Comment by elzbardico
2 months ago
If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
2 months ago
If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
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.”
It is worth the exercise to honestly assess the maintenance, initial costs, ongoing costs, etc etc for owning your own. I did this at a company for a single server to let the ml group test fine tuning frameworks/throw crazy ideas at before spending real money on a training run and it paid for itself in like 3 months. Sometimes the math is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes it isn't. In general, the smaller/earlier you are the less it makes sense. Not because of the per hour costs, but because of the distraction away from implementing the core idea of the company. It is worth some, maybe a lot of, inefficiency to stay focused. When you get bigger and have strong fit and a clear direction it is a lot easier to focus on optimizing hosting costs and spending leadership time away from the core problem of the company.
It’s always a spreadsheet decision.
Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability.
Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
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Oh man I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into arguments on here and other technical forums years ago about self-hosting and how 'stupid' I was to not want to rent cloud servers
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.
There are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.
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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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the capex vs opex arugment would be persuasive if you couldn't lease servers. and obviously colo was always opex. basically the only time you'd get into serious capex was when you were building your own datacenters
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.
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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.