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I don't think 37signals is a very strong example that this could become a trend. They are in the goldilocks zone where they're big and stable enough to save a

I don't think 37signals is a very strong example that this could become a trend. They are in the goldilocks zone where they're big and stable enough to save a lot of money with self-hosting, but not big enough that they can negotiate meaningful discounts with Amazon. In reality cloud is too convenient, and the tradeoffs for self-hosting just don't make sense for the majority of companies. The talent to run your own servers with modern HA and reliability expectations has largely been consolidated into the giant cloud providers and other large companies at this point. As much as I think a lot of cloud is wasteful and more diversity would be beneficial, I don't see any meaningful change to cloud dominance on the horizon.

swatcoder 2y ago
> modern HA and reliability expectations For most businesses, this is a fiction. Typical users are just as accustomed to outages and feature failures as they were twenty years ago, which is to say that they swear for a couple hours but almost never migrate to competitors just because a service goes down now and again. They anticipate that the other service will be down just as much, and the friction of moving to a new service means there's got to be a real gain, not just a speculative one. Even in retail, users typically come back to where the catalog and price is right, and where they've had good post-sales experience and loyalty points, just like when a shop around town in unexpectedly closed because of a water leak or whatever. Further, it's unclear that cloud vs managed hosting vs experienced self-hosting vs fairly naive self-hosting has a particularly different net reliability or availability profile for most use cases. That was the sales pitch of the cloud and it became acargo cult saying for a while, but it's very hard to demonstrate in a scientific way. It turns out cloud services fail plenty and of course the vast majority of services hosted in other ways do just fine. There are exceptions to all this, but they're rare, not routine.
- dasil003 2y ago
  Agreed, but this matters little if you can't hire people to manage your on-prem infra. 25 years ago everyone had a sysadmin and a DBA, now they are outnumbered by "devops engineers" who just know AWS and K8s.
deleted 2y ago
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sgarland 2y ago
I think one key requirement is a strong centralized directive on allowed technologies. If every team is allowed to run whatever they want, you’re likely going to struggle to run it on-prem, if for nothing else it’s unlikely that a dev team has the knowledge or resources to operate and maintain Kafka, for example. Running HA services on your own is not as difficult as it’s made out to be. Anything stateless can just be another endpoint behind a load balancer. Stateful things like RDBMS require more thought (not only for HA, just in general), but this is also a solved problem. The other thing this requires is a more careful and performance-oriented approach to development. “It works, ship it” will likely wind up consuming far more resources than you’d like. Taking the time to profile the code – which can be done in CI – and addressing hot spots will greatly help.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> The talent to run your own servers with modern HA and reliability expectations has largely been consolidated I kind of learned how to do all of this from Homelab communities. Claude 3.5 does really well with eliminating the toil of configuration documentation. If anything people vastly underestimate their capability to do this stuff themselves. That said, AWS RDS is a unique product that people will not migrate from. As long as Postgres developers and ecosystem continue to work for Amazon for free, companies will be overcharged by it.
- sgarland 2y ago
  > homelab communities Yes! Moving past “I want to run Plex” is possible and encouraged. > toil of configuration documentation IMO, if you don’t understand what you’re configuring and why, you’re not really any better off. And especially with the Linux community, if you can’t demonstrate that you’ve personally read docs and explain what you’ve tried, you’re gonna have a bad time.
marvstazar 2y ago
DHH did mention in the article that if you are just starting up and finding market fit, you should use the cloud and not buy your own hardware.

swatcoder 2y ago

> modern HA and reliability expectations For most businesses, this is a fiction. Typical users are just as accustomed to outages and feature failures as they were twenty years ago, which is to say that they swear for a couple hours but almost never migrate to competitors just because a service goes down now and again. They anticipate that the other service will be down just as much, and the friction of moving to a new service means there's got to be a real gain, not just a speculative one. Even in retail, users typically come back to where the catalog and price is right, and where they've had good post-sales experience and loyalty points, just like when a shop around town in unexpectedly closed because of a water leak or whatever. Further, it's unclear that cloud vs managed hosting vs experienced self-hosting vs fairly naive self-hosting has a particularly different net reliability or availability profile for most use cases. That was the sales pitch of the cloud and it became acargo cult saying for a while, but it's very hard to demonstrate in a scientific way. It turns out cloud services fail plenty and of course the vast majority of services hosted in other ways do just fine. There are exceptions to all this, but they're rare, not routine.

dasil003 2y ago
Agreed, but this matters little if you can't hire people to manage your on-prem infra. 25 years ago everyone had a sysadmin and a DBA, now they are outnumbered by "devops engineers" who just know AWS and K8s.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sgarland 2y ago

I think one key requirement is a strong centralized directive on allowed technologies. If every team is allowed to run whatever they want, you’re likely going to struggle to run it on-prem, if for nothing else it’s unlikely that a dev team has the knowledge or resources to operate and maintain Kafka, for example. Running HA services on your own is not as difficult as it’s made out to be. Anything stateless can just be another endpoint behind a load balancer. Stateful things like RDBMS require more thought (not only for HA, just in general), but this is also a solved problem. The other thing this requires is a more careful and performance-oriented approach to development. “It works, ship it” will likely wind up consuming far more resources than you’d like. Taking the time to profile the code – which can be done in CI – and addressing hot spots will greatly help.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> The talent to run your own servers with modern HA and reliability expectations has largely been consolidated I kind of learned how to do all of this from Homelab communities. Claude 3.5 does really well with eliminating the toil of configuration documentation. If anything people vastly underestimate their capability to do this stuff themselves. That said, AWS RDS is a unique product that people will not migrate from. As long as Postgres developers and ecosystem continue to work for Amazon for free, companies will be overcharged by it.

sgarland 2y ago
> homelab communities Yes! Moving past “I want to run Plex” is possible and encouraged. > toil of configuration documentation IMO, if you don’t understand what you’re configuring and why, you’re not really any better off. And especially with the Linux community, if you can’t demonstrate that you’ve personally read docs and explain what you’ve tried, you’re gonna have a bad time.

marvstazar 2y ago

DHH did mention in the article that if you are just starting up and finding market fit, you should use the cloud and not buy your own hardware.