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Back in 2007ish the CEO of Parallels/SWSoft (the company behind Virtuozzo a very popular hypervisor used back in the day) stood on the stage of the keynote of H

by jdoss 3y ago

Back in 2007ish the CEO of Parallels/SWSoft (the company behind Virtuozzo a very popular hypervisor used back in the day) stood on the stage of the keynote of HostingCon and said that the Cloud (AWS) was going to eat the WebHosting Industry's lunch. His entire keynote was very doom and gloom. Fast forward to 2015ish it totally it did. The days of VPS and Dedicated hosting being the only options for deploying your stuff for the Internet to consume were killed by the big three cloud providers. In one hand I am very thankful that this caused a boom of innovation and tooling to make engineering operations easier and more accessible to our industry as a whole. If I had the tools I have now, managing 50+ racks in my old datacenter would have been so much easier. But in the other hand, the promises the Cloud providers have shoved down our throats have been used against our Industry with raised prices, reduce freedoms on what providers you can choose, and consolidation of duties on Engineering staff. The average developer has to do more work, across many different domains to get paid well. The war waged to kill off Systems Administration as a core job responsibility and using the DevOps movement to kill FTE count for specialized work on bare metal or datacenter infra keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs. I think this really sucks. I do think this article hits home on some points I have been seeing over the past few years. The costs are too high for the goods provided in comparison to getting a couple of racks in few datacenters and DIY which can for sure work for the right kinds of companies at the right stage of growth. I also think Hybrid deployments of Cloud + Bare Metal in a datacenter is so much more of a viable option for less mature companies. The pendulum is starting to slowly swing back to doing things on Bare Metal. I am excited for the next 10 years of progress and I hope the Cloud still remains a powerful tool in our toolbox, but it isn't used for everything. The cost savings are too real as this article points out when you don't use the cloud and you'd be surprised how much easier it is these days to get some bare metal deployments going in your eng org.

sokoloff 3y ago
> keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs I love that we can use Cloud APIs to do our jobs. That's piles better than negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team to provision you hardware or networking that you don't have much visibility into and then relying on them to troubleshoot. I don't mind paying more for that (which you absolutely do on a per-unit of compute, network, or storage).
- axelthegerman 3y ago
  There is still a massive difference between PaaS and IaaS. I don't think anyone wants to rely on a human to unload a rack from the car, walk into a data center and install it. Doesn't mean that Lambda and hosted kubernetes should be our only alternatives.
- jdoss 3y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I love using them too. They are great for getting something setup quickly when you are getting started. I use some cloud services that support my single datacenter rack I have today. For my expensive workloads, I run them off three beefy bare metal servers in my rack. I'd argue you have less visibility on what is going on at a cloud provider than you did in the past with your Ops team. Support tickets without a massive yearly spend at a cloud provider are pain and suffering. Even with over 1 million/year spend at one of my previous companies, support and visibility on underlying issues was a very poor experience.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    From the developer angle? I'm not so sure. It's an N of 1, but I ran the Ops team for an e-commerce company that you're 50/50 likely to have heard of. I'm proud of how skilled and hard-working my e-comm systems/storage/network/DBA/DC-ops team of around 20 was, and the overall very good operational results we delivered. Even with that, AWS's out of the box offering utterly dominates what we could offer as a medium-sized operation. You might have 5 arbitrary points' worth less visibility behind the scenes, but you need 15 fewer points of visibility behind the scenes. (We're also on enterprise support and have an excellent support & solution architecture team attached to our account, but even for my side projects where I have no support plan whatsoever, I have enough visibility into how to make things work.)
- xethos 3y ago
  > negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team > I don't mind paying more for that I mean, it sounds like this is all through work. So regarding your second point about being okay paying more: are you the one cutting the cheques?
- 3y ago

by jdoss 3y ago

sokoloff 3y ago

> keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs I love that we can use Cloud APIs to do our jobs. That's piles better than negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team to provision you hardware or networking that you don't have much visibility into and then relying on them to troubleshoot. I don't mind paying more for that (which you absolutely do on a per-unit of compute, network, or storage).

axelthegerman 3y ago
There is still a massive difference between PaaS and IaaS. I don't think anyone wants to rely on a human to unload a rack from the car, walk into a data center and install it. Doesn't mean that Lambda and hosted kubernetes should be our only alternatives.
jdoss 3y ago
Don't get me wrong, I love using them too. They are great for getting something setup quickly when you are getting started. I use some cloud services that support my single datacenter rack I have today. For my expensive workloads, I run them off three beefy bare metal servers in my rack. I'd argue you have less visibility on what is going on at a cloud provider than you did in the past with your Ops team. Support tickets without a massive yearly spend at a cloud provider are pain and suffering. Even with over 1 million/year spend at one of my previous companies, support and visibility on underlying issues was a very poor experience.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  From the developer angle? I'm not so sure. It's an N of 1, but I ran the Ops team for an e-commerce company that you're 50/50 likely to have heard of. I'm proud of how skilled and hard-working my e-comm systems/storage/network/DBA/DC-ops team of around 20 was, and the overall very good operational results we delivered. Even with that, AWS's out of the box offering utterly dominates what we could offer as a medium-sized operation. You might have 5 arbitrary points' worth less visibility behind the scenes, but you need 15 fewer points of visibility behind the scenes. (We're also on enterprise support and have an excellent support & solution architecture team attached to our account, but even for my side projects where I have no support plan whatsoever, I have enough visibility into how to make things work.)
xethos 3y ago
> negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team > I don't mind paying more for that I mean, it sounds like this is all through work. So regarding your second point about being okay paying more: are you the one cutting the cheques?
3y ago