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I absolutely prefer to have the option to go into a datacenter in a hurry and actually fix stuff and be in charge, then be stuck with having to wait an indefinite amount of time, twiddle my thumbs, apologize to customers and hope for the best. While I considered myself a decent Windows NT admin, 20 years ago, the reason I went all in on Linux and FLOSS software at the turn of the century was because I dreaded the powerlessness that these proprietary solutions gave me, when they failed. You'd call the vendors, pored through logs, finding obscure, undocumented error codes, etc. With FLOSS and self-hosting youve got all the information at your fingertips. And if you encountered bugs and you can dig into the sources, patch them, re-compile and fix things - and share them with others and feel that you're contributing to our profession. When I got the chance to do cloud projects over the last 5 - 10 years, I always took these opportunities, hoping to ensure that I keep up with the tech. At first I was hopeful to offload the boring ops tasks, take our config management to the next level and automate even more. With every platform I got to work with, AWS, Azure and GCP so far, we kept finding bugs in their APIs, outdated or otherwise incorrect documentation and very unpredictable performance, unless you actually can run stacks at scale to average it out (as in more then just 10 - 20 instances or a larger clustered SaaS of the cloud vendor). Many times we also encountered undocumented limits that required requesting support and waiting for approval by the cloud vendor, to get even their mid-sized resources allocated. It all works very nicely on the free-tier-eligible, smallest instances and services, if as slow and high latency as is to be expected, but as soon as you actually need some decently sized storage, compute or bandwidth, it becomes quickly more expensive than what you can put in two or three datacenters for redundancy yourself, if you look at the yearly costs. So far none of the PoCs I was involved with ever got approved long term. They mostly end up as reference implementations for our customers or show case material for the corporate blog. :-( No thanks, I don't want to go back to feel that powerless as I did on closed systems ever again. Luckily, although many seem to think that cloud is the only option to run at a global scale, you can still provide lots of valuable services on the internet using robust hardware, housed in well connected datacenters. |
I know I'd rather someone else do it, then having to drive 2 hours away to a data center at 4:00 in the morning. But I don't know exactly what you're working on , I definitely can't imagine some use cases where a few hours of down time is just unacceptable. I know I wouldn't want to run a logistics firm with servers that go down all the time.