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It’s just a matter of tooling. Do you think AWS logs into the servers that back your service and care for them individually (as the article imagines caring for

It’s just a matter of tooling. Do you think AWS logs into the servers that back your service and care for them individually (as the article imagines caring for your own server)? Not even in the least - they treat them like cattle. If data center scale tools were easier to use for the average engineer - the gap between managed and self-hosted would start to close. Obviously, software, tooling, process, scale: there are plenty of huge challenges to making self-hosting viable. Personally, I see it as far more doable and less radical than trying to distribute the internet in any other fashion (blockchain or otherwise).

WJW 5y ago
I agree that it's a tooling issue, but I don't agree that the gap between managed and self-hosted will ever start to close again. IMO, modern IT tooling is having an industrial revolution moment where economies of scale really start to push out small scale operators. Back in the day every village would have their own blacksmith, but as steel mills scaled up fewer and fewer of them were needed. These days no hobbyist metalworker can ever hope to keep up with the accuracy and speed of professionals running multi-million CNC machines. Similarly, big tech companies will keep developing tools that provide total cost-of-ownership several orders cheaper than what hobbyists achieve, but will need to be operated by entire teams of people. The complexity of Kubernetes is only the start. No consumer refines their own petroleum or makes their own steel these days, except maybe as a hobby. Similarly I don't think the market share of consumers who host their own email, git servers or payment infrastructure will ever rise again.
- spicyusername 5y ago
  > Similarly I don't think the market share of consumers who host their own email, git servers or payment infrastructure will ever rise again. Every IT shop I've ever interacted with has a sizable on-prem footprint. And an even larger self-managed footprint if we include things that are run in the cloud but are managed by the IT shop itself (i.e. Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, HashiCorp Vault in Azure, GitLab in Alibaba, etc). So I think we've yet to see the initial demise of that paradigm. Even if the trend is that most Enterprises are moving towards SaaS and PaaS products, I think we still have a long way to go until the majority of IT infrastructure is managed by a third-party.
azornathogron 5y ago
I agree that tools can and should be improved, but it's not just a matter of tooling. If you're running 10,000 machines then you divide your management costs across them and treat them as cattle and end up spending (not real numbers, obviously) 0.02 person-days-per-month-per-machine or whatever on managing them. But that doesn't mean that with the same tooling you could run just one machine with just 0.02 person-days-per-month, because a lot of the benefit you're getting from scale is the ability to make one decision and do something to all 10,000 machines at once, and it's the decision that takes time and effort.

WJW 5y ago

I agree that it's a tooling issue, but I don't agree that the gap between managed and self-hosted will ever start to close again. IMO, modern IT tooling is having an industrial revolution moment where economies of scale really start to push out small scale operators. Back in the day every village would have their own blacksmith, but as steel mills scaled up fewer and fewer of them were needed. These days no hobbyist metalworker can ever hope to keep up with the accuracy and speed of professionals running multi-million CNC machines. Similarly, big tech companies will keep developing tools that provide total cost-of-ownership several orders cheaper than what hobbyists achieve, but will need to be operated by entire teams of people. The complexity of Kubernetes is only the start. No consumer refines their own petroleum or makes their own steel these days, except maybe as a hobby. Similarly I don't think the market share of consumers who host their own email, git servers or payment infrastructure will ever rise again.

spicyusername 5y ago
> Similarly I don't think the market share of consumers who host their own email, git servers or payment infrastructure will ever rise again. Every IT shop I've ever interacted with has a sizable on-prem footprint. And an even larger self-managed footprint if we include things that are run in the cloud but are managed by the IT shop itself (i.e. Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, HashiCorp Vault in Azure, GitLab in Alibaba, etc). So I think we've yet to see the initial demise of that paradigm. Even if the trend is that most Enterprises are moving towards SaaS and PaaS products, I think we still have a long way to go until the majority of IT infrastructure is managed by a third-party.

azornathogron 5y ago

I agree that tools can and should be improved, but it's not just a matter of tooling. If you're running 10,000 machines then you divide your management costs across them and treat them as cattle and end up spending (not real numbers, obviously) 0.02 person-days-per-month-per-machine or whatever on managing them. But that doesn't mean that with the same tooling you could run just one machine with just 0.02 person-days-per-month, because a lot of the benefit you're getting from scale is the ability to make one decision and do something to all 10,000 machines at once, and it's the decision that takes time and effort.