Comment by pu_pe
15 hours ago
> Self-reliance is great, but there are other benefits to running your own compute. It inspires good engineering.
It's easy to inspire people when you have great engineers in the first place. That's a given at a place like comma.ai, but there are many companies out there where administering a datacenter is far beyond their core competencies.
I feel like skilled engineers have a hard time understanding the trade-offs from cloud companies. The same way that comma.ai employees likely don't have an in-house canteen, it can make sense to focus on what you are good at and outsource the rest.
> I feel like skilled engineers have a hard time understanding the trade-offs from cloud companies.
They spend too much time on yet another cloud native support group call, learning for ThatOneCloudProvider certificates, figuring out that single implementation caveats, standardizing security procedures between cloud teams, and so on.
Yet people in the article just throw a 1000 lines of code KV store mkv [0] on a huge raw storage server and call it a day. And it's a legit choice, they did actual study beforehand and concluded: we don't need redundancy in most cases. At all. I respect that.
[0] https://github.com/geohot/minikeyvalue
We actually do have an in-house chef lol.