4 ms·

Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Am

by nupark2 15y ago

Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Amazon's fixed rate per-byte pricing. A real analysis would have even dug into the question of sysadmins vs engineering staff, and the potential for "the cloud" to allow programmers to actually program infrastructure, eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon). Instead, we got bizarre platitudes about how they "love computers". How boring. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time in the hot/cold, blaring fan world of data centers -- sometimes late at night, when a hard drive failed or a switch's fans went out. Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane; whether or not it makes sense in terms of cost was the answer I'd hoped to get from this article.

brudgers 15y ago
It was a real analysis that went beyond just counting the beans. As a privately held company, getting rid of passionate people doesn't make the stock go up, increase anyone's bonus, or benefit their long term goals - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent.
- deleted 15y ago
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- deleted 15y ago
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- nupark2 15y ago
  If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste -- and it's impossible to argue against personal taste. An evaluation based on personal taste is useless. If I say "I like orange because it's a great color" -- then either you already like orange, in which case my analysis does you no good, or you don't like orange, in which case my statement can simply be ignored. The same applies here, in that the article could have been coalesced to a single sentence: "We don't use the cloud because we don't want to. We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps" Possibly interesting -- but not useful.
  - KyleBrandt 15y ago
    Okay, I'll bite... > I spent a lot of time in the hot/cold, blaring fan world of data centers -- sometimes late at night, when a hard drive failed or a switch's fans went out. If a hard drive or a fan failing requires someone's attention at the data center in the middle of the night something is wrong (unless your company has such high uptime requirements that even redundant systems need to be fixed right away). Either your company can't afford to provide proper redundancy, or someone on the technical side has failed to implement redundancy or failover properly (which happens, but should be corrected). For example we had an entire router fail and this just caused a blip. We didn't have to do anything right away to fix it, just figure out what went wrong and bring it back up the next day. Also we don't really end up spending very much time in the data center itself (in fact I work remotely full time). > We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps We do like to consider ourselves experts -- we don't just dork around and tinker (at least, not most of the time) > If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste In part this is a matter of taste. But as I said: "This culture means when we hire technical staff, we hire people who share this passion. I believe that this passion translates into a better product. Whenever someone does a cost analysis of cloud vs self hosting there is no row in the spreadsheet for “Work Productivity Increase due to Passion.” Just because there is no good method to put it on a spreadsheet, doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the company. There are a lot of technical reasons we like to have control over the full stack. But I think it largely comes down to our culture. The culture of a company is very important. A culture could be all about how the numbers fall after you calculate your capital and operating expenses etc. Somehow it seems to me though that many people don't seem very happy in those cultures -- and this will effect employee retention and the sort of talent you can attract.
    - mwsherman 15y ago
      For me, the best justification for “doing it ourselves” is that it’s what exceptional companies do. We dig under abstraction layers not knowing what we’ll find. We dig under Linq to SQL. We dig under Redis clients. We really never consider the vendor’s platform good enough. The result of a million small optimizations is a platform that others can’t create.
- maximusprime 15y ago
  " - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent." They're a microsoft shop. They're not going to attract top talent. Who here wants to deal with that stuff?
  - gbog 15y ago
    There is some truth in this comment, but better say the same thing in a more constructive way.
gbeech 15y ago
> eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon) Man, this idea is one of the most insane things I hear. Amazon does not install your operating systems, Amazon does not install and configure you applications, Amazon does not troubleshoot anything related to the operation of the servers, Amazon does not do analysis on your traffic patterns and decide when you need more instances, Amazon absolutely doesn't care about how well your product runs as much as your own staff does, in other words there is no way you outsource your WHOLE sysadmin staff. All Amazon does is provide the hardware and network infrastructure to run on. It is not a magic bullet that says I don't need to have these people around. SysAdmin != server monkey - yes it is part of our jobs, but quite honestly it is a very very small part of it. > Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane Call me insane because I sure do love spending time in a datacenter, it's one of the few times working in IT you really get to do something with your hands, and that does have a certain appleal to me.
- reinhardt 15y ago
  You conveniently left out the first part of the quoted sentence, "allow programmers to actually program infrastructure". Almost everything you wrote can be programmed these days without a "traditional" sysadmin.
  - mey 15y ago
    Between AMIs, Configuration Engines, and things like http://susestudio.com/ http://susestudio.com/ make it simpler to create auto-scaling infrastructure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_confi... Granted that process is still under refinement, but with dedication you can achieve those goals. Conversely, again with cost analysis, which is cheaper, a developer who can manage all that, or a sysadmin? I am sure there is a curve, small end a sysadmin, large end automation.
  - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
    That is what good sysadmins do, and rack monkeys are training to do.

by nupark2 15y ago

brudgers 15y ago

It was a real analysis that went beyond just counting the beans. As a privately held company, getting rid of passionate people doesn't make the stock go up, increase anyone's bonus, or benefit their long term goals - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nupark2 15y ago
If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste -- and it's impossible to argue against personal taste. An evaluation based on personal taste is useless. If I say "I like orange because it's a great color" -- then either you already like orange, in which case my analysis does you no good, or you don't like orange, in which case my statement can simply be ignored. The same applies here, in that the article could have been coalesced to a single sentence: "We don't use the cloud because we don't want to. We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps" Possibly interesting -- but not useful.
- KyleBrandt 15y ago
  Okay, I'll bite... > I spent a lot of time in the hot/cold, blaring fan world of data centers -- sometimes late at night, when a hard drive failed or a switch's fans went out. If a hard drive or a fan failing requires someone's attention at the data center in the middle of the night something is wrong (unless your company has such high uptime requirements that even redundant systems need to be fixed right away). Either your company can't afford to provide proper redundancy, or someone on the technical side has failed to implement redundancy or failover properly (which happens, but should be corrected). For example we had an entire router fail and this just caused a blip. We didn't have to do anything right away to fix it, just figure out what went wrong and bring it back up the next day. Also we don't really end up spending very much time in the data center itself (in fact I work remotely full time). > We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps We do like to consider ourselves experts -- we don't just dork around and tinker (at least, not most of the time) > If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste In part this is a matter of taste. But as I said: "This culture means when we hire technical staff, we hire people who share this passion. I believe that this passion translates into a better product. Whenever someone does a cost analysis of cloud vs self hosting there is no row in the spreadsheet for “Work Productivity Increase due to Passion.” Just because there is no good method to put it on a spreadsheet, doesn't mean it doesn't have value for the company. There are a lot of technical reasons we like to have control over the full stack. But I think it largely comes down to our culture. The culture of a company is very important. A culture could be all about how the numbers fall after you calculate your capital and operating expenses etc. Somehow it seems to me though that many people don't seem very happy in those cultures -- and this will effect employee retention and the sort of talent you can attract.
  - mwsherman 15y ago
    For me, the best justification for “doing it ourselves” is that it’s what exceptional companies do. We dig under abstraction layers not knowing what we’ll find. We dig under Linq to SQL. We dig under Redis clients. We really never consider the vendor’s platform good enough. The result of a million small optimizations is a platform that others can’t create.
maximusprime 15y ago
" - and blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent." They're a microsoft shop. They're not going to attract top talent. Who here wants to deal with that stuff?
- gbog 15y ago
  There is some truth in this comment, but better say the same thing in a more constructive way.

gbeech 15y ago

> eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon) Man, this idea is one of the most insane things I hear. Amazon does not install your operating systems, Amazon does not install and configure you applications, Amazon does not troubleshoot anything related to the operation of the servers, Amazon does not do analysis on your traffic patterns and decide when you need more instances, Amazon absolutely doesn't care about how well your product runs as much as your own staff does, in other words there is no way you outsource your WHOLE sysadmin staff. All Amazon does is provide the hardware and network infrastructure to run on. It is not a magic bullet that says I don't need to have these people around. SysAdmin != server monkey - yes it is part of our jobs, but quite honestly it is a very very small part of it. > Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane Call me insane because I sure do love spending time in a datacenter, it's one of the few times working in IT you really get to do something with your hands, and that does have a certain appleal to me.

reinhardt 15y ago
You conveniently left out the first part of the quoted sentence, "allow programmers to actually program infrastructure". Almost everything you wrote can be programmed these days without a "traditional" sysadmin.
- mey 15y ago
  Between AMIs, Configuration Engines, and things like http://susestudio.com/ http://susestudio.com/ make it simpler to create auto-scaling infrastructure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_confi... Granted that process is still under refinement, but with dedication you can achieve those goals. Conversely, again with cost analysis, which is cheaper, a developer who can manage all that, or a sysadmin? I am sure there is a curve, small end a sysadmin, large end automation.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  That is what good sysadmins do, and rack monkeys are training to do.