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Why is self hosting a huge undertaking compared to using the cloud? What are the major differences from a layperson view? Is spinning VMs on your hardware tha

Why is self hosting a huge undertaking compared to using the cloud? What are the major differences from a layperson view? Is spinning VMs on your hardware that much harder than doing it on other people's computers? It's an honest question because I haven't done both

shadowgovt 4y ago
Yes. Cloud hosting puts out of the operator's space of concern actual maintenance of the hardware, which for most companies that want something like 24/7 uptime is a big deal. I worked at a small company where we planned for 24/7 uptime before clouds were ubiquitous. We planned out which of the three engineers in the team would hold the pager and the cost of gas reimbursements for them to drive one state over to deal with the machine in the secured rack facility if it physically went down. We didn't have nearly enough bandwidth capacity to our building itself to support the traffic we anticipated for our service. Smaller projects that don't require 24/7 uptime can be self-hosted, but you still want to be aware of fabric-layer security... If you're hosting on a machine in your building and somebody roots it, what will physical access to your intranet let them get away with? Can they see source code from there? Financials? Employee database? All of this is less a concern if you're using AWS with separated instances that are no more connected to each other than Netflix is to Disney+, even if they're in the same building. Cloud hosting lets you focus on the software and credentials and pay someone else to focus on hardware and application of credentials.
BigRedDog1669 4y ago
Yes, it's not just clicking a "create VM" button or setting up a box in the closet. It's setting up the networking and security so that only the right people can access it and the packages are updated etc. And being the support person if anyone besides yourself is using it.
vachina 4y ago
It depends on what you want to self host. Low hanging fruits like cloud storage, web hosting, VPN are fairly easy to setup and self maintain.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Yes. Cloud hosting puts out of the operator's space of concern actual maintenance of the hardware, which for most companies that want something like 24/7 uptime is a big deal. I worked at a small company where we planned for 24/7 uptime before clouds were ubiquitous. We planned out which of the three engineers in the team would hold the pager and the cost of gas reimbursements for them to drive one state over to deal with the machine in the secured rack facility if it physically went down. We didn't have nearly enough bandwidth capacity to our building itself to support the traffic we anticipated for our service. Smaller projects that don't require 24/7 uptime can be self-hosted, but you still want to be aware of fabric-layer security... If you're hosting on a machine in your building and somebody roots it, what will physical access to your intranet let them get away with? Can they see source code from there? Financials? Employee database? All of this is less a concern if you're using AWS with separated instances that are no more connected to each other than Netflix is to Disney+, even if they're in the same building. Cloud hosting lets you focus on the software and credentials and pay someone else to focus on hardware and application of credentials.

BigRedDog1669 4y ago

Yes, it's not just clicking a "create VM" button or setting up a box in the closet. It's setting up the networking and security so that only the right people can access it and the packages are updated etc. And being the support person if anyone besides yourself is using it.

vachina 4y ago

It depends on what you want to self host. Low hanging fruits like cloud storage, web hosting, VPN are fairly easy to setup and self maintain.