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Indeed, I offer consultancy for both cloud-based clients and ones using managed hosting like Hetzner, and colo'ed own servers, and the clients who host in the c

by vidarh 2y ago

Indeed, I offer consultancy for both cloud-based clients and ones using managed hosting like Hetzner, and colo'ed own servers, and the clients who host in the cloud routinely need more of my time on a per-server/instance basis. Most of the time when people bring up these costs they have no experience with modern server hardware, and hosting. You can have the server shipped directly to a colo, you can file tickets with the provider to have it plugged into your power bar and your network, and you can connect with your IPMI client and set it to boot from your PXE/bootp/tftp server to get an install image. With a well-configured setup, you have a one-off cost to set up your firewalls, wire-up the switches and power bars, and set up a server for the rest to network boot off, and the rest of bringing up your servers is near automatic and most management can be done remotely via IPMI or similar. It's not the 90's any more.

Winsaucerer 2y ago
Sounds like the real challenge is experience/skill then? Easier to find people who know how to use AWS/Azure/GCP, than know either (a) your colo'ed setup, or (b) how to do a good appropriate modern colo setup. (this is a question disguised as a statement, since I'm interested in your opinion)
- vidarh 2y ago
  There is something to that, though these skills are fairly easy to buy. Lots of consultancies like mine offer management of these things on retainer. But a lot of developers have passing knowledge of AWS etc., but none with managed hosting and might well prefer the cloud options for that reasons. Poorly managed old managed setups also probabl burned a lot of more experienced people. E.g. if you had to fill in stupid forms and request a server weeks ahead, odds are cloud equals freedom in your mind, even though a well run infra setup could offer you to spin up container workloads and leave dealing with adding capacity as a background concern developers don't need to think about. Personally, I recall well the time I had to call in to Yahoo's hardware review board, chaired by one of the founders (Filo) because the billing system I managed, which handled millions of dollars worth of transactions, needed a new database server - priced around $10k. There were at least a dozen senior people on that call. If that was your experience of colo/managed servers/on prem, it's not unsurprising if you value cloud services far higher than their costs for the sake of avoiding that bureaucracy. I'm working on tooling that I hope will change that, by making compute and storage on cheaper managed providers vs. cloud providers fungible commodities, but it's a hard problem.

by vidarh 2y ago

Winsaucerer 2y ago

Sounds like the real challenge is experience/skill then? Easier to find people who know how to use AWS/Azure/GCP, than know either (a) your colo'ed setup, or (b) how to do a good appropriate modern colo setup. (this is a question disguised as a statement, since I'm interested in your opinion)

vidarh 2y ago
There is something to that, though these skills are fairly easy to buy. Lots of consultancies like mine offer management of these things on retainer. But a lot of developers have passing knowledge of AWS etc., but none with managed hosting and might well prefer the cloud options for that reasons. Poorly managed old managed setups also probabl burned a lot of more experienced people. E.g. if you had to fill in stupid forms and request a server weeks ahead, odds are cloud equals freedom in your mind, even though a well run infra setup could offer you to spin up container workloads and leave dealing with adding capacity as a background concern developers don't need to think about. Personally, I recall well the time I had to call in to Yahoo's hardware review board, chaired by one of the founders (Filo) because the billing system I managed, which handled millions of dollars worth of transactions, needed a new database server - priced around $10k. There were at least a dozen senior people on that call. If that was your experience of colo/managed servers/on prem, it's not unsurprising if you value cloud services far higher than their costs for the sake of avoiding that bureaucracy. I'm working on tooling that I hope will change that, by making compute and storage on cheaper managed providers vs. cloud providers fungible commodities, but it's a hard problem.