5 ms·

They might not be wrong. In govt at least it was 6+ months to get a single rack of machines provisioned / assignees if you were lucky. The machines were there

They might not be wrong. In govt at least it was 6+ months to get a single rack of machines provisioned / assignees if you were lucky. The machines were there fully paid. But w aws I’d be up in 10 minutes w a lot less arguing . I’m convinced this might be part of AWS edge in big players

avrionov 5y ago
Same thing in a private company. 45 days to get a server + approval from a VP depending on the cost.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
It can be really tough to get people out of the beige box mentality if they have never encountered anything different. The first time you blow away their production server(s) and replace them with what is checked into git can be rough. Then you get into serverless and suddenly they can’t log into production anymore, and they have to instrument their code, and work within finite resources - all that stuff they ignored in college about manipulating datasets larger then core memory are suddenly relevant. When we did our transition to serverless we found that the people who complained the loudest about their traditional servers being mysteriously corrupted were actually the same that had obtained admin rights “so they could work faster” and were going into the servers and blowing away configuration files, altering permissions, and making other changes. Once there was no more ssh and no more root privileges our outages dropped two thirds. Today it’s mostly third party outages impacting us and people deploying untested code to production.
- hughrr 5y ago
  We didn’t find that. What we did find is our operational expenditure over three years tripled. So basically capital expenditure. I’m not sure how they warped that into self congratulatory success. The people complaining now complain that it turns out the promise of total automation was a lie. None of it is very robust and all of it is painful.
- d1sxeyes 5y ago
  From a personal project perspective, I've maintained a few VPSes for quite a while now, but now I run them as a Docker Swarm, and deploy containers onto them - or better, I use serverless. From a maintenance perspective, it's brilliant. Over time, cruft accumulates on my VPSes however disciplined I intend to be when I spin one up. Now, I no longer have to remember all of the ugly hacks I had to implement to get a particular new app I wanted to try out working, I just deploy and it's done.
wasmitnetzen 5y ago
What makes you think the process for getting a new EC2 instance won't get the same amount of red tape as a physical instance over time?
- fendy3002 5y ago
  In some companies, pre paid takes a whole lot of time and paperworks, while post paid only need invoices and maybe half an hour meeting with higher ups to explain the cost.
- onphonenow 5y ago
  Because you only talk to finance not IT. Because compared to a staff of 50 doing anything the costs of an ec2 instance for a week are irrelevant? Because finance already has AWS in system as a vendor? Because pricing is public? Because costs hit your budget not ITs so you have more authority? Orgs can easily spend 5x what it would cost internally on AWS because of friction avoiding factors like this.

avrionov 5y ago

Same thing in a private company. 45 days to get a server + approval from a VP depending on the cost.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

It can be really tough to get people out of the beige box mentality if they have never encountered anything different. The first time you blow away their production server(s) and replace them with what is checked into git can be rough. Then you get into serverless and suddenly they can’t log into production anymore, and they have to instrument their code, and work within finite resources - all that stuff they ignored in college about manipulating datasets larger then core memory are suddenly relevant. When we did our transition to serverless we found that the people who complained the loudest about their traditional servers being mysteriously corrupted were actually the same that had obtained admin rights “so they could work faster” and were going into the servers and blowing away configuration files, altering permissions, and making other changes. Once there was no more ssh and no more root privileges our outages dropped two thirds. Today it’s mostly third party outages impacting us and people deploying untested code to production.

hughrr 5y ago
We didn’t find that. What we did find is our operational expenditure over three years tripled. So basically capital expenditure. I’m not sure how they warped that into self congratulatory success. The people complaining now complain that it turns out the promise of total automation was a lie. None of it is very robust and all of it is painful.
d1sxeyes 5y ago
From a personal project perspective, I've maintained a few VPSes for quite a while now, but now I run them as a Docker Swarm, and deploy containers onto them - or better, I use serverless. From a maintenance perspective, it's brilliant. Over time, cruft accumulates on my VPSes however disciplined I intend to be when I spin one up. Now, I no longer have to remember all of the ugly hacks I had to implement to get a particular new app I wanted to try out working, I just deploy and it's done.

wasmitnetzen 5y ago

What makes you think the process for getting a new EC2 instance won't get the same amount of red tape as a physical instance over time?

fendy3002 5y ago
In some companies, pre paid takes a whole lot of time and paperworks, while post paid only need invoices and maybe half an hour meeting with higher ups to explain the cost.
onphonenow 5y ago
Because you only talk to finance not IT. Because compared to a staff of 50 doing anything the costs of an ec2 instance for a week are irrelevant? Because finance already has AWS in system as a vendor? Because pricing is public? Because costs hit your budget not ITs so you have more authority? Orgs can easily spend 5x what it would cost internally on AWS because of friction avoiding factors like this.