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Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy? TANSTAAFL 1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction. 2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can
by brudgers 3y ago
Doesn’t this imply that it’s better to rent than to buy?
TANSTAAFL
1. Physical hardware is a useful abstraction.
2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course).
3. Rents can go up. Terms and Conditions can change. Credit cards can expire or be cancelled. In other words, renting introduces a significant dependency.
4. You are your own most important customer. Statistically, you are not The Clouds's most important customer. When The Clouds has a fault, it gets resolved based on its business model.
Engineering decisions are specific to a specific problem and all of them come with tradeoffs.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>2. At the end of a three year cycle, you can sell something you own. (This has associated costs of course). This is huge and often overlooked or undervalued. Renting means you have nothing when the contract ends, buying means you have something for your money spent.
- alphabeta2023 3y ago[dead]
- cduzz 3y agoA 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. I'm not going to lose sleep over not getting firmware updates; when they've got all the bugs on my stuff ironed out I don't want more firmware updates. I haven't done the spreadsheet work to identify the cross-over point for where old systems become uneconomical but when I've done it in the past for my heavily clustered workloads it's typically better to buy an off-lease server that's 3 years old and run it for another 8 years, than it is to forklift all my infrastructure every 3 years chasing the newest generation thing. Certainly the cloud's got some advantages, but running equipment until it's really old is also pretty good too. I'd bet that AWS doesn't throw older systems out just because they're old.
- CapeTheory 3y agoDo you happen to have a preferred source for these 3-year old off-lease servers?
- Slartie 3y ago> A 3 year depreciation cycle may be reasonable for some spaces but not others. Exactly. I am running a server at Hetzner which has a CPU that was discontinued about 7 years ago. I don't know the exact age of the machine because it was already used when I got it 4 years ago, but based on the CPU availability it's at least 7 or 8 years old, potentially even older. Nothing on that machine has failed in the last 4 years except for HDDs (the spinning platter type), which are immediately swapped when broken, RAID rebuilds, everything's fine. 3 years is no time for hardware nowadays. It can live much longer, especially if storage is solid-state. And the performance improvements often aren't substantial enough to warrant a swap within anything shorter than 5 or 6 years.
- k8sToGo 3y agoYou forgot that Hetzner also has spare parts.
- brudgers 3y agoAnd Dells have warranties. And both offer service agreements. And Hetzner is a straight line expense while a Dell might be a depreciating asset. And either both or neither may offer discounts off retail. And so on. Because that’s the nature of actual decisions versus online arguments.
- k8sToGo 3y agoIf you want to host your own stuff then you have to have spare parts in stock. Not the same as waiting for dell to RMA your GPU over days.
- chrisweekly 3y ago> TANSTAAFL "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (I had to look it up, figure I'll save someone else yhe trouble)