3 ms·

You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand.

by HWR_14 4y ago

You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.

LanceH 4y ago
And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.
- whatever1 4y ago
  Making IT an OPEX problem is the main reason that C-suites love cloud providers
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I thought that was less true when you started signing deals for discounts. Commit to a spend of X and they'll reduce your bill. That kind of stuff
zo1 4y ago
Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
    - alex_suzuki 4y ago
      Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
    - unregistereddev 4y ago
      On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
      - olddustytrail 4y ago
        I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        I have a rant here about security being mostly bullshit. Not even sysadmins can setup a server "in the most secure, maintainable manner". You don't hire a dedicated sys admin because they know some voodoo magic developers don't, you hire a sys admin because they have the _TIME_ to watch for security updates. And you _PAY_ a company like RedHat to ease that burden. A dedicated sysadmin will typically do a better job than a non-dedicated developer, but if that developer cannot do a passable job, that's a gap in their skillset. I may not be a network engineer, but I damned well understand DNS, MPLS, networking, gateways, and the like. Any developer who doesn't has gaps.

by HWR_14 4y ago

LanceH 4y ago

And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.

whatever1 4y ago
Making IT an OPEX problem is the main reason that C-suites love cloud providers
HWR_14 4y ago
I thought that was less true when you started signing deals for discounts. Commit to a spend of X and they'll reduce your bill. That kind of stuff

zo1 4y ago

Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.

HWR_14 4y ago
Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
  - alex_suzuki 4y ago
    Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
  - unregistereddev 4y ago
    On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
    - olddustytrail 4y ago
      I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      I have a rant here about security being mostly bullshit. Not even sysadmins can setup a server "in the most secure, maintainable manner". You don't hire a dedicated sys admin because they know some voodoo magic developers don't, you hire a sys admin because they have the _TIME_ to watch for security updates. And you _PAY_ a company like RedHat to ease that burden. A dedicated sysadmin will typically do a better job than a non-dedicated developer, but if that developer cannot do a passable job, that's a gap in their skillset. I may not be a network engineer, but I damned well understand DNS, MPLS, networking, gateways, and the like. Any developer who doesn't has gaps.