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DHH made this point a while ago when talking about this potentially springboarding a walk back to self-hosting/on-device software for companies. I think the mai

DHH made this point a while ago when talking about this potentially springboarding a walk back to self-hosting/on-device software for companies. I think the main point was that running CI on a MacBook PRO happens about 3-5x faster than CI on the cloud. The benefit of things running faster on the cloud is tearing away.

re-thc 2y ago
> The benefit of things running faster on the cloud is tearing away Was that the benefit? I thought it's reliability, scalability, etc. I remember having a FAST shared server for CI. "Someone" was in charge of it. Every time it went down everyone lost 1/2 a day trying to ask "someone" to reboot it.
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  It wasn't switching to the cloud that saved your dev team. It was getting rid of policy/thinking that allowed the "ownership" of a critical service to be so opaque/siloed that it took half a day to reboot a computer.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > It was getting rid of policy/thinking that allowed the "ownership" of a critical service to be so opaque/siloed that it took half a day to reboot a computer. No 1 got rid of any policy. Cloud meant any team could just take out their company card and sign up. Same as how SaaS got popular. The problem is, what is critical? That server was non-production and there were 100s to 1000s of things more critical to deal with. It was low priority. Maybe you know but to many up the chain in many orgs - they don't know. I've seen way worse scenarios - things on someone's laptop with ports opened that were production critical. Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      > Cloud meant any team could just take out their company card and sign up > Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change. That's the thing - there are plenty of organizations that operate solely in the cloud but do not give their teams the authority/ability to spend without prior approval. And there are plenty of organizations that have no cloud presence that allow their teams the discretion to spend money when spending money is the right answer. For a lot of companies, the move to the cloud was a super large benefit. I'm just arguing that the real benefit to those organizations was a side effect and that many organizations probably still don't realize this.
- authorfly 2y ago
  I meant for CI and other software that your company uses internally (e.g. not your own software offering to customers/clients). Yes for other purposes, lile hosting your software, the cloud provides reliability/scalability. But for Dev compute. That was the context of the DHH conversation. I would say the cost value still leaks in though: I have never seen a big three providers cloud costs per $ for a given machine ever reduce (excluding Spot bidding etc) - despite the fact the efficiency gains in recent years have been so fast it is making more and more sense to self-host either on prem or in a data center. Cloud was a lot cheaper in 2008 compared to buying off the shelf, not so much today.
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > But for Dev compute. That was the context of the DHH conversation. My point was exactly that internal use cases still has a reliability/scalability factor. > it is making more and more sense to self-host either on prem or in a data center I'd say it's the other way around. Automation improvements, infrastructure as code and less knowledge has meant Cloud now makes sense. Back in the days it was a lot easier to find people skilled in self-hosting and the common language was something like Redhat and not AWS. Self-hosting didn't meant getting internal networking and stacks enough to run kubernetes. You'd have a single server or 2 and that was it. It's a totally different game. > I have never seen a big three providers cloud costs per $ for a given machine ever reduce It has in a lot of ways, e.g. similar prices for faster CPUs (newer generation) and e.g. with AWS getting 2 real cores vs 1 (core) + 1 (thread). The problem is server hardware is cheaper. Electricity, rent (data center) and wages is not. This growing cost eats into self-hosting a lot more than the hardware savings. The prices not going up is actually already a cost saving. Most data centers want to up your contract by at least inflation % per year if not more.
    - authorfly 2y ago
      Thank you for the point on newer generations costing similar but delivering better; I hadn't considered that, I suppose my mind was on the serverless and Cloud API services, not machines under infra-based scaling. Electricity of a Macbook M1 Pro running my build locally is cheaper than self-hosting or Amazon, as far as I can tell so while I get your reasoning - I'm talking about Dev compute. Also MRKL and other tools (even yes for Infra as code) are making it to my mind more viable and easy than the old days. Good times are ahead.

re-thc 2y ago

> The benefit of things running faster on the cloud is tearing away Was that the benefit? I thought it's reliability, scalability, etc. I remember having a FAST shared server for CI. "Someone" was in charge of it. Every time it went down everyone lost 1/2 a day trying to ask "someone" to reboot it.

Kon-Peki 2y ago
It wasn't switching to the cloud that saved your dev team. It was getting rid of policy/thinking that allowed the "ownership" of a critical service to be so opaque/siloed that it took half a day to reboot a computer.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > It was getting rid of policy/thinking that allowed the "ownership" of a critical service to be so opaque/siloed that it took half a day to reboot a computer. No 1 got rid of any policy. Cloud meant any team could just take out their company card and sign up. Same as how SaaS got popular. The problem is, what is critical? That server was non-production and there were 100s to 1000s of things more critical to deal with. It was low priority. Maybe you know but to many up the chain in many orgs - they don't know. I've seen way worse scenarios - things on someone's laptop with ports opened that were production critical. Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    > Cloud meant any team could just take out their company card and sign up > Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change. That's the thing - there are plenty of organizations that operate solely in the cloud but do not give their teams the authority/ability to spend without prior approval. And there are plenty of organizations that have no cloud presence that allow their teams the discretion to spend money when spending money is the right answer. For a lot of companies, the move to the cloud was a super large benefit. I'm just arguing that the real benefit to those organizations was a side effect and that many organizations probably still don't realize this.
authorfly 2y ago
I meant for CI and other software that your company uses internally (e.g. not your own software offering to customers/clients). Yes for other purposes, lile hosting your software, the cloud provides reliability/scalability. But for Dev compute. That was the context of the DHH conversation. I would say the cost value still leaks in though: I have never seen a big three providers cloud costs per $ for a given machine ever reduce (excluding Spot bidding etc) - despite the fact the efficiency gains in recent years have been so fast it is making more and more sense to self-host either on prem or in a data center. Cloud was a lot cheaper in 2008 compared to buying off the shelf, not so much today.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > But for Dev compute. That was the context of the DHH conversation. My point was exactly that internal use cases still has a reliability/scalability factor. > it is making more and more sense to self-host either on prem or in a data center I'd say it's the other way around. Automation improvements, infrastructure as code and less knowledge has meant Cloud now makes sense. Back in the days it was a lot easier to find people skilled in self-hosting and the common language was something like Redhat and not AWS. Self-hosting didn't meant getting internal networking and stacks enough to run kubernetes. You'd have a single server or 2 and that was it. It's a totally different game. > I have never seen a big three providers cloud costs per $ for a given machine ever reduce It has in a lot of ways, e.g. similar prices for faster CPUs (newer generation) and e.g. with AWS getting 2 real cores vs 1 (core) + 1 (thread). The problem is server hardware is cheaper. Electricity, rent (data center) and wages is not. This growing cost eats into self-hosting a lot more than the hardware savings. The prices not going up is actually already a cost saving. Most data centers want to up your contract by at least inflation % per year if not more.
  - authorfly 2y ago
    Thank you for the point on newer generations costing similar but delivering better; I hadn't considered that, I suppose my mind was on the serverless and Cloud API services, not machines under infra-based scaling. Electricity of a Macbook M1 Pro running my build locally is cheaper than self-hosting or Amazon, as far as I can tell so while I get your reasoning - I'm talking about Dev compute. Also MRKL and other tools (even yes for Infra as code) are making it to my mind more viable and easy than the old days. Good times are ahead.