3 ms·

I don't know why everyone is moving to "cloud native" where the databases and queues are not even software you can run locally.

p_ing 1y ago
Running your own infrastructure is expensive.
- dijit 1y ago
  yet, it costs 1/5th of what cloud does with any kind of minor load. Someone needs to study these claims tbh; your point is contrary to my experience.
  - r3trohack3r 1y ago
    I think when some people say “self hosting is expensive” they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary to successfully sysadmin the setup and ongoing maintenance - and the cost/risk of shopping for and evaluating that skillset to find and retain an engineer that isn’t going to muck the whole thing up. You can subsidize the cost of self hosting by discounting your time/skill in DIY - and you don’t have to interview yourself.
    - dijit 1y ago
      Yes, I get that. However there are SREs and DevOps engineers that are seemingly required for cloud solutions; and they cost more than sysadmins. So, someone is lying somewhere.
      - r3trohack3r 1y ago
        SREs have nothing to do with cloud solutions. You may have the wrong mental model here. The profession grew out of observations made in catastrophic failures like Chernobyl. They primarily focus on organization structures, communication structures, and responding to failures. At an engineering level they focus on meta stability - decoupling local failure from overall system stability to prevent local failures from cascading to catastrophic failures - and automated tooling to loop the right engineers into ongoing incidents. The skill set is a side effect of operating at scale, where even brief catastrophic failures can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses; directly in revenue and indirectly to reputation.
        jeremyjh 1y ago
        That's what it meant 8 years ago. Now SRE is just a synonym for "devops" which now is a synonym for "sysadmin" in most companies. You won't have both devops and SREs in most orgs, and you won't have any devops doing dev work.
        r3trohack3r 1y ago
        If you’re fighting snake oil and buzzwords, you gripe isn’t with the cloud. You can “buzzword” yourself into job security just as easily on a VM.
    - mrweasel 1y ago
      > they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary You need to do that for cloud as well. The assumption that you can just get the developers to spin up what they need doesn't work. You need a team of "cloud engineers" if you don't want your cloud bill to go crazy. I know a few people that does AWS for clients, they basically spend all their time maintaining, upgrading and reworking things to reduce the cost. In one example, when AWS changed their IPv4 pricing, one of the went in an managed to remove 90% of their public IPv4 usage. You need to say on top of the cloud platforms, ensuring that costs stay low is a full time job.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- Hobadee 1y ago
  Have you seen a cloud bill recently!? My buddy worked for a company that was spending a million on their monthly AWS bill. You can easily buy all your own infra, plus hire an engineer or two for the price that some of these companies are dropping on "inexpensive" cloud services.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    Now add SOC and PCI compliance, DR with RTO, HA, etc. No doubt it could still be cheaper. But self managed infra does add up quickly.
    - dijit 1y ago
      You don’t get away from any of those by hosting in a cloud. Your colo provider should be doing their part for physical access for ISO27001/SOC2 and PCI-DSS. I quite literally know all about this because I was running payment card infrastructure in a colo, as part of one of the largest e-commerce software suites in the UK at the time.
      - paulryanrogers 1y ago
        Indeed. But cloud can provide a faster and easier path to getting there, at least IME.
        dijit 1y ago
        No? Cloud gives you direct access to compute at the click of a button (provided you have quota). The ISO/PCI cert requirements are not accelerated by their use, only the initial deployment speed of your solution. If at all anything the latest I've seen is that there are more checks in cloud for various areas where you can accidentally leak data through poor permissions or because someone could enable those permissions. For example in Google Cloud there was an additional requisite that I monitor any admin users oauth2 application accesses for their google accounts; this was not a requirement for on-prem.
- mattl 1y ago
  Is it? $40 a month gets you a pretty beefy dedicated server. EDIT: (I can't reply for a bit) Quick glance at https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ seems to suggest 64GB RAM and a full Intel i7.
  - Hobadee 1y ago
    Define "pretty beefy", because in my research $40 will only get you something like 8 vCPU and 16GB RAM.
    - dijit 1y ago
      for €48.75 you can get 12vCPU/64GB https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ But 8/16 is $95+ on AWS.
  - pragmatic 1y ago
    What kind of IO? That's where they get you.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mrweasel 1y ago
  Sure, but so is running on AWS, Azure or GCP. Your on-prem bill tends to not run amok though. You don't wake up one day and get a bill for $100.000 for something that was accidentally deploy Friday afternoon. People are starting to learn that cloud hosting isn't exactly cheap. It's great for quickly scaling, there's way better automation tools, e.g. Terraform, a lot of the complicated stuff is done for you, but it's not cheap. 37signals is running their own infrastructure, and it's cheaper than cloud.
- pragmatic 1y ago
  No you just shift bounded capex to unbounded opex.
- ahofmann 1y ago
  It just isn't. We are talking websites here. You can serve billions of requests from dirt cheap vps. Heck, I just saw a hetzner website, on a hosting plan for 20 € pumping out almost a terabyte of traffic per month. The database is included in the hosting plan.
- const_cast 1y ago
  It's pretty much always cheaper than going to cloud services. The biggest thing I hear otherwise is "but salaries!". Okay, but you're just replacing your sysadmins with AWS devops people, who I can't imagine are cheaper. Cloud isn't simple, it's very complex. You need just as many people and just as much knowledge to make it work.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
  Cooking your own food is technically less efficient; the per-meal costs are definitely higher than in a restaurant. But somehow eating in restaurants is more expensive.

p_ing 1y ago

Running your own infrastructure is expensive.

dijit 1y ago
yet, it costs 1/5th of what cloud does with any kind of minor load. Someone needs to study these claims tbh; your point is contrary to my experience.
- r3trohack3r 1y ago
  I think when some people say “self hosting is expensive” they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary to successfully sysadmin the setup and ongoing maintenance - and the cost/risk of shopping for and evaluating that skillset to find and retain an engineer that isn’t going to muck the whole thing up. You can subsidize the cost of self hosting by discounting your time/skill in DIY - and you don’t have to interview yourself.
  - dijit 1y ago
    Yes, I get that. However there are SREs and DevOps engineers that are seemingly required for cloud solutions; and they cost more than sysadmins. So, someone is lying somewhere.
    - r3trohack3r 1y ago
      SREs have nothing to do with cloud solutions. You may have the wrong mental model here. The profession grew out of observations made in catastrophic failures like Chernobyl. They primarily focus on organization structures, communication structures, and responding to failures. At an engineering level they focus on meta stability - decoupling local failure from overall system stability to prevent local failures from cascading to catastrophic failures - and automated tooling to loop the right engineers into ongoing incidents. The skill set is a side effect of operating at scale, where even brief catastrophic failures can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses; directly in revenue and indirectly to reputation.
      - jeremyjh 1y ago
        That's what it meant 8 years ago. Now SRE is just a synonym for "devops" which now is a synonym for "sysadmin" in most companies. You won't have both devops and SREs in most orgs, and you won't have any devops doing dev work.
        r3trohack3r 1y ago
        If you’re fighting snake oil and buzzwords, you gripe isn’t with the cloud. You can “buzzword” yourself into job security just as easily on a VM.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    > they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary You need to do that for cloud as well. The assumption that you can just get the developers to spin up what they need doesn't work. You need a team of "cloud engineers" if you don't want your cloud bill to go crazy. I know a few people that does AWS for clients, they basically spend all their time maintaining, upgrading and reworking things to reduce the cost. In one example, when AWS changed their IPv4 pricing, one of the went in an managed to remove 90% of their public IPv4 usage. You need to say on top of the cloud platforms, ensuring that costs stay low is a full time job.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
Hobadee 1y ago
Have you seen a cloud bill recently!? My buddy worked for a company that was spending a million on their monthly AWS bill. You can easily buy all your own infra, plus hire an engineer or two for the price that some of these companies are dropping on "inexpensive" cloud services.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Now add SOC and PCI compliance, DR with RTO, HA, etc. No doubt it could still be cheaper. But self managed infra does add up quickly.
  - dijit 1y ago
    You don’t get away from any of those by hosting in a cloud. Your colo provider should be doing their part for physical access for ISO27001/SOC2 and PCI-DSS. I quite literally know all about this because I was running payment card infrastructure in a colo, as part of one of the largest e-commerce software suites in the UK at the time.
    - paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Indeed. But cloud can provide a faster and easier path to getting there, at least IME.
      - dijit 1y ago
        No? Cloud gives you direct access to compute at the click of a button (provided you have quota). The ISO/PCI cert requirements are not accelerated by their use, only the initial deployment speed of your solution. If at all anything the latest I've seen is that there are more checks in cloud for various areas where you can accidentally leak data through poor permissions or because someone could enable those permissions. For example in Google Cloud there was an additional requisite that I monitor any admin users oauth2 application accesses for their google accounts; this was not a requirement for on-prem.
mattl 1y ago
Is it? $40 a month gets you a pretty beefy dedicated server. EDIT: (I can't reply for a bit) Quick glance at https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ seems to suggest 64GB RAM and a full Intel i7.
- Hobadee 1y ago
  Define "pretty beefy", because in my research $40 will only get you something like 8 vCPU and 16GB RAM.
  - dijit 1y ago
    for €48.75 you can get 12vCPU/64GB https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax42/ But 8/16 is $95+ on AWS.
- pragmatic 1y ago
  What kind of IO? That's where they get you.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mrweasel 1y ago
Sure, but so is running on AWS, Azure or GCP. Your on-prem bill tends to not run amok though. You don't wake up one day and get a bill for $100.000 for something that was accidentally deploy Friday afternoon. People are starting to learn that cloud hosting isn't exactly cheap. It's great for quickly scaling, there's way better automation tools, e.g. Terraform, a lot of the complicated stuff is done for you, but it's not cheap. 37signals is running their own infrastructure, and it's cheaper than cloud.
pragmatic 1y ago
No you just shift bounded capex to unbounded opex.
ahofmann 1y ago
It just isn't. We are talking websites here. You can serve billions of requests from dirt cheap vps. Heck, I just saw a hetzner website, on a hosting plan for 20 € pumping out almost a terabyte of traffic per month. The database is included in the hosting plan.
const_cast 1y ago
It's pretty much always cheaper than going to cloud services. The biggest thing I hear otherwise is "but salaries!". Okay, but you're just replacing your sysadmins with AWS devops people, who I can't imagine are cheaper. Cloud isn't simple, it's very complex. You need just as many people and just as much knowledge to make it work.
Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
Cooking your own food is technically less efficient; the per-meal costs are definitely higher than in a restaurant. But somehow eating in restaurants is more expensive.