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Sounds like a cool hack, but why not just self-host with on-premises hardware, or rent a cloud server from a hosting provider like e.g. Digitalocean? Then you w

Sounds like a cool hack, but why not just self-host with on-premises hardware, or rent a cloud server from a hosting provider like e.g. Digitalocean? Then you wouldn't have to worry so much about what Microsoft wants, no?

bob1029 3y ago
PII is a monster. We'd prefer our customers take charge of that. The goldilocks is running our stack on a tenant our customers are owners of. This way, everything is 100% consistent across the board and liability is on them. We've got some experience with on-prem IT shops that have taken way more out of us than we probably should have allowed. Every one of their issues with getting our software to run in prod was unhappy in its own special way.
theshrike79 3y ago
Good old HN, "just self-host with onprem". Who monitors it 24/7 and checks the alerts? Who drives to the data center to fix broken hardware on Christmas Day? It has to be multiple "whos" or one sick leave will leave you completely vulnerable. For small-medium companies whose main business isn't hosting software this makes it untenable from a financial point of view. For the monthly salary of a single SRE/devops/admin whatever you can run AWS services for a year at that scale.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Basecamp is a small-medium company and leaving the cloud was a huge win for them: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Basecamp is an anomaly on pretty much every vector imaginable. They have been remote-first (remote-only?) since forever, they still use Ruby in production, have never taken VC money and they've never even tried to do a hockey stick growth unicorn hack. They're still under 40 people.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      None of which provide any legitimate reason for dismissing their savings.
      - theshrike79 3y ago
        The point is that Basecamp is an unicorn, they've been special since their inception and can do stuff that a regular 40 person company could never even dare to try.
        vidarh 3y ago
        There's nothing daring or special about picking a cheaper alternative and/or looking at how they're achieving what they're doing. There are huge numbers of people who will run the devops side for you on retainer - this is not a special setup nor a rare skillset.
  - jakubmazanec 3y ago
    But Basecamp's business is hosting software.
- vidarh 3y ago
  It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. Marginally easier for actual on prem or colocated setups because there is more room for error. The devops time you need to provide to manage most cloud setups is generally far higher than what it'd cost you to get someone to manage your managed servers both in time and retainers to have someone to escalate to. When I was consulting, cloud focused customers were gold dust because they needed so much more help and had no notion of cost control. The idea that cloud is cheap is pure fiction from people who haven't run and costed both. Put another way: The notion that anyone needs to drive to the data centre reflects a very outdated idea of both.the alternatives and the support options available if you actually choose to own the servers rather than rent managed servers. I used to manage a setup spread over multiple data centers, and the only visits to the data centre were scheduled trips 3-4 times a year. We regularly priced out cloud alternatives, and every time it'd have bankrupted the company if we'd switched. I love using cloud when working places with margins enough to afford it, but it's an expensive luxury and the idea it's a cost saving really needs to die, because it takes a really large setup where you have power to demand crazy discounts, and a lot of engineering, to even get close to break even against a moderately competently set up managed setup.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    > It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. So, I've got 6 different backend services running as monolithic Lambda functions. They all must be up for a number of nines per year, each going down will cost our company actual money for every second of downtime. They've never been down except when AWS broke something - and then the customers couldn't have accessed them anyway. Can you tell me how I can host 6 services that can't be on the same machine in a managed system cheaper than my current setup? 6 servers, preferably each duplicated. We'll assume that all the other AWS services we use can "just" be replicated in managed hosting too. (DynamoDB, S3, Aurora and a bunch of others).
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Without more details I can't give you numbers, but I've gone through this with countless customers. Every time I offered to do the work for a percentage of savings. Unfortunately most of them did the maths and had me bill by the hour instead. I've yet to come across a setup where we couldn't trivially halve costs. Often you can halve costs over a well optimized AWS setup (most AWS setups are nowhere near well optimized, and most AWS customers haven't even caught on to the ability to start pushing for discounts once their bills are high enough; you can still beat that with more traditional setups) even while just migrating to cheaper cloud services elsewhere. Often the cheapest is a hybrid, because it allows you to benefit from the resiliency of cloud providers while only rarely having to put any load that costs on them. I get that you've left out a lot of details, but what you describe is not a complex setup. Try thousands of VMs over multiple countries with dozens of database and everything replicated at minimum in three locations, and with zero downtime migration of loads between countries on a hybrid setup across multiple providers, several colo facilities and managed hosting providers. Even with the fully loaded devops cost a setup like that came out at less than just the egress bandwidth would've cost us at AWS. There are plenty of loads where cloud providers are the right choices, but they are almost never a cheap choice, and when they are, AWS and tge other big ones are rarely even breaking the top 5 cheapest cloud options.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

bob1029 3y ago

PII is a monster. We'd prefer our customers take charge of that. The goldilocks is running our stack on a tenant our customers are owners of. This way, everything is 100% consistent across the board and liability is on them. We've got some experience with on-prem IT shops that have taken way more out of us than we probably should have allowed. Every one of their issues with getting our software to run in prod was unhappy in its own special way.

theshrike79 3y ago

Good old HN, "just self-host with onprem". Who monitors it 24/7 and checks the alerts? Who drives to the data center to fix broken hardware on Christmas Day? It has to be multiple "whos" or one sick leave will leave you completely vulnerable. For small-medium companies whose main business isn't hosting software this makes it untenable from a financial point of view. For the monthly salary of a single SRE/devops/admin whatever you can run AWS services for a year at that scale.

AlchemistCamp 3y ago
Basecamp is a small-medium company and leaving the cloud was a huge win for them: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Basecamp is an anomaly on pretty much every vector imaginable. They have been remote-first (remote-only?) since forever, they still use Ruby in production, have never taken VC money and they've never even tried to do a hockey stick growth unicorn hack. They're still under 40 people.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    None of which provide any legitimate reason for dismissing their savings.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      The point is that Basecamp is an unicorn, they've been special since their inception and can do stuff that a regular 40 person company could never even dare to try.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        There's nothing daring or special about picking a cheaper alternative and/or looking at how they're achieving what they're doing. There are huge numbers of people who will run the devops side for you on retainer - this is not a special setup nor a rare skillset.
- jakubmazanec 3y ago
  But Basecamp's business is hosting software.
vidarh 3y ago
It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. Marginally easier for actual on prem or colocated setups because there is more room for error. The devops time you need to provide to manage most cloud setups is generally far higher than what it'd cost you to get someone to manage your managed servers both in time and retainers to have someone to escalate to. When I was consulting, cloud focused customers were gold dust because they needed so much more help and had no notion of cost control. The idea that cloud is cheap is pure fiction from people who haven't run and costed both. Put another way: The notion that anyone needs to drive to the data centre reflects a very outdated idea of both.the alternatives and the support options available if you actually choose to own the servers rather than rent managed servers. I used to manage a setup spread over multiple data centers, and the only visits to the data centre were scheduled trips 3-4 times a year. We regularly priced out cloud alternatives, and every time it'd have bankrupted the company if we'd switched. I love using cloud when working places with margins enough to afford it, but it's an expensive luxury and the idea it's a cost saving really needs to die, because it takes a really large setup where you have power to demand crazy discounts, and a lot of engineering, to even get close to break even against a moderately competently set up managed setup.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  > It's basically impossible to make managed hosting more expensive than cloud. So, I've got 6 different backend services running as monolithic Lambda functions. They all must be up for a number of nines per year, each going down will cost our company actual money for every second of downtime. They've never been down except when AWS broke something - and then the customers couldn't have accessed them anyway. Can you tell me how I can host 6 services that can't be on the same machine in a managed system cheaper than my current setup? 6 servers, preferably each duplicated. We'll assume that all the other AWS services we use can "just" be replicated in managed hosting too. (DynamoDB, S3, Aurora and a bunch of others).
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Without more details I can't give you numbers, but I've gone through this with countless customers. Every time I offered to do the work for a percentage of savings. Unfortunately most of them did the maths and had me bill by the hour instead. I've yet to come across a setup where we couldn't trivially halve costs. Often you can halve costs over a well optimized AWS setup (most AWS setups are nowhere near well optimized, and most AWS customers haven't even caught on to the ability to start pushing for discounts once their bills are high enough; you can still beat that with more traditional setups) even while just migrating to cheaper cloud services elsewhere. Often the cheapest is a hybrid, because it allows you to benefit from the resiliency of cloud providers while only rarely having to put any load that costs on them. I get that you've left out a lot of details, but what you describe is not a complex setup. Try thousands of VMs over multiple countries with dozens of database and everything replicated at minimum in three locations, and with zero downtime migration of loads between countries on a hybrid setup across multiple providers, several colo facilities and managed hosting providers. Even with the fully loaded devops cost a setup like that came out at less than just the egress bandwidth would've cost us at AWS. There are plenty of loads where cloud providers are the right choices, but they are almost never a cheap choice, and when they are, AWS and tge other big ones are rarely even breaking the top 5 cheapest cloud options.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]