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I was a very early adopter of AWS back when instances did not have permanent storage options. AWS and other cloud providers were a huge part of my career for ov

I was a very early adopter of AWS back when instances did not have permanent storage options. AWS and other cloud providers were a huge part of my career for over a decade. I have found myself shunning them in recent times. Not only for the cost, but the excessive complexity. Not every application needs to hyperscale. Most of the time a simple server takes care of it and we can move on to better value adds. With the commonly available gig+ fiber plus good open source tools I find myself hosting things myself at home or on simple clouds like linode, digital ocean, or ovh. Recently got a NUC i7 with dual 2TB SSD, 8/16 cores, 64gb of ram for $1200. I run proxmox on it as a hypervisor and management. I front it with a $5 haproxy on linode and connect it all up with Nebula mesh vpn. It works really well.

ksec 4y ago
>Not every application needs to hyperscale. Most of the time a simple server takes care of it and we can move on to better value adds. Yes. And that wont true in the early days of AWS. Now we are marching towards 128 ARM core with 128 GB Memory on a single node, you could fit 2 to 3 node in a 1U unit. Or 128 Core AMD EYPC Zen 4C with 256 vCPU Thread.
tatersolid 4y ago
Without ECC I’d be wary of catastrophic data corruption on that rig. It’s laptop parts in a tiny desktop case. There’s a reason all us Enterprise(TM) types shell out for “real servers”, and it’s not because we’re stupid or enamored with the vendor’s ability to pay for rounds of golf.
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  Yes. If i was running mission critical systems it would be another story. In this case i have triple backups so worst case I take some downtime. Still easier (and faster) than running the same servers on AWS, which is where I migrated them from.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Run a proper high-load high-availability architecture instead. You'd need it anyways and it will turn out cheaper in the end.
  - tatersolid 4y ago
    You misunderstand the impact of silent RAM errors; when the data is corrupted in RAM then written to disk you have persistent, unrecoverable data corruption. Your backups are also corrupt and no common HA mechanism will even detect the failure unless it causes a crash. This sort of memory corruption happens in the real world and is often written off as software bugs.

ksec 4y ago

>Not every application needs to hyperscale. Most of the time a simple server takes care of it and we can move on to better value adds. Yes. And that wont true in the early days of AWS. Now we are marching towards 128 ARM core with 128 GB Memory on a single node, you could fit 2 to 3 node in a 1U unit. Or 128 Core AMD EYPC Zen 4C with 256 vCPU Thread.

tatersolid 4y ago

Without ECC I’d be wary of catastrophic data corruption on that rig. It’s laptop parts in a tiny desktop case. There’s a reason all us Enterprise(TM) types shell out for “real servers”, and it’s not because we’re stupid or enamored with the vendor’s ability to pay for rounds of golf.

dismalpedigree 4y ago
Yes. If i was running mission critical systems it would be another story. In this case i have triple backups so worst case I take some downtime. Still easier (and faster) than running the same servers on AWS, which is where I migrated them from.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Run a proper high-load high-availability architecture instead. You'd need it anyways and it will turn out cheaper in the end.
- tatersolid 4y ago
  You misunderstand the impact of silent RAM errors; when the data is corrupted in RAM then written to disk you have persistent, unrecoverable data corruption. Your backups are also corrupt and no common HA mechanism will even detect the failure unless it causes a crash. This sort of memory corruption happens in the real world and is often written off as software bugs.