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by oceanplexian 1340 days ago
If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour. You also don’t “deploy a server” to reduce load you plan ahead every few months and deploy thousands at a time. Even then- if you have a good relationship with a really good systems integrator, they can ship and rack machines in a matter of days, not weeks.

I’m increasingly convinced that the large scale companies that don’t do bare-metal because they never learned how, and all the people advising them have never done bare metal or have done it poorly, so it’s like the blind leading the blind.. But they are leaving a 50-90% cost savings, better control over reliability, latency, data residency, etc on the table by doing so.
1 comments
sofixa 1340 days ago
> If you open a ticket with a real remote hands you should get a response back in minutes; typically someone will be on-site in your cage in under an hour

Remote hands won't order your servers, configure your networking, install OSes/configure your PXE, and all the other tedious things running your own DC entails.

Yes, most DIY DCs are done terribly, that's to whole point - if so many people struggle with that, doesn't it make sense to just outsource it?

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oceanplexian 1340 days ago
They will do whatever is in the contract. Yes, they will hook up a crash cart and PXE the server (If you need that), done it hundreds of times in the old days. However in modern datacenters no one "installs OSes and configures the network". You plug it in, turn it on, everything self-provisions and starts serving traffic.
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sofixa 1339 days ago
> However in modern datacenters no one "installs OSes and configures the network". You plug it in, turn it on, everything self-provisions and starts serving traffic.

Absolutely agreed. That's what i used to in part do, and it's a massive effort to do everything automatically and efficiently, and it needs multiple people's time to create and maintain all the infrastructure, glue between different systems, scripts, tools. Even components as basic as DHCP suck absolutely (your options are either something from the 1990s, isc-dhcp-server, which lacks an API in any real sense, or Kea, made from the same people, which really shows), and before Tinkerbell there was literally nothing that could be used to automate such a thing at scale.

And more to my point, how many datacenters do you think are "modern"? I've only encountered one that was starting to get there (where i used to work before an acquisition by a company with arcane practices in their DCs), and having worked with hundreds of customers with "on prem" stuff, for the vast majority it's a legacy horror show.

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