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by PragmaticPulp 1636 days ago
> Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID?

This is the second-level mistake engineers commonly make:

The right questions isn't "Can you do X". Give engineers enough time and resources and they can usually come up with a solution to do X.

The real question is "How much time and resources need to be invested to accomplish X at a satisfactory level?"

And the third-level mistake is to assume that getting something to work once is the finish line. In practice, getting something to work once is just the beginning. Getting it to a maintainable, well-documented, repeatable state is a lot more work.

Cloud services make all of this effort disappear. Type a few commands and it's good to go. Now you can take all of the engineering hours that would have gone into the DIY version and allocate them to working on the company's product instead of reinventing architecture that you could have simply paid for.

Good engineers are scarce and expensive. Using them to reinvent infrastructure that can be trivially purchased for a nominal amount is a terrible move most of the time. Even when it does make sense, the right move is to build the prototypes on AWS and then consider transitioning to self-hosted later if the numbers work out.

2 comments

Eh, I would argue that any advantage cloud has in ease of configuration is because of the brain drain in good server software caused by the cloud: Spend some time in Microsoft Azure and it becomes instantly sad that all this manpower was pulled off of Windows Server (which has stagnated as a product) and been invested in a proprietary service product that runs on top of Windows Server. And the former will outlive the latter more than likely.
You make a lot of claims without providing evidence.