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Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virg

Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322 https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115407725852594322

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.
- darkwater 1y ago
  With a gazillion of shelves, closets, Jims and cables. So if Fortnite's Jim trips on a wire, Canva's Jim is quitely sipping coffee at his desk.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  Once had a site wide outage (biggish manufacturing company) of the internet and backup servers because one of the women wanted to plug her hair straighteners in for the xmas party. In a surprise to literally no one that happening on the last friday before xmas break got my "We need to secure the main comms cabinet" (which had the backup server and main ingress for WAN and was in a separate building on other side of site) item that I'd been asking about for months to the top of the list. Still one of my favourite "outages" because I got to my desk, turned PC on, no network, walked across the landing into the main office, opened comms cabinet, plugged it back in and was "resolved" before the MD got to my desk.
- gspencley 1y ago
  > "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience. You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest. First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative to "cloud." Many businesses, including the ones I worked for, did co-location. The companies owned their own bare metal servers, but would rent a rack in a data centre, and certain things - like the network admin - was entirely outsourced to the data centre / hosting company. You could also rent managed bare metal servers (you still can). This means that you can pretty much outsource your entire IT department, but you're still not doing cloud services. Meaning you've got bare metal servers, someone you're paying at the hosting company is handling security updates and troubleshooting. You don't get things like auto-scaling or serverless or other cloud features, but you also don't have to worry about Jim tripping over the power cable either. There's also still virtual servers. Which is basically a VM running on a server that hosts multiple clients. All of this is to say that the alternative is not "cloud" or "box in a closet." The alternative is "cloud" and a ton of different server options: owned, rented, co-located, on-prem, dedicated, virtual, managed v un-managed (outsource IT vs admin your own) and the list goes on and on.
  - maccard 1y ago
    We run a subset of our CI workload on on-prem workstations because the cost/performance ratio of consumer hardware is so much higher than servers. 1TB NVMe drive, with a 7950x/i9, 64GB RAM and gigabit networking is < $1000. It actually completes our CI job faster than AWS restarts a gpu instance. 100% of our failure rates with this machine have been "carpet cleaners unplugged the machine" in 2 years. Last year we had nobody in the office (due to carpet cleaning). This year we sent someone in straight after the cleaning to fix it.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    But is the distinction meaningful? The alternative to a shed in Virginia is a different shed in Montana? I mean sure there are a lot of different sheds out there but they're all still sheds. They're all shared responsibility models where the line is drawn in different areas, some outages will be because of your fuckup, some will be theirs. Not saying as an industry we shouldn't diversify a little but it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship each company has to their hosting provider.
- franz_vlkshp 1y ago
  on the other hand, that's a small price to pay to having total control and physical access to your own infrastructure. if the sysadmin did his job properly, an incident like that shouldn't require anything else but to plug the server back in and hit the power switch. but then if he did his job properly, no one but IT should be tripping on power cables to begin with.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    My home infrastructure is immune from the “unplug” problem by being hosted on two different 10 year old £30 raspberry pis in different rooms. But apparently that’s too hard for the average.
- jacobsenscott 1y ago
  Largely mitigated by twist lock sockets.

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago

Sounds like a pretty good shed! Like a lot of pithy commentary on the cloud, this ignores the fact the practical alternative to a shed in Virginia for most businesses is a shelf in the supply closet. "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.

darkwater 1y ago
With a gazillion of shelves, closets, Jims and cables. So if Fortnite's Jim trips on a wire, Canva's Jim is quitely sipping coffee at his desk.
noir_lord 1y ago
Once had a site wide outage (biggish manufacturing company) of the internet and backup servers because one of the women wanted to plug her hair straighteners in for the xmas party. In a surprise to literally no one that happening on the last friday before xmas break got my "We need to secure the main comms cabinet" (which had the backup server and main ingress for WAN and was in a separate building on other side of site) item that I'd been asking about for months to the top of the list. Still one of my favourite "outages" because I got to my desk, turned PC on, no network, walked across the landing into the main office, opened comms cabinet, plugged it back in and was "resolved" before the MD got to my desk.
gspencley 1y ago
> "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience. You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest. First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative to "cloud." Many businesses, including the ones I worked for, did co-location. The companies owned their own bare metal servers, but would rent a rack in a data centre, and certain things - like the network admin - was entirely outsourced to the data centre / hosting company. You could also rent managed bare metal servers (you still can). This means that you can pretty much outsource your entire IT department, but you're still not doing cloud services. Meaning you've got bare metal servers, someone you're paying at the hosting company is handling security updates and troubleshooting. You don't get things like auto-scaling or serverless or other cloud features, but you also don't have to worry about Jim tripping over the power cable either. There's also still virtual servers. Which is basically a VM running on a server that hosts multiple clients. All of this is to say that the alternative is not "cloud" or "box in a closet." The alternative is "cloud" and a ton of different server options: owned, rented, co-located, on-prem, dedicated, virtual, managed v un-managed (outsource IT vs admin your own) and the list goes on and on.
- maccard 1y ago
  We run a subset of our CI workload on on-prem workstations because the cost/performance ratio of consumer hardware is so much higher than servers. 1TB NVMe drive, with a 7950x/i9, 64GB RAM and gigabit networking is < $1000. It actually completes our CI job faster than AWS restarts a gpu instance. 100% of our failure rates with this machine have been "carpet cleaners unplugged the machine" in 2 years. Last year we had nobody in the office (due to carpet cleaning). This year we sent someone in straight after the cleaning to fix it.
- Spivak 1y ago
  But is the distinction meaningful? The alternative to a shed in Virginia is a different shed in Montana? I mean sure there are a lot of different sheds out there but they're all still sheds. They're all shared responsibility models where the line is drawn in different areas, some outages will be because of your fuckup, some will be theirs. Not saying as an industry we shouldn't diversify a little but it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship each company has to their hosting provider.
franz_vlkshp 1y ago
on the other hand, that's a small price to pay to having total control and physical access to your own infrastructure. if the sysadmin did his job properly, an incident like that shouldn't require anything else but to plug the server back in and hit the power switch. but then if he did his job properly, no one but IT should be tripping on power cables to begin with.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  My home infrastructure is immune from the “unplug” problem by being hosted on two different 10 year old £30 raspberry pis in different rooms. But apparently that’s too hard for the average.
jacobsenscott 1y ago
Largely mitigated by twist lock sockets.