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I do not understand how cloud proponents talk about the he costs of self hosting but then get into situations like this. Spending serious engineering time to w

I do not understand how cloud proponents talk about the he costs of self hosting but then get into situations like this. Spending serious engineering time to wrangle with the complexities of cloud orchestration is not something that should be taken lightly. Cloud services should be required to have a black-box Surgeon’s General warning.

bravetraveler 2y ago
'accept vendor lock in, it'll save you the cost of engineers' Routinely: oops, our API usage slipped and we mistakenly paid more than the staff to avoid this would cost Keep fucking up, tech industry. My job role depends on it (SRE)
- belter 2y ago
  The Tech Industry is well know for shunning the Price of Education, while rejecting the Cost of Ignorance.
  - JackMorgan 2y ago
    Maybe even shunning the reasonable Price of Education while paying the significant Costs of Ignorance.
    - belter 2y ago
      AWS has a three day course on the technicals of efficient cost management. Believe it or not...I heard is one of the least requested classes....
      - wisemang 2y ago
        Maybe by the time you need it you can’t afford to pay for it…
- bluGill 2y ago
  Even in Germany you won't get an engineer for only $5k/month. You can get bad engineers in places like India for that, but good engineers cost more than that.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    German companies for all their precision probably make more than one spending mistake, like we do over here. There's asymmetry you aren't considering: one engineer can make/solve many problems. Not even all on either side. To be clear: I'm not taking a dig at this specific case. Larger patterns. It's more nuanced than X of these or Y of those. I'm not arguing in your vacuum/hypothetical There need-not be an increase in staff in a lot of cases. Just better, or different, staff. If I wanted to earnestly dissect/solve this I wouldn't have opened with snide jokes. The engineers hired to stave expense tend to go on to create it The positive spin is: 'get the engineers anyway, self-hosted or not'. They'll help you optimize $solution. My point is things are rarely this positive. Things can be optimized to the point of being non-optimal.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    When you have salaried staff, it's very easy to ignore their cost when they do various background work because it seems to happen for "free." That's not to say that cloud services are always a good value but it's also the case that it's easy to ignore the full cost of doing everything in-house.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  Managing these things is a skillset too. You now have X VM's and Y' containers and Z storage things. You still get to manage them. It is easier but is not a zero cost which some people seem to think it is. I have one where it is basically internal and I am at my teams all the time 'clean up your mess'. Tons of PoC's spun up and just left laying around. Things that do millions of calls (to be fixed later). That sort of thing. A cloud abstracts one set of skills. But everything above that line is still on the groups to manage. Cloud stuff is really alluring at first. Works for awhile then the costs become above what it would cost to run it yourself. Cloud is not a 'set it and forget it' sort of thing. You have to manage it too.
tamiral 2y ago
It’s not a set of up and leave it! You have to continuously monitor and improve! Yes using some cloud service will save XYZ time but doesn’t mean it’s a set it and forget it feature. I’ll add this is a really good write up ! Love this comment : “There is no harm in using boring/simple methods if the results are right.”
hibikir 2y ago
The best advantage of cloud was never price: It was not having to argue with your data center organization, which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM. If those companies were good at managing data centers, and could hire people actually interested in helping the company run, they'd have had little need for the cloud in predictable compute loads. Until you get quite big, all necessary interactions with the cloud provider are just bills. It's just much easier, even though it is often expensive
- vb-8448 2y ago
  > which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM It's still true? In my experience it used to be, nowadays most of the organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Who do you think builds and maintains those portals? Internal data center organizations that need to be argued with to acquire quota. They usually don’t care for internal or dev stuff, but as soon as something needs prod levels of quota or new licenses, prepare to wait.
  - michpoch 2y ago
    > organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal Which will create things in cloud…
- silverquiet 2y ago
  Cloud was absolutely sold as saving money once upon a time, but like any other industry, they wanted to push the margins higher by getting away from providing commodity services (cloud primitives in their case), and thus the marketing started saying it was never about saving money or how you're not supposed to use the primitives; you need to use the higher-level, managed services (that also happen to have tons of vendor lock-in). I've spent the last decade or so wondering if the emperor was wearing clothes and not really getting what everyone else has been talking about. Which isn't to say that cloud is useless, but it's not the universal panacea that it was often sold as, and it seems that others are waking up to that.
candiddevmike 2y ago
> Spending serious engineering time to wrangle with the complexities of cloud orchestration is not something that should be taken lightly. Bare metal and datacenter orchestration is leaps and bounds more complex. You're paying for the abstraction.
- latch 2y ago
  If your scale is crazy, or your product doesn't allow you to use battle-tested pieces, then orchestration is complex in both cases. In most cases, managing software on bare metal is more complex in exactly one case: when engineers only know cloud abstractions.
  - rbranson 2y ago
    Yeah calling the EC2 API is definitely more complex than leasing datacenter space, purchasing racks of hardware, deploying a fault tolerant and secure network, capturing and managing offsite backups, dealing with hardware component failures, etc.
    - trollbridge 2y ago
      If you’re at that scale, there are plenty of other platforms that don’t have vendor lock in and overly complex, proprietary APIs by design.
    - latch 2y ago
      Serious question, are you familiar with dedicated hosting?
  - skrtskrt 2y ago
    after working at a cloud provider, I would say: 1. managing compute clusters has gotten a lot easier but managing storage clusters and running good storage products for block & object storage on them is very very very far from a solved problem and quite frankly it sucks and is not fun. 2. planning out buying, installing, upgrading, patching, and retiring hardware, server/hypervisor OSs, takes waaaaaaaaay more engineering management skill and experience than 99.9% of companies have. Plus you probably have to fight for every dollar of investment against a board / investors. Even at the cloud provider we were constantly getting kneecapped by upper management not wanting to spend money on hardware.
rjmunro 2y ago
$5k/month was 25% of his pods, so the total was ≈$20k/month. It's entirely possible that self hosting would cost much more than that, particularly as they wouldn't be able to save costs by scaling down.
- serverlessmom 2y ago
  Yeah. My dad had told me more than one horror story of early tech startups buying truckloads of hardware to scale way beyond demand growth. And I remember when getting on Slashdot meant your service would inevitably go down. Of course, given stable demand and known requirements, bare metal can be a great option. But it’s not strictly better than public cloud hosting. I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    > I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering. Not just engineering, but deploying it too. I'm building a whole business around deploying it based at least partially on the fact that it has been forgotten. I've just been doing it long enough that I remember how to do it and it isn't getting any easier as the need for compute grows into even more complex and powerful hardware.
- tnolet 2y ago
  Moreover, we need to have presence in 20+ regions around the world. This multiplies the hassle of self hosting / bare metal / colo. Disclaimer: Checkly founder.
helsinkiandrew 2y ago
The problem wasn't between the cloud and self hosting - the problem was they had stateful code that didn't scale to thousands of requests for different clients. So they are bringing up new instances every invocation. The same 3s runtime startup cost (and need for more hardware) would happen if they were running their own servers.
- mgkimsal 2y ago
  Would the actual costs have been less, the same, or more, running on their own hardware? Processes can take longer running on your own hardware, but still have a lower TCO.
  - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
    Possibly - the advantage of cloud is you don't need to provision for your peak load, it scales with usage from a few requests a day, to millions a second for an hour a day. If your usage is lumpy or growing fast then paying 2-3 times more than the cost of your own hardware can be cheaper.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bravetraveler 2y ago

'accept vendor lock in, it'll save you the cost of engineers' Routinely: oops, our API usage slipped and we mistakenly paid more than the staff to avoid this would cost Keep fucking up, tech industry. My job role depends on it (SRE)

belter 2y ago
The Tech Industry is well know for shunning the Price of Education, while rejecting the Cost of Ignorance.
- JackMorgan 2y ago
  Maybe even shunning the reasonable Price of Education while paying the significant Costs of Ignorance.
  - belter 2y ago
    AWS has a three day course on the technicals of efficient cost management. Believe it or not...I heard is one of the least requested classes....
    - wisemang 2y ago
      Maybe by the time you need it you can’t afford to pay for it…
bluGill 2y ago
Even in Germany you won't get an engineer for only $5k/month. You can get bad engineers in places like India for that, but good engineers cost more than that.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  German companies for all their precision probably make more than one spending mistake, like we do over here. There's asymmetry you aren't considering: one engineer can make/solve many problems. Not even all on either side. To be clear: I'm not taking a dig at this specific case. Larger patterns. It's more nuanced than X of these or Y of those. I'm not arguing in your vacuum/hypothetical There need-not be an increase in staff in a lot of cases. Just better, or different, staff. If I wanted to earnestly dissect/solve this I wouldn't have opened with snide jokes. The engineers hired to stave expense tend to go on to create it The positive spin is: 'get the engineers anyway, self-hosted or not'. They'll help you optimize $solution. My point is things are rarely this positive. Things can be optimized to the point of being non-optimal.
- ghaff 2y ago
  When you have salaried staff, it's very easy to ignore their cost when they do various background work because it seems to happen for "free." That's not to say that cloud services are always a good value but it's also the case that it's easy to ignore the full cost of doing everything in-house.
sumtechguy 2y ago
Managing these things is a skillset too. You now have X VM's and Y' containers and Z storage things. You still get to manage them. It is easier but is not a zero cost which some people seem to think it is. I have one where it is basically internal and I am at my teams all the time 'clean up your mess'. Tons of PoC's spun up and just left laying around. Things that do millions of calls (to be fixed later). That sort of thing. A cloud abstracts one set of skills. But everything above that line is still on the groups to manage. Cloud stuff is really alluring at first. Works for awhile then the costs become above what it would cost to run it yourself. Cloud is not a 'set it and forget it' sort of thing. You have to manage it too.

tamiral 2y ago

It’s not a set of up and leave it! You have to continuously monitor and improve! Yes using some cloud service will save XYZ time but doesn’t mean it’s a set it and forget it feature. I’ll add this is a really good write up ! Love this comment : “There is no harm in using boring/simple methods if the results are right.”

hibikir 2y ago

The best advantage of cloud was never price: It was not having to argue with your data center organization, which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM. If those companies were good at managing data centers, and could hire people actually interested in helping the company run, they'd have had little need for the cloud in predictable compute loads. Until you get quite big, all necessary interactions with the cloud provider are just bills. It's just much easier, even though it is often expensive

vb-8448 2y ago
> which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM It's still true? In my experience it used to be, nowadays most of the organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal.
- dartos 2y ago
  Who do you think builds and maintains those portals? Internal data center organizations that need to be argued with to acquire quota. They usually don’t care for internal or dev stuff, but as soon as something needs prod levels of quota or new licenses, prepare to wait.
- michpoch 2y ago
  > organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal Which will create things in cloud…
silverquiet 2y ago
Cloud was absolutely sold as saving money once upon a time, but like any other industry, they wanted to push the margins higher by getting away from providing commodity services (cloud primitives in their case), and thus the marketing started saying it was never about saving money or how you're not supposed to use the primitives; you need to use the higher-level, managed services (that also happen to have tons of vendor lock-in). I've spent the last decade or so wondering if the emperor was wearing clothes and not really getting what everyone else has been talking about. Which isn't to say that cloud is useless, but it's not the universal panacea that it was often sold as, and it seems that others are waking up to that.

candiddevmike 2y ago

> Spending serious engineering time to wrangle with the complexities of cloud orchestration is not something that should be taken lightly. Bare metal and datacenter orchestration is leaps and bounds more complex. You're paying for the abstraction.

latch 2y ago
If your scale is crazy, or your product doesn't allow you to use battle-tested pieces, then orchestration is complex in both cases. In most cases, managing software on bare metal is more complex in exactly one case: when engineers only know cloud abstractions.
- rbranson 2y ago
  Yeah calling the EC2 API is definitely more complex than leasing datacenter space, purchasing racks of hardware, deploying a fault tolerant and secure network, capturing and managing offsite backups, dealing with hardware component failures, etc.
  - trollbridge 2y ago
    If you’re at that scale, there are plenty of other platforms that don’t have vendor lock in and overly complex, proprietary APIs by design.
  - latch 2y ago
    Serious question, are you familiar with dedicated hosting?
- skrtskrt 2y ago
  after working at a cloud provider, I would say: 1. managing compute clusters has gotten a lot easier but managing storage clusters and running good storage products for block & object storage on them is very very very far from a solved problem and quite frankly it sucks and is not fun. 2. planning out buying, installing, upgrading, patching, and retiring hardware, server/hypervisor OSs, takes waaaaaaaaay more engineering management skill and experience than 99.9% of companies have. Plus you probably have to fight for every dollar of investment against a board / investors. Even at the cloud provider we were constantly getting kneecapped by upper management not wanting to spend money on hardware.

rjmunro 2y ago

$5k/month was 25% of his pods, so the total was ≈$20k/month. It's entirely possible that self hosting would cost much more than that, particularly as they wouldn't be able to save costs by scaling down.

serverlessmom 2y ago
Yeah. My dad had told me more than one horror story of early tech startups buying truckloads of hardware to scale way beyond demand growth. And I remember when getting on Slashdot meant your service would inevitably go down. Of course, given stable demand and known requirements, bare metal can be a great option. But it’s not strictly better than public cloud hosting. I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering.
- latchkey 2y ago
  > I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering. Not just engineering, but deploying it too. I'm building a whole business around deploying it based at least partially on the fact that it has been forgotten. I've just been doing it long enough that I remember how to do it and it isn't getting any easier as the need for compute grows into even more complex and powerful hardware.
tnolet 2y ago
Moreover, we need to have presence in 20+ regions around the world. This multiplies the hassle of self hosting / bare metal / colo. Disclaimer: Checkly founder.

helsinkiandrew 2y ago

The problem wasn't between the cloud and self hosting - the problem was they had stateful code that didn't scale to thousands of requests for different clients. So they are bringing up new instances every invocation. The same 3s runtime startup cost (and need for more hardware) would happen if they were running their own servers.

mgkimsal 2y ago
Would the actual costs have been less, the same, or more, running on their own hardware? Processes can take longer running on your own hardware, but still have a lower TCO.
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  Possibly - the advantage of cloud is you don't need to provision for your peak load, it scales with usage from a few requests a day, to millions a second for an hour a day. If your usage is lumpy or growing fast then paying 2-3 times more than the cost of your own hardware can be cheaper.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]