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| ▲ | tiew9Vii 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted. Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B pension fund [1] Or your cloud portfolio is so big you need a "platform" team of multiple devops/developer staff to build wrappers around/package up your cloud provider for you and your platform team is now the bottleneck. Cloud is useful but it's not as pain free as everyone says when comparing with managing your own, it still costs money and work. Having worked on several cloud transformations they've all cost more and taken more effort than expected. A large proportion have also been canned/postponed/re-evaluated due to cost/size/time/complexity. Unless you are a big spender with dedicated technical account manager, your support is likely to be as bad as a no name budget VPS provider. Both cloud and traditional hosting have their merits and place. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden... |
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| ▲ | grey-area 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it. |
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| ▲ | n4r9 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I suspect that this is really about liability. When AWS goes down you can just throw up your hands, everyone's in the same boat. If your own server goes down you worry that your customers doubt your competence. | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The difference is that if AWS goes down, I know for a fact that it'll be back up without me doing anything. If my own dedicated server goes down, I'm going to need to call my admin at 3am 10 times just to wake him up. |
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| ▲ | oersted 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers. One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other virtualized services for way cheaper with similar guarantees, they are not stuck in the last century. And I don’t know how people are using cloud, but most config issues happen above the VM/Docker/Kubernetes level, which is the same wether you are on cloud or not. Even fully managed database deployments or serverless backends are not really that much simpler or less error-prone than deploying the containers yourself. Actually the complexity of Cloud is often a worse minefield of footguns, with their myriad artificial quirks and limitations. Often dealing with the true complexities of the underlying open-source technologies they are reselling ends up being easier and more predictable. This fearmongering is really weakening us as an industry. Just try it, it is not as complex or dangerous as they claim. |
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| ▲ | aurareturn 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I'm a geek and I like to tinker with hardware. I want to maximum my $/hardware and have built a ton of DIY computers myself since I was young. I'm all about getting the most hardware for the money. But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business. | | |
| ▲ | oersted 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently. And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work. We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K. |
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| ▲ | Perz1val 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's even worse when AWS goes down and myth of it never going down should be more than shattered by now |
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| ▲ | esseph 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sure, but AWS has more downtime than I do :-) |
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| ▲ | bjourne 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What prevents an EC2 instance from going down in exactly the same way? Other hosting providers offer automatic backup too - it's not an AWS exclusive feature. |
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| ▲ | juliusceasar 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| When your system goes down on AWS and your AWS admin is on holiday, you'll have the same problem. What is your point? |
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| ▲ | wink 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it. Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware. I'm not even one of the "cloud is so great" people - but it you're generally doing software it's actually a lot less friction. And while the ratio of cost difference may sound bad, it's generally not. Unless we're talkign huge scale, you can buy a lot of AWS crap for the yearly salary of a single person. | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't have an AWS admin. I assume a $2.4 trillion dollar company always has dev ops on call? |
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