If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.

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api 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.

Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.

The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”

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antonvs 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re expressing a very narrow engineer’s perspective that doesn’t consider the realities of managing bare metal hosting at any kind of scale.

These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.

The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.

There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.

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icedchai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.

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calvinmorrison 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it

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rincebrain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.

(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)

	▲	nixon_why69 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ok but add up a trickle of those examples, with staff to handle them, and you're still comfortably in the black. You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.
	▲	ericd an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Our colo experience was pretty smooth, nothing insane like that, and saved us a bundle. Apparently ymmv. I hate working with AWS APIs by comparison, some of the worst UX I've ever seen.
	▲	calvinmorrison an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I've dealt with both. I am continually amazed that people not only pay for AWS, but that it is so complicated, and that they use it in all sorts of absurd ways, not even just hosting 'vms' but using all sorts of amazon tools to do trivial tasks. I am sorry I just dont get it. Is it like learning salesforce and once you're sucked in you're just in? I am so glad I do not work at an AWS shop anymore and am very glad to be in a position where we do not use it.
	▲	late2part an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		or things like "Datacenter bombed by Iran..."

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icedchai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others.

There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.

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nixon_why69 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most corporations past a certain point have in-house counsel because it would be ruinous to pay Big Law for every little thing.

That's not a narrow legal perspective, it's one look at a very obvious balance sheet. The same could go for hosting.

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__d 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.

	▲	sgarland an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Until someone gets the bright idea that you should be multi-region.

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elzbardico 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Frankly. Most of that stuff is corporate bullshit. Compliance is 99% fucking theatre, cover your ass audits with a fancy check list.

The capex vs opex theatre is just stupid economics and bad generalization from wall street types.

Almost nothing of it is really real.

And your analogy may impress other glorified salesman, but it doesn't hold water for a second, electricity is fungible, computing is not, electricity is stateless, you computing infrastructure carries your data. Power consumption generally is not a competitive differentiator,computing often is. And of course, the economics IN THE FUCKING REAL WORLD is broken: It is very hard to compete with the prices of the grid, not so in the modern cloud world where hyperscalers captured market enough to feel free to start extracting monopolistic rent from their consumers. And even the premise is uninformed, heavy industry frequently resorts to co-generation, and now, ironically, even data centers projects are exploring it.