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Running your own data center is just a PITA no one wants to do. Non-C-levels just love to ignore the costs you have when doing such a thing by just comparing ha

Running your own data center is just a PITA no one wants to do. Non-C-levels just love to ignore the costs you have when doing such a thing by just comparing hardware costs to the cloud costs. There's always the liability aspect, managing less people, externalizing some complexity to another company etc. etc. All worth a lot of money, at least for me personally. I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage hardware lifecycles, fire stuff, more engineers etc. etc. You deal with enough complexity nowadays already. I'd say that if you really want to have hardware on your own, you get the right people to do the job for you. CTOs are not managing that on the floor. So I'm not sure it's the real reason.

CoolCold 2y ago
> Running your own data center is just a PITA I believe in the article they clearly say they just use colo, not running own DCs > I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage hardware lifecycles, fire stuff, more engineers etc. etc. You deal with enough complexity nowadays already. This looks strange to me, to focus on software but not on company goals, one of them quite often is to increase profits/decrease spending. Focus on software may happen on lower level of responsibility from my PoV. No offense, but for me it sounds like someone having talent for bakery and cooking, decided to open franchise of McDonald's, becoming General Manager of that shop and then suddenly says - I wanna focus on burgers only, not hire/fire workers.
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  Maybe my point didn't come across properly. Me personally, I prefer to keep the org complexity down and externalize some headcaches if I can. Having to also manage hardware, people that manage this hardware and not being able to keep other people liable for a given SLA. It's just yet another thing that other companies are really good at and for me it's just not worth it to do on our own. If I don't really need it, why would I? And again, there are more costs associated with this approach than just infra vs hardware + people costs. Granted, I'm never using edge/runner stuff and choosing the stack from the get go as something performant. I'm also talking about headcount < 100, which I also prefer to stay that way. In short: it's not the background (I'm not the one directly managing hardware anyway!), but the upside is not enough for the risk, costs and headaches in general. You need to have a real good use case to do CoLo/DC. If you build web software, you probably don't need it.
CoolCold 2y ago
> I'd say that if you really want to have hardware on your own, you get the right people to do the job for you. CTOs are not managing that on the floor. So I'm not sure it's the real reason. Not sure I got this point right - if you need to create you own product you will need to hire programmers as well and get right people. Same for PMs, Security, Infra guys as I see it.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > if you need to create you own product you will need to hire programmers as well and get right people SWEs working on a product are part of a different budget (R&D) from IT (Finance & IT). As a tech company, you can justify high R&D (they build the product) and Sales&Marketing (they sell the product) spend, but you cannot justify Finance & IT spend. This depends company to company ofc, but for plenty of firms, it's fine to eat the Public Cloud cost because DevOps can be treated as part of the R&D bucket, and there are common metrics that all companies need to follow (some due to experience, others due to inertia).
  - CoolCold 2y ago
    Thank you, interesting. Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups? From my experience it was bit different - say Infra, Dev, Security departments having their own Head Of Dev/Infra/Sec reporting to the CTO and having their budgeting aligned with CTO. CorporateIT being a bit different thing. Procurement may be shared among all of them of course. Not saying that's the only possible setup of org structure - just what I've used to more.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups? Depends what you mean by "infra". The team that would manage your DC (either self managed or CoLo) would generally be under the CFO or COO (who will generally report to CFO), and as such that team would fall into the Finance procurement bucket. Even if R&D has budget for multiple racks in your DC, it will still cost money on the Finance&IT side of the house to staff people to maintain it and manage it. This model is very clunky, because procurement takes time, and this lack of nimbleness can drastically affect delivery roadmaps. CFOs also don't like this model as much, because their job is to manage cash flow, keep books and accounts ready for audits, build financial projections, etc and time consuming work like managing IT procurement (while critical) is a major slog. The model you mentioned is more common now (Platform/Infra team acting as an interface w/ Eng), but even they would offload DC and CoLo management to the CorpIT team.
mistrial9 2y ago
this appears to be survivor bias from two decades of fast money and those that handled it
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  Not really, no.

CoolCold 2y ago

> Running your own data center is just a PITA I believe in the article they clearly say they just use colo, not running own DCs > I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage hardware lifecycles, fire stuff, more engineers etc. etc. You deal with enough complexity nowadays already. This looks strange to me, to focus on software but not on company goals, one of them quite often is to increase profits/decrease spending. Focus on software may happen on lower level of responsibility from my PoV. No offense, but for me it sounds like someone having talent for bakery and cooking, decided to open franchise of McDonald's, becoming General Manager of that shop and then suddenly says - I wanna focus on burgers only, not hire/fire workers.

RamblingCTO 2y ago
Maybe my point didn't come across properly. Me personally, I prefer to keep the org complexity down and externalize some headcaches if I can. Having to also manage hardware, people that manage this hardware and not being able to keep other people liable for a given SLA. It's just yet another thing that other companies are really good at and for me it's just not worth it to do on our own. If I don't really need it, why would I? And again, there are more costs associated with this approach than just infra vs hardware + people costs. Granted, I'm never using edge/runner stuff and choosing the stack from the get go as something performant. I'm also talking about headcount < 100, which I also prefer to stay that way. In short: it's not the background (I'm not the one directly managing hardware anyway!), but the upside is not enough for the risk, costs and headaches in general. You need to have a real good use case to do CoLo/DC. If you build web software, you probably don't need it.

CoolCold 2y ago

> I'd say that if you really want to have hardware on your own, you get the right people to do the job for you. CTOs are not managing that on the floor. So I'm not sure it's the real reason. Not sure I got this point right - if you need to create you own product you will need to hire programmers as well and get right people. Same for PMs, Security, Infra guys as I see it.

alephnerd 2y ago
> if you need to create you own product you will need to hire programmers as well and get right people SWEs working on a product are part of a different budget (R&D) from IT (Finance & IT). As a tech company, you can justify high R&D (they build the product) and Sales&Marketing (they sell the product) spend, but you cannot justify Finance & IT spend. This depends company to company ofc, but for plenty of firms, it's fine to eat the Public Cloud cost because DevOps can be treated as part of the R&D bucket, and there are common metrics that all companies need to follow (some due to experience, others due to inertia).
- CoolCold 2y ago
  Thank you, interesting. Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups? From my experience it was bit different - say Infra, Dev, Security departments having their own Head Of Dev/Infra/Sec reporting to the CTO and having their budgeting aligned with CTO. CorporateIT being a bit different thing. Procurement may be shared among all of them of course. Not saying that's the only possible setup of org structure - just what I've used to more.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups? Depends what you mean by "infra". The team that would manage your DC (either self managed or CoLo) would generally be under the CFO or COO (who will generally report to CFO), and as such that team would fall into the Finance procurement bucket. Even if R&D has budget for multiple racks in your DC, it will still cost money on the Finance&IT side of the house to staff people to maintain it and manage it. This model is very clunky, because procurement takes time, and this lack of nimbleness can drastically affect delivery roadmaps. CFOs also don't like this model as much, because their job is to manage cash flow, keep books and accounts ready for audits, build financial projections, etc and time consuming work like managing IT procurement (while critical) is a major slog. The model you mentioned is more common now (Platform/Infra team acting as an interface w/ Eng), but even they would offload DC and CoLo management to the CorpIT team.

mistrial9 2y ago

this appears to be survivor bias from two decades of fast money and those that handled it

RamblingCTO 2y ago
Not really, no.