Comment by decasia
1 month ago
Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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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> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs
Yep, and it's mostly caused by the VC funding model - if your investors are demanding hockey-stick growth, there is no way in hell a startup can justify (or pay for) the resulting Capex.
Whereas a nice, stable business with near-linear growth can afford to price in regular small Capex investments.
> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front).
Yes, there is.
Honestly, it looks to me that this school of thought is mostly adopted by people that can't do arithmetic or use a calculator. But it does absolutely exist.
That said, no, servers are not nearly expensive enough to move the needle on a company nowadays. The room that often goes around them is, and that's why way more people rent the room than the servers in it.
Connectivity is a problem, not the room.
I ran the IT side of a media company once, and it all worked on a half-empty rack of hardware in a small closet... except for the servers that needed bandwidth. These were colocated. Until we realized that the hoster did not have enough bandwidth, at which point we migrated to two bare metal servers at Hetzner.
It's connectivity, reliable power, reliable cooling, and security.
The actual space isn't a big deal, but the entire environment has large fixed costs.
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If you rent dedicated servers, then you're not worrying about any of the capex or maintenance stuff.
the benefits of don't write a distributed system unless you really have to are also very real
Exactly, same for microservices I feel. Why have enterprise org problems if you don't have an enterprise org.
I think you hit the nail on the head. What enterprise are paying for is abstraction of responsibility. Suits would never criticise going with Microsoft or Amazon.
> if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.
Never underestimate the price people are willing to pay to evade responsibility. I estimate this is a multi-billion dollar market.
For anything up to about 128GB RAM you can still easily avoid capex by just renting servers. Above that it gets a bit trickier
It's not like it's a huge capex for that level of server anyway. Probably less than the cost of one employee's laptop.
Renting (hosted) servers above 128GB RAM is still pretty easy, but I agree pricing levels out. 128GB RAM server ~$200/Month, 384 GB ~$580, 1024 GB ~$940/Month
To be clear - this isn't an endorsement on my part, just observations of why cloud-only deployment seems common. I guess we shouldn't neglect the pressure towards resume-oriented development either, as it undoubtedly plays a part in infra folks' careers. It probably makes you sound obsolete to be someone who works in a physical data center.
I for one really miss being able to go see the servers that my code runs on. I thought data centers were really interesting places. But I don't see a lot of effort to decide things based on pure dollar cost analysis at this point. There's a lot of other industry forces besides the microeconomics that predetermine people's hosting choices.