is also a new expense. Power redundancy you ask? $$$ Now, you need that sysadmin and possibly a small team. At that point, you go back to your cloud rep, and renegotiate fees. You have now created an entirely new department at your company on managing the on-prem.