5 ms·

Nah, I'm going to pick dedicated hardware with SSDs for IO consistency that beats the pants off of AWS for a fraction of the price and not much more time commit

by ericd 14y ago

Nah, I'm going to pick dedicated hardware with SSDs for IO consistency that beats the pants off of AWS for a fraction of the price and not much more time commitment, rather than for the potentially better uptime.

stickfigure 14y ago
not much more time commitment This is fiction.
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  How much time commitment do you figure on when your site is down and paying customers are calling and emailing you?
  - stickfigure 14y ago
    If reliability is that critical, you need multiple data centers. This is far easier to implement with EC2 than by building out hardware. Also: Most downtime is caused by bad code deployment, poorly-conceived network or system configuration changes, and sysadmins with fat fingers. Do you really think your hired talent is going to be better than Amazon's hired talent?
    - patrickgzill 14y ago
      Sorry to be rude, but that is a bit incendiary of a comment. However, given stats for the past 12 months, I can show that my availability for the 2 racks I manage, is in fact, higher than AWS. Thanks for the compliment!
- calinet6 14y ago
  This is fact. Honestly, it's not that hard to set up a server, and furthermore, it's just not that different to maintain a hard server than a virtual server. And the most important part: when you have your own hardware, you at least maintain control over every aspect of your systems. The value of this cannot be overstated.
  - stickfigure 14y ago
    it's just not that different to maintain a hard server than a virtual server I'm guessing you haven't used Heroku. Server setup is "git push master". you at least maintain control over every aspect of your systems There are still plenty of things you don't control - network feeds to your cage, continuous power, bugs and failures in the hardware you buy. You cannot provision new systems without either buying machines or having a hot standby, and somebody needs to make a trip to the cage. If you're getting hardware by the month from a service, you will probably have faster turnaround (hours not days), but once again you're giving up some control.
- ericd 14y ago
  I don't consider a few hours per month administering servers to be much more than the time I would spend working around Heroku's proprietary app model for the more esoteric things I would want to do. I would guess it's less, but I don't really know. Throw saving thousands a month into the mix and it's not something I'd lose sleep over. Database servers that can handle 10's of thousands of iops and web servers that can handle thousands of uncached requests per second makes machine administration a lot more pleasant than it was just 5 years ago. Hardware has been scaling vertically quickly enough that it's no longer strictly necessary to scale horizontally in a massive way as you grow.

by ericd 14y ago

stickfigure 14y ago

not much more time commitment This is fiction.

patrickgzill 14y ago
How much time commitment do you figure on when your site is down and paying customers are calling and emailing you?
- stickfigure 14y ago
  If reliability is that critical, you need multiple data centers. This is far easier to implement with EC2 than by building out hardware. Also: Most downtime is caused by bad code deployment, poorly-conceived network or system configuration changes, and sysadmins with fat fingers. Do you really think your hired talent is going to be better than Amazon's hired talent?
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    Sorry to be rude, but that is a bit incendiary of a comment. However, given stats for the past 12 months, I can show that my availability for the 2 racks I manage, is in fact, higher than AWS. Thanks for the compliment!
calinet6 14y ago
This is fact. Honestly, it's not that hard to set up a server, and furthermore, it's just not that different to maintain a hard server than a virtual server. And the most important part: when you have your own hardware, you at least maintain control over every aspect of your systems. The value of this cannot be overstated.
- stickfigure 14y ago
  it's just not that different to maintain a hard server than a virtual server I'm guessing you haven't used Heroku. Server setup is "git push master". you at least maintain control over every aspect of your systems There are still plenty of things you don't control - network feeds to your cage, continuous power, bugs and failures in the hardware you buy. You cannot provision new systems without either buying machines or having a hot standby, and somebody needs to make a trip to the cage. If you're getting hardware by the month from a service, you will probably have faster turnaround (hours not days), but once again you're giving up some control.
ericd 14y ago
I don't consider a few hours per month administering servers to be much more than the time I would spend working around Heroku's proprietary app model for the more esoteric things I would want to do. I would guess it's less, but I don't really know. Throw saving thousands a month into the mix and it's not something I'd lose sleep over. Database servers that can handle 10's of thousands of iops and web servers that can handle thousands of uncached requests per second makes machine administration a lot more pleasant than it was just 5 years ago. Hardware has been scaling vertically quickly enough that it's no longer strictly necessary to scale horizontally in a massive way as you grow.