[lbotos]

I mean, sure, you might not save money being in the "cloud" but running hardware is a different skillset than building software. If you can pay someone else to run your hardware, someone else who wants to be really good at running hardware, you might be able to focus more on your software, and get really good at making that?

[tbrowbdidnso]

There is nothing hard about running hardware. The current VM trend gives you bare metal access. the only difference is you have to plug in your machines, and you get to look at them every once in a while.

Really, what software dev hasn't put together a desktop PC and plugged in some Ethernet jacks? That's all you need to Colocate.

Your response echos what cloud providers want everyone to think. Hardware is too hard for us, let's pay someone to do it and make 50% profit margins on us

[bdamm]

As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy.

Plugging in 150 machines is significantly more challenging. Providing disaster response, backups, stable power, and VLANs to secure services, quickly ratchets up the cost. And nobody wants to pay one engineer per machine to babysit one machine, x 150. That wouldn't even be a good idea, because engineers get bored and start mucking with stuff that needs to be left alone.

Data center administration is a first class professional grouping. Software engineers who don't know that are a real hazard to any business.

[cookiecaper]

First, most of the time it's not a question of paying someone to run an entire data center, but rather some racks in someone else's data center. The data center has data center staff who handle a lot of this. It's unfair to pretend that going bare metal entails starting with an empty plot of land and building/managing a whole data center. While that may be the case for the largest companies, even moderately-sized companies won't do that.

When you're a business, you have to pay people to handle hardware no matter what. The question is not whether you need to pay someone to administer the hardware -- the question is who you are going to pay. It can be an employee, contractor, or third-party service company like AWS or remote hands at a colo.

I've seen multiple companies move to cloud merely because they were annoyed at having to go down to the rack to deal with hardware, often making oblique justifications about difficulty when they really meant that they don't like driving down to the colocation center.

Those companies have spent millions more paying AWS than they would've if they just hired a couple of hardware jockeys.

The argument basically becomes a question of whether you know how to hire someone who knows how to deal with hardware. If you don't, it's better to go with Amazon even though they're going to rake you over the coals cost-wise. If you do, then practically speaking, the differences should be small. Your hardware people will automatically fix the hardware issues just like Amazon's hardware people.

The bulk of the work of running servers is at the OS admin level, which is still the customer's responsibility with cloud servers. These arguments about difficulty of administration would work for something like Heroku, but they don't work for Amazon.

[omgdresser]

I was about to make a comment similar to this, but this is articulated so much better than what I was able to get out.

I'm in agreement, after the hardware deploy, you're pretty much left with what you would have in a cloud environment: a bunch of VMs (or in this case OS instances) that need care and feeding, and only rarely, much rarely than many would think, do you have to replace a disk, or recable because requirements changed.

[user5994461]

> As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy.

Till you're the guy in your 20 people startup who has to do it and crawl around the racks with 100kg of equipment to assemble, cable and power up everything.

[morgante]

I'm sorry, but your comments in this thread are incredibly out of touch.

It's absolutely hard to run your own hardware. There's a reason that companies which run their own hardware have entire teams devoted to it.

You seem to be thinking like an engineer, not a business person. For most businesses, cloud providers offer a substantial cost savings.

[tbrowbdidnso]

I know it's a controversial opinion. And probably not even true in a lot of cases... but I'm glad it sounds like I'm out in left field.

The echo chamber needs a devil's advocate and sometimes the resulting discussion gets interesting enough that I question my original beliefs.

In this case I believe owning my hardware is cheaper for me because I already do. I might be a rarity though, or just old fashioned and wrong

[morgante]

Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs. bare metal and bare metal came out on top, that's fine. But don't assume that other mature businesses haven't also done so.

For companies with AWS bills less than $10k/m, it'd be ludicrous to even consider bare metal.

[tbrowbdidnso]

I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. The hype will eventually die down and we'll see some kind of equilibrium.

I've been experimenting with "cloud over" where I only use cloud servers for spare capacity. With docker it's getting easier. My baseline CoLo has the same performance as a super high end AWS instance and costs a third as much after my fixed investment.

I still have the cloud if my box goes down or takes a big traffic hit, but I'm not paying for a bunch of cloud servers all the time either.

[cookiecaper]

I've seen businesses move to the cloud and cost themselves millions of dollars in doing so. I'm not sure where you're coming from believing that cloud always offers a massive savings. It's possible that in some circumstances, cloud will be cheaper, but I actually think that more often than not, it's more expensive.

It's ludicrous that you suggest that anyone who is not willing to dive head-first into 100% cloud everything should be fired. The cloud has a place, but there's no reason that cloud should be the only option, as you appear to suggest.

[morgante]

I have not once said that cloud is the only option. You're arguing with a straw man.

If you're spending millions on infrastructure, you should absolutely do a rigorous analysis of whether the cloud is better or worse.

[hueving]

>Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Significant savings is not something you get from the cloud unless you were massively over-provisioned with your hardware. In nearly every case I've seen, moving an equivalent workload to the cloud has resulted in more costs for the same size workload. But the company still made the decision to do it because it was less stuff to worry about and it made expanding that much quicker.

You pay a premium for the flexibility of the cloud.

[ex_amazon_sde]

> There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Those "old-school sysadmins..." get hired by large cloud companies. Amazon has plenty. The cloud is just somebody else's computers.

[morgante]

Sure, and that's precisely the operational efficiency which comes from cloud providers.

[Heliosmaster]

It really really depends how you structure your application. Depending on your architecture having a few huge boxes is very much worth it, and that scales a lot better with bare metal.

[throwtotheway]

You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it.

Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".

[tbrowbdidnso]

Google ran on desktop computers for a long time. If anything, the cloud is less reliable than individual machines once were. You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order.

I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I make sure not to touch anything running production sites

[mynameisvlad]

> You have no control over when or why one of your VM's goes down, and there's nothing you can do but wait and hope everything comes back in short order.

Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to.

Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more likely to happen when you run your own bare metal if you don't pump sufficient time and resources into it, than at the company that has hired thousands of engineers and ops people specifically to provide these services.

[cookiecaper]

This belief is the problem. Most cloud services are not automatically redundant.

They have stuff that will allow you to make your stuff redundant if you know how to architect, configure, and deploy it, but you don't get these benefits just by becoming an AWS customer. You have to know how to set up an ELB just the same as you have to know how to set up haproxy on bare metal.

Is it easier to configure an ELB than a haproxy instance? Probably, but it's not that much harder, and configuration is mostly a one-time cost. Pay someone on staff to spend a couple of hours testing and configuring haproxy or pay 3x more than you should every month to rent VMs on Amazon? Which one is cheaper over "the long term"?

All you're doing is renting some space in a server. The configuration is still mostly up to the user. Hardware requires maintenance, yes, but people are really hamming up both the frequency and difficulty of hardware maintenance.

[hueving]

>Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to.

Have you ever used EC2 with traditional apps hoisted onto the cloud? Just because you can click a button for ELB doesn't mean anything when the system wasn't horizontally scalable to begin with. EC2 is just VMs, it doesn't provide any high availability at the VM level.

With local solutions (e.g. vmware/kvm/openstack), you can live migrate these annoying (but critical) pets around as you phase out hardware with very limited traffic interruption. With EC2, the thing eventually just shits the bed and you get a notice saying the instance will be retired even though it's already in a worthless state.

[throwtotheway]

Google that ran on desktop computers isn't the same Google of today. Times change. Technology advances.

Glad to hear the vmware cluster is working out for you. Anecdotal but I've seen people having issues without touching vmware too. One personal experience doesn't diminish the cloud. Maybe different business needs? One sysadmin maintaining customer websites vs multi-person team managing a web app?

I'm not against running your own servers. Bare metal is fun, interesting, and possible. I'm just against blanket statements that "it's bare metal or nothing!".