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Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

• floatinglotus 4y ago
  All of these articles make one thing clear, there is a serious lack of good tools for building and managing your own on-prem cloud.
• Insanity 4y ago
  Sure, but it’s not just the hardware. The (integrated)services and reduced development time play a role as well. And help offset some of the HW cost difference.
• Jupe 4y ago
  Isn't there a "throat to choke" aspect of this as well? While not actual indemnification, leveraging a cloud vendor at least allows for a "but AWS/Google/Azure" was down response to your customers. And cost offsets can come into play as well in the event of a failure, or even missing an SLA, in some cases. You don't get that when you roll your own. Not to mention certain, tested disaster workflows are available such as global tables/databases/etc., alternate region backups. If your solution is not mission/legal critical, and outages are simply "uncomfortable" then rolling-your-own seems a viable alternative. But, as your customer base grows in size/maturity/ the costs can start to look a little less important. You just bill it through to the end customer.
• sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Colo is most performance per buck. Cloud is least performance per buck but no headaches. There is also the option of managed metal. You get raid, monitoring and super performance. I used to think VPS was the middle ground but now I like managed metal best.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  People love to generalize this stuff and I still work with hardware all the time (gasp!) What it really comes down to is this - you cannot just make a blanket assumption on Cloud vs Self Hosted Generally however I believe that the hybrid approach is going to be the best for most larger companies - any highly variable workload (that benefits massively from autoscaling in the cloud) is going to be better renting servers from AWS or similar. And any very predictable workload (especially ones that require lots of compute or GPU power) will be cheaper to run on your own (think something like a GPO farm for a 3D animation studio). And of course there is nothing stoping you from doing both and having your very predicatble and high power workloads in your own DC with your own managed hardware and then just autoscale as needed to whatever Cloud you want. This shit always comes full circle - we had Mainframes and Terminals (basically a mini cloud) and the pendulum swung for awhile to personal PC's and now we are penduluming back again. Theres no all encompassing solution for everyone.
• jtrtoo 4y ago
  Yes, but it's much harder to have a legally enforceable SLA with your in-house team and much less fun to threaten to sue yourself. [On the other hand, in-house gives you greater control. If you're good (enough) at alignment and execution, you can optimize your infrastructure for your use case and either save the organization money or enable more money to be made through enhanced capabilities.]
• jtrtoo 4y ago
  Everyone is going to have a different answer to this (and that answer may evolve as the business does). All business decisions like this are about what level of abstraction is appropriate for us (today) and what level of specialization is conducive to our strategy[1] (today). In some cases the infrastructure outsourcing question won't even be particularly important - a wash essentially regardless of the path taken (in the bigger picture of the enterprise's mission anyway). Other times, it'll be - effectively - paramount. [1] Or current priorities, concerns, strengths, weaknesses, biases, pressures, risks, opportunities, competitors, etc.
• TheGigaChad 4y ago
  [dead]
• walrus01 4y ago
  When you consider that 2U size servers with 128 cores and 2TB of RAM are now a commodity thing you can buy for not a totally absurd price, you can serve a real metric shitload of end-user-facing https content and applications from literally one item of hardware now. I'm not saying put all your stuff on literally one box, but colocation space for even a really high traffic thing might not exceed something like 1 44U cabinet on the west coast (Hillsboro), 1 cabinet in Chicago, and 1 cabinet in northern VA or in a NJ datacenter.
  • manquer 4y ago
    There is plenty of middle path between colo and cloud as well . Providers like OVH and hetzner are super cheap too
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  Its kind of dumb to me that this is news. I don’t feel like I’m old enough to have this observation. But I’m glad they did a real analysis for estimated numbers at that scale. A modern analysis, no fear of server maintenance.
• rippercushions 4y ago
  @dang: the original blog post by Ahrefs is much more informative and detailed. https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8 https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...
• senttoschool 4y ago
  So ahrefs is a special case because they're literally crawling the internet and scrapping Google. Their entire service is based on having a lot of servers. It's not the same as your typical Silicon Valley CRUD app.
  • manquer 4y ago
    Do you really need that much infra to index 10 million sites ? Many other indexing tools are not this well funded and are able to be effective?
• rippercushions 4y ago
  From the caveat at the end of the original article: > This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc. You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing servers, upgrades, hardware replacements, 24/7 oncall rotations etc etc is considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the hardware itself, particularly at startup scale. With a cloud provider, it's (almost) all abstracted away.
  • vidarh 4y ago
    One of my longest contracts was being on call for a a company to assist with their cloud setup. Most of this is not abstracted away all that well. Having managed both on premises, colocated, managed servers and cloud services, my customers when I was consulting tended to need more of my time for similar sized setups to manage cloud setups. Yes, with a colocated setup we needed to rack and wire up servers, but the amount of time spent for the lifetime of a server was typically measured in single digit number of hours amortised over several years. EDIT: As to why the time to manage colocated servers is so low, consider that pretty much everything has IPMI or similar now, so apart from a few hours setting up an initial provisioning server for the entire environment, on a per server basis you're connecting power, screwing on rails, connecting the network, configuring IPMI (remote reboot, remote KVM, remote sensor access), running your provisioning scripts and starting (automated) burn-in tests, and then you have a bunch of new capacity in your orchestrator at the end of it. Everything else is pretty much the same as using a cloud provider, except your instance sizes are tailored to your actual workloads. The odd replacement of broken equipment can often be handled by your colo provider. When I was racking equipment myself, I'd often install more than one server an hour, and then not touch that server again physically for several years. Monitoring is largely the same - you need to be able to migrate away from failing instances either way, only now some of those failures might mean hardware has failed and you have a few more indicators in your monitoring system matching your IPMI sensors.
    • margorczynski 4y ago
• dikei 4y ago
  This is kinda obvious, isn't it. Companies have made this observation for years: cloud is very expensive compared to self-hosting. However, * you do not have to spend a large amount of money upfront * cloud's provisioning time is very short * cloud's automated management requires way less man-power to operate
  • vidarh 4y ago
    > * cloud's automated management requires way less man-power to operate My experience here is the opposite. I did contracting in the devops space for years, and those of my clients who spent the most on ops were consistently those using cloud providers.
    • nostrebored 4y ago
      Chicken and egg, maybe? If ops are more important to me I will not be owning my own infra.
      • vidarh 4y ago
        My experience is the opposite: Those who see it as important and core to their business are more likely to own. The rest tend to see cloud services as a way to reduce capex. Never mind that you can rent or lease managed servers and still save. It was almost uniquely down to complexity and e.g working around lack of flexibility (fitting workloads to cloud services and instance sizes rather than fitting the environment to the services). We'd always run everything under an orchestrator, whether on prem, in colos or in clouds anyway, and with the same monitoring and same redundancy.
• tiffanyh 4y ago
  158 comments (2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094407
• andyp-kw 4y ago
  The cloud isn't about saving money, it's about convenience and automation of using someone elses environmentand tools.
• Hnrobert42 4y ago
  They article notes that it’s unclear whether the analysis considers discounts from reserved instances, but then brushes it off. Considering that reserved instances save about 40%, that is a huge deal. Next, the comparison doesn’t seem to account for the cost of personnel to maintain the self-hosted infrastructure, not to mention the replicate the security and other layers of infrastructure management that are built into AWS. Next, Singapore sits atop at least 5 different pan-Pacific cables. They are connected to HK, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, etc. So this company uniquely benefits from redundancy that other companies not in Sing may not enjoy. That said, I wouldn’t put all my eggs in region basket, let alone one DC! It doesn’t say, but it doesn’t appear that the analysis includes the cost of maintaining a subsidiary company in another region for HA. Basically, this analysis, or at least the reporting of it, leaves a LOT to be desired. As it is, it is just a fluff piece that lets you see what you want to see. If you don’t like cloud, it confirms your bias. If you like cloud, the article looks like junk you can ignore.
• tehCorner 4y ago
  Not on the same scale but in my previous company we observed the same thing (though the other way around since we moved from self-hosted to cloud). He had a team of 4 managing the infra for an app (82 million users, 30 million DAU) and spent around 500.000€ per year on the data centers + this team's salaries + some other expenses like travels to the datacenters, some new stuff etc..., let's say around 1.000.000€ per year. At some point upper management decided to move to the cloud and we eneded up in a worse situation: the promise of easier resource management was unfulfilled since the same 4 people was managing now the cloud so no cost reduction on that side and most important, cloud costs were 4-5 times higher than self-hosting I still wonder why management decided to go that way
  • igtztorrero 4y ago
    Wow what a number ! 5 times more expensive !
  • jtwaleson 4y ago
    I was PM for a cloud hosting solution that we were originally running colocated. We moved it all to AWS for about 5x the costs after you calculated capex vs opex etc. "The Cloud" allowed our customers to set up their applications with High Availability and PITR (via RDS, building that ourselves at scale would have been problematic). It also allowed us to launch services anywhere in the world. Setting up data centers globally would have been hell. The product was still easily profitable despite the costs, so I think we made the right move.
    • johnbellone 4y ago
      We are nearly two decades from the launch of EC2 and I still need to explain to people (technical and not) that the cloud isn’t cheaper once you get to a certain scale. Everyone is always amazed.
  • siva7 4y ago
    Cost is only one aspect and infra should know that moving to the cloud will usually be more expensive than running on colo. I assume there were other aspects that played a role in this decision like elasticity, scalability and high-availability which are easier to go for with a cloud provider.
• yardie 4y ago
  This keeps being brought up since the early days of AWS. Yes, the cloud is more expensive. It simply adds another layer of management, scalability, and flexibility you would not be able to build yourself. And there is a layer of profit for the cloud provider as well. Whoever was told the cloud would be cheaper was being lied to. I've built cloud, colo'ed and hybrid systems. Every few years this would come up. Now, so many cloud services we use are connected to the cloud providers we don't even need to spin up SSO/authentication servers because it's simply built in at this point.
  • VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Something which sometimes gets lost from a US centric perspective is that cloud lets you get servers much closer to the end user without having to establish relationships with hosting companies and colo facilities on another continent. Shaving 100ms off of each request can be useful in a lot of circumstances.
    • nikau 4y ago
      In that circumstance a CDN would likely deliver the same performance.
      • jonfw 4y ago
        if you're serving static assets
        • nikau 4y ago
          Which is what most of web sites are, frameworks come from cdn cache, user specific queries from origin.
          • jonfw 4y ago
            And if latency is important, you need that origin to be close to the user. The front end is the least latency critical component in a lot of stacks, because the user downloads it once and can cache it on their machine, whereas every single action they make using that UI is subject to the latency of going to your back end
• openplatypus 4y ago
  Cloud was always more expensive (in the short term) than self-managed/collocated servers. How is this news? In cloud, you pay for availability, for ad-hoc instances without waiting for a month to install new servers and more. You only need to hire “software” DevOps, rather than people who neatly lay your cables, journey to DC to replace disks, etc, etc, etc. Pick a good, cheap cloud. It is a commodity product. Just because AWS is expensive, you don't have to pick AWS. If going solo is an option, you likely do not use any of them “fancy” AWS managed services. In that case, you can just as well go with any of tens of other Cloud providers. DHH sang the song and some people take it as a gospel. (eyeroll)
  • openplatypus 4y ago
    For completeness: There are many reasons to NOT go with cloud. Cost is rarely on that list.
  • endisneigh 4y ago
    What is a "good, cheap cloud?"
    • orangepurple 4y ago
      Vultr comes to mind immediately. I used Ramnode a few years ago.
    • samelrici 4y ago
      Bandwidth on Hetzner is really cheap
    • andrewstuart 4y ago
      Ionos
      • openplatypus 4y ago
        IONOS cloud is not so cheap :( It is good performance, but not cheap.
  • 4y ago
• mabbo 4y ago
  My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. Just let [cloud services company] handle it for you until you reach that point. And then when you do reach that point, you get to write the article about how everyone using the cloud are fools because it's cheaper to self host.
  • api 4y ago
    I always tell people to do the spreadsheet. There is a point at which bare metal or colo becomes cheaper and that point will depend on your work load. If it’s outbound bandwidth intensive that point will come sooner than say a storage intensive work load. You always hear stories like this where people didn’t do that and were lazy and massively overpaid on cloud.
    • bsenftner 4y ago
      I am often surprised how people in our field don't run the numbers, so they are not talking nonsense when these hard numbers are so easy to generate. Also, people seem to forget that not all startups are consumer lo-CPU requiring applications. If one has a product that requires non-trivial compute, going immediately colo can be essential. In my own previous startup, my calculations showed an AWS monthly expense of $96K, while I could spend $60K to acquire higher end hardware than AWS to build a server cluster and colocate that for a measly $600 a month.And forget about the "it's hard to run a server, let along a server cluster" propaganda - it is not hard at all.
      • re-thc 4y ago
        Sadly with "microservices" and "microfrontends" and what not, it does become a CPU/memory expenditure. Every split service has overhead and requires some minimal allocation to start its own server, own database etc.
• yonisto 4y ago
  Like in every utility, at certain point of scale it make sense to cut the middle man and do it on your own. Mcdonald's, for example, own potatoes fields. In my current working place, the cloud really saves us money. I would estimate 500k$ a year.
• nprateem 4y ago
  Over the weekend I created a globally distributed CDN pulling data from a globally distributed, auto healing database as a cache. It took a few hours then I tore it all down in 15 minutes, and it probably only cost a few dollars. The cloud trades agility for cost.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > The cloud trades agility for cost. Very true. Did you actually need a globally distributed CDN just for 15 minutes though, or was this a learning/PoC exercise? For any business that has very spiky resource needs (such as this example), the cloud is ideal. I've never been in such a business though, usually there is a fairly predictable (hopefully growing) steady load with small variance.
    • nprateem 4y ago
      POCing a new project that requires fast global performance to be viable.
  • joelrwilliams1 4y ago
    This. We're a small company that used to have a full rack in a colo, and have completely migrated to AWS 6 years ago. Our cloud costs are ~20x what our colo cost was. There are things we use in the cloud (DynamoDB, Aurora, CDN, etc.) that I just don't want to have to build and manage on my own. For us, the managed services are very much worth the extra cost. I couldn't believe how much better life is without having to diagnose failed DB backups.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs which are much, much more expensive and much much slower than consumer grade GPUs. And if you can summarise which parts of your system are incurring traffic costs then you’re beating the deliberately complex systems intended to nickel and dime your architecture every time a byte turns a corner.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    I remember a time when SQL was advertised as "write programs in plain English and fire all your programmers". It ended with the situation where you can't get a job for Oracle SQL if you only know Microsoft SQL. Are we already at a point where you can't get a job as AWS DevOps if you only worked with Azure before?
  • siva7 4y ago
    Sure, cloud is usually more expensive, so is developer time. If your team is wrangling more with the quirks of your own setup instead of the standardized workflow of a paas provider, your calculation won't work in your favour anymore.
    • andrewstuart 4y ago
      I have seen vast amounts of developer effort go into “programming the cloud instead of the application”. It’s complete fiction that somehow developers are freed for all except application coding if the use the cloud.
      • brianmcc 4y ago
        A million application devs who used to write Java and SQL, but now do mostly Terraform, laugh and give a nostalgic sigh...
• 300bps 4y ago
  “Lift and shift” is always more expensive. That is, you will always pay more for cloud servers than you will for on-prem at a certain level of scale. Lift and shift is not really getting the cost benefit of cloud though. As applications get re-architected with serverless technologies like lambda, costs are optimized. The exact amount of resources will pop in and out of existence for the exact amount of time they’re needed.
• loxdalen 4y ago
  Using cloud is renting hardware (and maintenance, and redundancy), of course someone is making a profit from it.
• samelrici 4y ago
  Why don't companies just use hosting services such as Hetzner? way cheaper expecially for bandwidth, you don't have to pay the hardware costs, and you can scale
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    It misses the coolness factor. And the engineers need to put cloud on CV.
  • harshitaneja 4y ago
    I love Hetzner and keep a couple of machines running for prototypes and running scripts. But I can't use it for production or as my primary remote development environment because for someone in India the latency is way too high. I really wish they had Indian datacenter or any similar alternative. The ones in the country are at least 4x priced with still worse specs and much worse reliability and service. If anyone knows any good option in India, I would start using them for me and clients in a heartbeat. Until then, I am stuck with AWS.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    Plenty of companies to that, have rented bare metal, have owned bare metal, etc. It's just not a very visible practice and not backed by armies of marketers.
  • pritambarhate 4y ago
    Many enterprises use cloud because the cloud offers a very high level of compliance. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ The hosting providers which provide similar level of compliance are not cheap either.
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  In the event of a fire: - In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running. - On prem, your company is essentially dead. If you want to deploy to another region: - In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template. - On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.
  • teerak 4y ago
    You really haven't looked into the possibilities with dedicated hardware vendors in a very long time.
  • luizcdc 4y ago
    Servers on premise with regular backups stored in the cloud can still be cheaper than offloading all your compute, storage and backup to AWS.
    • iLoveOncall 4y ago
      The problem is not having the backups, it's restoring them. How do you restore backups when you have no servers to restore them on because they all burnt down?
      • ericd 4y ago
        You trivially and quickly lease them from Hetzner, OVH, or literally any of the other shops that lease out dedicated servers? Or large cloud instances. I don’t understand why you’re artificially constraining this? When we had colo’d servers, we still used cloud services where it made sense (especially S3, scaling storage sucks). I don’t think people are arguing for never using anything but your own equipment.
  • doubled112 4y ago
    I worked at a software shop that survived not one but two fires. This was before cloud.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  True, but the cloud is more modern. You want your startup to be cool and modern, not doing things like they did in 2000s, even if it saves you money.
• dTal 4y ago
  If cloud was cheaper than on-prem, all the cloud providers would simply rent from other cloud providers in an infinite regress asymptoting to 0 cost. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/
• ilikerashers 4y ago
  These articles are usually pretty honest and non-controversial but bring out all the AWS brainwashed "Cloud Transformation" consultants. They cling to a set of vendor principles drummed into them and can't seem to view other angles. Good 'ole Enterprise IT.
  • teerak 4y ago
    "AWS Well-Architected Framework" aka overengineer your service for optimal cash burn (hint: optimal for AWS).
  • nostrebored 4y ago
    This comment is very ironic in context, especially with the makeup of comments on the article. There are passionate people on both sides and usually pretty good reasons for both.
    • ilikerashers 4y ago
      I think the perceived laggard side is less enthused to engage in the debate. On lots of public forums, there will be plenty of characters telling you to use Rust/Crypto/Serverless/AI for everything. Fair enough, they are cool technologies but don't blow up your business for them.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  People are scared they have to pay for managing servers but they end up paying more for managing the cloud.
• alephnerd 4y ago
  Why are people on here so militantly pro- or anti- On-Prem/Cloud? (Rhetorical question) It's so god damn annoying. Either works depending on your usecase.
  • dpkirchner 4y ago
    Everyone is smarter than everyone else, and damn it, you're going to hear about it.
• jonfw 4y ago
  Does anybody have experience with hybrid cloud? It seems to me that having colo machines for your base loads would be the cheapest, having cloud machines available for flexibility would alleviate scalability / business continunity concerns, and then having them all on cloud networking would allow integration of the managed data services, etc.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    I think everybody that has bare metal does this. It's cheaper to use DO or whoever for the small stuff than to manage your own VM hosting stack. The integrated network stuff imho is just for people who can't implement proper transport and application layer security.
• sgjohnson 4y ago
  It's true even for hobbyist-scale. I can rent 1/3rd of a rack at Hetzner facility in Helsinki for €120/month. They'll even throw in a BGP session, 1gbit uplink and 2TB of traffic for free. Sure, I need to put a physical server in there, but it's not hard to get something decent for €300-ish on ebay. And €120/month is nothing for rack space when comparing to how easy it is to rack up an AWS bill. Also, it's 14U space, so scaling is also quite trivial. And this is Hetzner, getting a 2U space in some local datacenter might be even cheaper. I'm actually strongly considering doing this, cause currently I'm renting 2 dedis from them at about €90/month. If I need more capacity, it's definitely going to be cheaper in the long run to just colocate.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, why go with a rack rather than just renting a server from them? At hobbyist scale this would be more cost-effective no? FYI they can give you 10Gbps uplinks on their servers too for an extra fee, no need for colo.
    • sgjohnson 4y ago
      They offer BGP sessions only to colo customers, and I have my own IPv6 space that I want to use. If they suddenly decided to offer BGP for dedi customers too, colo would no longer look that attractive.
• ckozlowski 4y ago
  There's a major element missing from these discussions, and I'm stunned I don't see it in the comments either. And that is, ...what happens when things go wrong? One of the major advantages of cloud, be it AWS, Azure, GCP, etc, is the ability to bridge across failure domains. Properly architected, a workload can be resilient in the face of data center outages and circuit breaks. To me, these savings from operating in a single colo are living on borrowed time. Because they're one data center fire or cable break away from failure. Can the workload survive a sudden outage for hours? A day? Will it survive a loss of the data center and implementation of the business continuity plan? (There is a plan, right?) Every organization is different of course, and not everyone needs active-active failover, or 4-nines of availability, etc. But when figures of $400m start getting thrown around, I can't imagine it's in a state where "oh, we'll just rebuild it elsewhere" is the plan. Show me where they achieve these savings and still have a viable DR/COOP, and I'll be impressed. Disclaimer: I'm a TAM for AWS
  • jjav 4y ago
    > ...what happens when things go wrong? The same that happens when things go wrong with AWS (just cheaper). One can of course engineer for any level of redundancy the business needs, whether on colo or cloud. Or not, as in most cases. We had four multi-hour outages due to AWS being down last year.
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    You can also use more than one COLO or have your DR stuff located in the cloud provider of your choice :-)
  • dboreham 4y ago
    You use more than one colo. Nothing about not using AWS says you need to not care about HA.
  • weberer 4y ago
    >But when figures of $400m start getting thrown around, I can't imagine it's in a state where "oh, we'll just rebuild it elsewhere" is the plan. If you're operating at that scale, you're likely to be operating in multiple data centers with load balancers already.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Another aspect, not mentioned in the article, is that you can arrange to have machines with hardware resources specifically tailored to your workload. e.g. AWS can't get you a box with 20T of NVMe storage. So if you have a workload that needs 20T of fast storage, hosted on AWS the system architecture is different : you're using NAS which has much higher latency so now you're probably using more machines, which is less efficient, and of course much more costly.
  • q1w2 4y ago
    As an old-school co-founder, honestly, I just enjoy managing the infra. Sometimes there are issues and outages, but I'm offline maybe 3-4 hours per year - no big deal. It's about 1/4th the price (for the equivalent performance).
  • partyindiok 4y ago
    While I know what you mean, you can totally get 20TiB+ of NVME local to the machines you get from AWS
• donutshop 4y ago
  I think there's a sweetspot where Equinix Metal fits in.
• exabrial 4y ago
  My problem has been hiring a person that has experience with colocation and knowing all the ins/outs of hardware maintenance and keeping DC operations alive. It's a skill set that disappeared with AWS "engineering" became a thing unfortunately.
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    And this is exactly why I am making sure I keep this skillset (I am relatively young). Not that I am one of those people that is all in for on prem and anti cloud - both have their place. But knowing hardware I think will eventually become a more valued skill once all of the people your talking about finally do retire.
    • exabrial 4y ago
      It’s definitely working with hardware, but more of working with operations that I’m concerned about! What needs to be done at what regular intervals. In addition, what are things to inspect at potential hosting sites, etc.
• margorczynski 4y ago
  A question - doesn't using any US cloud provider mean that your data is accessible to all sorts of 3 letter agencies without any warrant and informing you about the fact it was accessed?