4 ms·

Downvoted? Really?

by efitz 3y ago

Downvoted? Really?

throwaway14356 3y ago
I dunno, I suspect hosting and cloud became one and the same thing some place in your post. From what I understand you need both a large or complex computational load and a lot of traffic before clouds should become the weapon of choice. But Im not entirely sure.
oceanplexian 3y ago
I don’t think you deserve a downvote but I can give you my take having worked at a lot of places that did their own infra as well as cloud. You don’t need to physically rack servers, lots of systems integration vendors and remote hands will gladly put servers together for you. Most colos will gladly help you figure out connectivity. And there are lots of vendors, like Cisco, who will deliver a rack to your datacenter with virtualization software installed and everything, plug and play.. My point is there isn’t an either/or choice of using the cloud or building the universe from scratch, there are so many available options in-between. And while those options aren’t available conveniently behind an API and might require a few old school phone calls, you can save millions of dollars, get access to better performing hardware, have better control over data sovereignty, and 90%less lock-in if you choose to go down that road. It’s not for everyone but a /lot/ of workloads that people are running in the cloud can be done better elsewhere.
electroly 3y ago
(I did not downvote you.) The person you're replying to is definitely overly flippant, but you've taken a sort of Gish gallop approach where you think if you list enough individual things that have to be done, that'll be overwhelming evidence that it's impossibly difficult. But the things you've listed aren't as hard as you want them to be on reasonable small business scales. We are a company with 4 IT employees including myself, and two of us alone (both full-time programmers) handled our hybrid cloud migration. We rented a rack in a colocation facility. I learned how to design racks in a couple days and did the rack design myself. We bought servers from Dell and network equipment from Meraki. The colo facility found us an inexpensive contractor who racked and stacked everything to my design, and remote hands does any ongoing hardware maintenance. The other guy had an old, outdated CCNA and he designed the network. We got a fiber connection to AWS up and running for a hybrid cloud approach. All of this was very doable for a part-time two-man team with other job responsibilities and we're saving a ton of money for database and workstation hosting--big, expensive, totally static workloads. Perfect for on-prem. The ongoing savings vs. pure AWS exceeds my own salary. It was clear from the outset that we could accomplish this. I wouldn't have signed us up for a boondoggle. Certainly, there are more demanding configurations where the complexity would be too high, but people act like on-prem is literally impossible without a team of dedicated staff in every case. It's not. It can be doable.
- efitz 3y ago
  A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever. On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all the skills to originally stand it up. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you make a bunch of resource trade-offs, usually by not implementing stuff that you’ll never need (until you do). That was the point I was trying to make. As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over. As other a have pointed out, other benefits are scale-on-demand, pay only for what you use, and agility - if you have a great idea you don’t have to do a PO and wait months for a server.
  - electroly 3y ago
    How many more years do you suppose we need to run on-prem before you can accept that we understand our needs? It's been 10+. We've been running on-prem for a lot longer than we've been running in AWS. Again, there's this sort of paternalistic suggestion that people can't possibly understand how to run on-prem. But we've always been on-prem. We've always maintained a SQL Server cluster. AWS is the new thing. AWS vs. on-prem is always a tradeoff. You have to look at the costs and benefits for your particular situation to decide which is best. We decided to go with both, because AWS has benefits for our dynamic workloads and on-prem has savings for our static workloads.
  - tpetry 3y ago
    The cloud has the same problem but in a different color. One employee created and managed everything in AWS and then quits. You have the same problem that nobody really knows how to continue from that point. Why was it built that way? Why are the IAM rules like that? etc.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      Exactly. It actually makes this problem worse bc cloud apis lower the skill level requirement to the point that people who don’t know what they’re doing can create a lot of unmanageable headache in very short time span

Downvoted? Really?

by efitz 3y ago

Downvoted? Really?

I dunno, I suspect hosting and cloud became one and the same thing some place in your post. From what I understand you need both a large or complex computational load and a lot of traffic before clouds should become the weapon of choice. But Im not entirely sure.

oceanplexian 3y ago

I don’t think you deserve a downvote but I can give you my take having worked at a lot of places that did their own infra as well as cloud. You don’t need to physically rack servers, lots of systems integration vendors and remote hands will gladly put servers together for you. Most colos will gladly help you figure out connectivity. And there are lots of vendors, like Cisco, who will deliver a rack to your datacenter with virtualization software installed and everything, plug and play.. My point is there isn’t an either/or choice of using the cloud or building the universe from scratch, there are so many available options in-between. And while those options aren’t available conveniently behind an API and might require a few old school phone calls, you can save millions of dollars, get access to better performing hardware, have better control over data sovereignty, and 90%less lock-in if you choose to go down that road. It’s not for everyone but a /lot/ of workloads that people are running in the cloud can be done better elsewhere.

electroly 3y ago

(I did not downvote you.) The person you're replying to is definitely overly flippant, but you've taken a sort of Gish gallop approach where you think if you list enough individual things that have to be done, that'll be overwhelming evidence that it's impossibly difficult. But the things you've listed aren't as hard as you want them to be on reasonable small business scales. We are a company with 4 IT employees including myself, and two of us alone (both full-time programmers) handled our hybrid cloud migration. We rented a rack in a colocation facility. I learned how to design racks in a couple days and did the rack design myself. We bought servers from Dell and network equipment from Meraki. The colo facility found us an inexpensive contractor who racked and stacked everything to my design, and remote hands does any ongoing hardware maintenance. The other guy had an old, outdated CCNA and he designed the network. We got a fiber connection to AWS up and running for a hybrid cloud approach. All of this was very doable for a part-time two-man team with other job responsibilities and we're saving a ton of money for database and workstation hosting--big, expensive, totally static workloads. Perfect for on-prem. The ongoing savings vs. pure AWS exceeds my own salary. It was clear from the outset that we could accomplish this. I wouldn't have signed us up for a boondoggle. Certainly, there are more demanding configurations where the complexity would be too high, but people act like on-prem is literally impossible without a team of dedicated staff in every case. It's not. It can be doable.

efitz 3y ago
A recurring anti-pattern I have seen over and over is the app that is built and runs on a developer desktop, then becomes business critical and needs to scale and evolve, and eventually fails catastrophically. Maybe the SQL database design or storage system isn’t capable of handling the new I/O requirements. Maybe the creator quits and nobody else knows how it works. Whatever. On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all the skills to originally stand it up. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you make a bunch of resource trade-offs, usually by not implementing stuff that you’ll never need (until you do). That was the point I was trying to make. As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over. As other a have pointed out, other benefits are scale-on-demand, pay only for what you use, and agility - if you have a great idea you don’t have to do a PO and wait months for a server.
- electroly 3y ago
  How many more years do you suppose we need to run on-prem before you can accept that we understand our needs? It's been 10+. We've been running on-prem for a lot longer than we've been running in AWS. Again, there's this sort of paternalistic suggestion that people can't possibly understand how to run on-prem. But we've always been on-prem. We've always maintained a SQL Server cluster. AWS is the new thing. AWS vs. on-prem is always a tradeoff. You have to look at the costs and benefits for your particular situation to decide which is best. We decided to go with both, because AWS has benefits for our dynamic workloads and on-prem has savings for our static workloads.
- tpetry 3y ago
  The cloud has the same problem but in a different color. One employee created and managed everything in AWS and then quits. You have the same problem that nobody really knows how to continue from that point. Why was it built that way? Why are the IAM rules like that? etc.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Exactly. It actually makes this problem worse bc cloud apis lower the skill level requirement to the point that people who don’t know what they’re doing can create a lot of unmanageable headache in very short time span