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logifail 6 days ago

> and server hardware is expensive up front

You don't need to buy server hardware(!), the article specifically mentions renting from eg Hetzner.

> The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real

Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

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bearjaws 6 days ago | parent [-]

> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues.

I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

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Nextgrid 6 days ago | parent [-]

> I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

You don't deal with that either if you rent a dedicated server from a hosting provider. They handle the datacenter and maintenance for you for a flat monthly fee.

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immibis 6 days ago | parent [-]

They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times. For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy.

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1dom 5 days ago | parent [-]

> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread has even already had the argument "if the cloud provider goes down, it's not your fault" as a cloud benefit. Either cloud is strong and stable and can't break, or cloud breaks often enough that people will just excuse you for it.

	▲	immibis 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.
	▲	namibj 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's a reason semiconductor manufacturing is so highly automated, and it's not labor cost. Humans err. Computers only err when told. But they'll repeat a task reliably without random mistakes if told what to do by a competent (manufacturing process) engineering organization. Yes it takes more than one engineer.