Comment by antonvs
2 months ago
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.
Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
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.)
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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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Agreed, it’s why I said “at any kind of scale”.
There’s a sort of arguable sweet spot where someone motivated and knowledgeable can manage their own hardware, even if it’s just rented from Hetzner etc. But that just doesn’t scale.
Once you do try to scale that - not just the hardware but the staffing that’s needed to avoid a bus factor of 1, to ensure the required uptime especially if it needs to be 24x7, to handle disaster recovery, failover, security and compliance issues etc. etc., you quickly run into all the reasons that infrastructure management services and other computing services - i.e., cloud - have won out so definitively.
If you’re small enough that none of those things matter very much to you, and knowledgeable enough to run your whole system yourself, and have the time and inclination to deal with it, go for it! But such people are outliers who are really indulging a hobby more than anything else. It generally makes extremely little business sense.
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.
Your legal department does not replace your retained lawyers, they add to it. It’s separate roles.
Sure, just like CDN or rarely-used excess capacity could be separate roles to the bulk of your compute.
If you're racking up 750/hr putting big law on routine corporate tasks then you are probably messing up. Hire an admin.
Your legal department usually doesn't do litigation. This is contracted to external offices.
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.
Until someone gets the bright idea that you should be multi-region.
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.