3 ms·

Best of luck running your own data center properly. It's a massive pain in the hoop.

atoav 3y ago
Most university IT departments I know manage just fine to do this. Allthough I get the idea of paying others to run your servers (I do so myself), I am somewhat puzzled that people so readily want to move on from the option of selfhosting. Knowing how to do things yourself has its own value. This reminds me a bit of developers who can't write anything useful without using a framework. There is life outside of frameworks and life outside of the cloud. These are the technological foundations of being able to do anything we are doing. Granted, it can be useful to outsource these parts, but that doesn't come without it's very own short and long term costs, it strengthens some market asymmetries that you maybe don't wanna strengthen, it let's your organization forget to do things that are the basis of your business and so on. I don't say everybody has to run their own infra, just that the work of doing so can pay off in different ways — and whether these trade offs are worth it depends entirely on the nature of your endevour.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  It depends on what level of "run your own infra" were talking about here. Like, purchasing hardware, racking and connecting, coming up with a nice way to PXE build your fleet and a way to manage the OS and config (chef/ansible/puppet/nix?), before implementing a complete monitoring stack that works on network equipment, raid controllers etc, and then bootstrapping your own Kubernetes cluster or hashistack (or pretending that you don't need complexity, but over time cobbling together your own unique undocumented mess). It's a huge amount of work that startups usually can't afford. The time and effort to do it properly is monstrous. You need to be a company of a certain size to devote the required engineering and support staff to it.

Most university IT departments I know manage just fine to do this. Allthough I get the idea of paying others to run your servers (I do so myself), I am somewhat puzzled that people so readily want to move on from the option of selfhosting. Knowing how to do things yourself has its own value. This reminds me a bit of developers who can't write anything useful without using a framework. There is life outside of frameworks and life outside of the cloud. These are the technological foundations of being able to do anything we are doing. Granted, it can be useful to outsource these parts, but that doesn't come without it's very own short and long term costs, it strengthens some market asymmetries that you maybe don't wanna strengthen, it let's your organization forget to do things that are the basis of your business and so on. I don't say everybody has to run their own infra, just that the work of doing so can pay off in different ways — and whether these trade offs are worth it depends entirely on the nature of your endevour.

raffraffraff 3y ago
It depends on what level of "run your own infra" were talking about here. Like, purchasing hardware, racking and connecting, coming up with a nice way to PXE build your fleet and a way to manage the OS and config (chef/ansible/puppet/nix?), before implementing a complete monitoring stack that works on network equipment, raid controllers etc, and then bootstrapping your own Kubernetes cluster or hashistack (or pretending that you don't need complexity, but over time cobbling together your own unique undocumented mess). It's a huge amount of work that startups usually can't afford. The time and effort to do it properly is monstrous. You need to be a company of a certain size to devote the required engineering and support staff to it.