5 ms·

So your organisation is so inefficient that it’s easier to just engage a third party to syphon off any profitability?

by piker 3y ago

belval 3y ago
> your organisation is so inefficient Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements. For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can have everything on-prem and hope that your IT department actually understand the security and privacy boundaries or have everything in AWS and be compliant because they conform to the standard by default. > syphon off any profitability For most of those businesses software is not the profitable bit, it's a cost center like most other things that serve to support operations. In that context, migrating your code to AWS/GCP/Azure means very little cost inflation.
- ilc 3y ago
  Just because AWS is HIPAA compliant, doesn't mean what you do there is :). But at least it solves the basics.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    I think their point is that it gives you a relatively stable env, and allows you to be the one deploying and configuring infrastructure. Anything that can be miscommunicated to client on-prem deployment staff will be, in a lot of cases breaking guarantees like HIPAA compliance.
  - jeanlou 3y ago
    That's just nitpicking
    - ilc 3y ago
      Not really. So much of HIPAA is actually getting the administration right.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale Simply using AWS doesn't do anything to help with this in that same long run. Give it a decade or two and those same organizations will suddenly have multiple bureaucratic departments to approve new AWS resources and spending. All AWS is offering is a channel that a bureaucratic process hasn't been developed for _yet_ and the organizations hivemind response is to allow its usage freely because it doesn't fit in the existing form template of rules
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >Give it a decade or two A decade or two is someone else's problem.
  - jeanlou 3y ago
    Good luck maintaining your own infra, server, system middle war combo. It's a whole area in itself. Let the specialists do it and focus on your core business. Saying otherwise is just a lack of pragmatism.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
theshrike79 3y ago
I can literally right now, sitting here in my underwear, spin up 4 clustered servers in 3 different continents with a globally replicated object storage and a master + 2 slaves setup of SQL databases on each location. And all that for less than the price of _one_ competent sysadmin's monthly salary. How would you suggest a company would match that with local servers and sysadmins? One sysadmin per 8 hour shift = 3 people for 24 hour rotation, you need 1-2 extra so that if one is sick the others don't need to pull a double. That's $400k a year alone. Then you need to get the 12 identical servers purchased and shipped around the globe to colocation. Now at least one, preferably two, of the admins needs to be a proficient DBA so they can get the replicating SQL running. Now you need to build monitoring for all of that and runbooks on what to do if crap breaks outside of office hours. ..and now a server has kicked the bucket, you need to buy a new one from $vendor, get it delivered and set up in Australia - you're in Michigan. And in some years the servers are underpowered because your business has grown, now you need to buy 12 new ones and get them installed. I can do all that from home without putting on my pants. I might need to grab a shirt if the AWS people want to hop on Zoom for something. =) This is why we use the cloud and managed services, usually it's either out of our hands anyway or already fixed when we manage to log in. For the last two biggest downtimes I've encountered even Meta's crap was offline too (FB, Instagram at least).
- Agingcoder 3y ago
  It depends on the size of your company. If it has 200k employees, you can mutualize the salaries of your dbas. There are also intermediate steps between ´build your own dc’ and ´run everything in was’. You will build monitoring tools anyway, and will most likely have sysadmins too if your fleet is large enough etc. Cloud is not always an obvious win, and depends a lot on where you work
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    At 200k employees and being profitable, you can definitely can start investigating moving to on-prem. And most likely a lot sooner than that. BUT it depends on what field you're in. If you're managing CCPA/GDPR/HIPAA data it's a huge bureaucracy mess to get everything certified. Cloud operators usually have their documented and certified already, you just need to figure out your own part.
jeanlou 3y ago
I sense that you're writing this as if software is an end to itself as opposed to a mean. It's normal to engage with third party, especially for activities that are not part of your core business.

So your organisation is so inefficient that it’s easier to just engage a third party to syphon off any profitability?

by piker 3y ago

So your organisation is so inefficient that it’s easier to just engage a third party to syphon off any profitability?

> your organisation is so inefficient Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements. For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can have everything on-prem and hope that your IT department actually understand the security and privacy boundaries or have everything in AWS and be compliant because they conform to the standard by default. > syphon off any profitability For most of those businesses software is not the profitable bit, it's a cost center like most other things that serve to support operations. In that context, migrating your code to AWS/GCP/Azure means very little cost inflation.

ilc 3y ago
Just because AWS is HIPAA compliant, doesn't mean what you do there is :). But at least it solves the basics.
- monocasa 3y ago
  I think their point is that it gives you a relatively stable env, and allows you to be the one deploying and configuring infrastructure. Anything that can be miscommunicated to client on-prem deployment staff will be, in a lot of cases breaking guarantees like HIPAA compliance.
- jeanlou 3y ago
  That's just nitpicking
  - ilc 3y ago
    Not really. So much of HIPAA is actually getting the administration right.
delfinom 3y ago
>Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale Simply using AWS doesn't do anything to help with this in that same long run. Give it a decade or two and those same organizations will suddenly have multiple bureaucratic departments to approve new AWS resources and spending. All AWS is offering is a channel that a bureaucratic process hasn't been developed for _yet_ and the organizations hivemind response is to allow its usage freely because it doesn't fit in the existing form template of rules
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Give it a decade or two A decade or two is someone else's problem.
- jeanlou 3y ago
  Good luck maintaining your own infra, server, system middle war combo. It's a whole area in itself. Let the specialists do it and focus on your core business. Saying otherwise is just a lack of pragmatism.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

theshrike79 3y ago

I can literally right now, sitting here in my underwear, spin up 4 clustered servers in 3 different continents with a globally replicated object storage and a master + 2 slaves setup of SQL databases on each location. And all that for less than the price of _one_ competent sysadmin's monthly salary. How would you suggest a company would match that with local servers and sysadmins? One sysadmin per 8 hour shift = 3 people for 24 hour rotation, you need 1-2 extra so that if one is sick the others don't need to pull a double. That's $400k a year alone. Then you need to get the 12 identical servers purchased and shipped around the globe to colocation. Now at least one, preferably two, of the admins needs to be a proficient DBA so they can get the replicating SQL running. Now you need to build monitoring for all of that and runbooks on what to do if crap breaks outside of office hours. ..and now a server has kicked the bucket, you need to buy a new one from $vendor, get it delivered and set up in Australia - you're in Michigan. And in some years the servers are underpowered because your business has grown, now you need to buy 12 new ones and get them installed. I can do all that from home without putting on my pants. I might need to grab a shirt if the AWS people want to hop on Zoom for something. =) This is why we use the cloud and managed services, usually it's either out of our hands anyway or already fixed when we manage to log in. For the last two biggest downtimes I've encountered even Meta's crap was offline too (FB, Instagram at least).

Agingcoder 3y ago
It depends on the size of your company. If it has 200k employees, you can mutualize the salaries of your dbas. There are also intermediate steps between ´build your own dc’ and ´run everything in was’. You will build monitoring tools anyway, and will most likely have sysadmins too if your fleet is large enough etc. Cloud is not always an obvious win, and depends a lot on where you work
- theshrike79 3y ago
  At 200k employees and being profitable, you can definitely can start investigating moving to on-prem. And most likely a lot sooner than that. BUT it depends on what field you're in. If you're managing CCPA/GDPR/HIPAA data it's a huge bureaucracy mess to get everything certified. Cloud operators usually have their documented and certified already, you just need to figure out your own part.

jeanlou 3y ago

I sense that you're writing this as if software is an end to itself as opposed to a mean. It's normal to engage with third party, especially for activities that are not part of your core business.