[olavgg]

> I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues.

Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.

[pageandrew]

The point was about redundancy / geo spread / HA. It’s significantly more difficult to operate two physical sites than one. You can only be in one place at a time.

If you want true reliability, you need redundant physical locations, power, networking. That’s extremely easy to achieve on cloud providers.

[PunchyHamster]

You can just rent the rack space in datacenter and have that covered. It's still much cheaper than running that in cloud.

It doesn't make sense if you only have few servers, but if you are renting equivalent of multiple racks of servers from cloud and run them for most of the day, on-prem is staggeringly cheaper.

We have few racks and we do "move to cloud" calculation every few years and without fail they come up at least 3x the cost.

And before the "but you need to do more work" whining I hear from people that never did that - it's not much more than navigating forest of cloud APIs and dealing with random blackbox issues in cloud that you can't really debug, just go around it.

[direwolf20]

How much does your single site go down?

On cloud it's out of your control when an AZ goes down. When it's your server you can do things to increase reliability. Most colos have redundant power feeds and internet. On prem that's a bit harder, but you can buy a UPS.

If your head office is hit by a meteor your business is over. Don't need to prepare for that.

[account42]

You don't need full "cloud" providers for that, colocation is a thing.

[nicman23]

or just to be good at hiding the round trip of latency

[jim180]

Also I'd add this question, why do so many developers and sysadmins think, that cloud companies always hire competent/non-lazy/non-pissed employees?

[rvz]

> Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services.

Because those services solve the problem for them. It is the same thing with GitHub.

However, as predicted half a decade ago with GitHub becoming unreliable [0] and as price increases begin to happen, you can see that self-hosting begins to make more sense and you have complete control of the infrastructure and it has never been more easier to self host and bring control over costs.

> its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.

What you have just seen with coding agents is going to have the same effect on "developers" that will have a decline in skills the moment they become over-reliant on coding agents and won't be able to write a single line of code at all to fix a problem they don't fully understand.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

[faust201]

> Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.

It is a different skillset. SRE is also an under-valued/paid (unless one is in FAANGO).

[clickety_clack]

It’s all downside. If nothing goes wrong, then the company feels like they’re wasting money on a salary. If things go wrong they’re all your fault.

[faust201]

Correct

[sgarland]

SRE has also lost nearly all meaning at this point, and more or less is equivalent to "I run observability" (but that's a SaaS solution too).

[infecto]

Maybe you find it fun. I don’t, I prefer building software not running and setting up servers.

It’s also nontrivial once you go past some level of complexity and volume. I have made my career at building software and part of that requires understanding the limitations and specifics of the underlying hardware but at the end of the day I simply want to provision and run a container, I don’t want to think about the security and networking setup it’s not worth my time.

[tomcam]

Because when I’m running a busy site and I can’t figure out what went wrong, I freak out. I don’t know whether the problem will take 2 hours or 2 days to diagnose.

[MaKey]

Usually you can figure out what went wrong pretty quickly. Freaking out doesn't help with the "quickly" part though.

[tomcam]

I’m not as smart as you

[speedgoose]

At a previous job, the company had its critical IT infrastructure on their own data center. It was not in the IT industry, but the company was large and rich enough to justify two small data centers. It notably had batteries, diesel generators, 24/7 teams, and some advanced security (for valid reasons).

I agree that solving technical issues is very fun, and hosting services is usually easy, but having resilient infrastructure is costly and I simply don't like to be woken up at night to fix stuff while the company is bleeding money and customers.