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In-house IT isn't up to the task of building systems that are infinitely scalable but as the price goes up lots and lots of shops are going to realize they don'

In-house IT isn't up to the task of building systems that are infinitely scalable but as the price goes up lots and lots of shops are going to realize they don't need infinitely scalable, they need the scale they're at and have no reason to want to grow it. In-house IT is great at that.

api 3y ago
I feel like people also haven’t updated their mental models from 20 years ago about what a small server can do. A Raspberry Pi 5 has more power than a huge NT back office server in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The cloud hid 20 years of progress more or less. Things got more powerful but cloud prices didn’t come down at the same rate. Cloud providers pocketed the difference. The void for on prem is mostly in the software. There just aren’t good management solutions or modern devops stacks for it. The hardware is way more than adequate. It’s also a lot more reliable than it used to be. Spinning disk is dead unless you are warehousing massive amounts of data.
- bandrami 3y ago
  On a lark a made a Ceph cluster a couple of years ago with a dozen RPis, a dozen commodity 1TB USB drives, and a SO/HO switch and... it worked. Like, it was a joke project one afternoon but suddenly we had a 3X redundant 4TB S3 pool that was faster than our WAN connection and just took switching out a HD or RPi once a quarter or so whenever Nagios lit up that one had failed.
  - api 3y ago
    Yep, but companies need to pay tens or hundreds of thousands a month for AWS to run it for them. I feel like we are ripe for another turn of the on-prem/off-prem wheel. Then, of course, once it's all back on-prem we will once again have price gouging monopolies (probably in software) and someone will have the bright idea of moving everything to... what will they call it next time? Maybe "the grid" instead of "the cloud?"
Ekaros 3y ago
And what is the ratio of services that need to scale infinitely to those that do not? At least if you are for example in more traditional internal software development?
- bandrami 3y ago
  Almost none do. Internal software never does. External-facing software only does if the intended user base is "the world".

api 3y ago

I feel like people also haven’t updated their mental models from 20 years ago about what a small server can do. A Raspberry Pi 5 has more power than a huge NT back office server in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The cloud hid 20 years of progress more or less. Things got more powerful but cloud prices didn’t come down at the same rate. Cloud providers pocketed the difference. The void for on prem is mostly in the software. There just aren’t good management solutions or modern devops stacks for it. The hardware is way more than adequate. It’s also a lot more reliable than it used to be. Spinning disk is dead unless you are warehousing massive amounts of data.

bandrami 3y ago
On a lark a made a Ceph cluster a couple of years ago with a dozen RPis, a dozen commodity 1TB USB drives, and a SO/HO switch and... it worked. Like, it was a joke project one afternoon but suddenly we had a 3X redundant 4TB S3 pool that was faster than our WAN connection and just took switching out a HD or RPi once a quarter or so whenever Nagios lit up that one had failed.
- api 3y ago
  Yep, but companies need to pay tens or hundreds of thousands a month for AWS to run it for them. I feel like we are ripe for another turn of the on-prem/off-prem wheel. Then, of course, once it's all back on-prem we will once again have price gouging monopolies (probably in software) and someone will have the bright idea of moving everything to... what will they call it next time? Maybe "the grid" instead of "the cloud?"

Ekaros 3y ago

And what is the ratio of services that need to scale infinitely to those that do not? At least if you are for example in more traditional internal software development?

bandrami 3y ago
Almost none do. Internal software never does. External-facing software only does if the intended user base is "the world".