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Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

So what? I would rather have Google/Amazon employees on the issue than some random DevOps dude.

The random dude is your employee and his/her mani job to get it to work and it’s first proirity. You will never be AWS/GCP/Azure first priority.

How could I be their second priority? For any one service and availability zone isn't it all or nothing (or slow).

> So what? I would rather have Google/Amazon employees on the issue than some random DevOps dude.

This is fine if three nines of availability is all you need. Doesn't matter much if you prefer a big brand employee fixing things or a small brand employee. It doesn't change the outcome.

However there are a lot of things that simply cannot live with crappy three nines availability. And the only way to do better is to stop relying on any single cloud, which inevitably requires infrastructure engineers aka random devops dudes.

In fairness one "random DevOps dude" might be equally capable and less expensive for your infrastructure. Generally speaking any software company can succeed without a cloud provider's infrastructure, it's just a matter of cost and developing that competency in-house. There are many site reliability engineers who specialize in high availability and downtime resolution on baremetal hardware. StackExchange notably has this competency internally.

Site reliability is a new fancy name for the sucker who is on call.

They will change career after being forced to work on week ends and holidays a few times. Incidentally, today is a Sunday AND the most taken holiday of the year.

Not all site reliability engineers have a bad work life balance.

The ones at AWS and Google, maybe not.

The ones who are the single "random DevOps dude" at a small company trying to emulate AWS and Google, do have zero balance.

Well I guess the whole essence of HN is now lost... no room for some "random" startup dude to do anything that can be trusted.

I think you can concede that if we're talking a five nines foot race, you're unlikely to beat out AWS etc.

Five nines means you can't rely on a single infrastructure provider for anything ever and it doesn't actually matter whether you use AWS at all.

I wouldn’t. Hire the right person and you have immediate response instead of waiting or somebody else. A large reason we are not going cloud for our new infrastructure.

And this one person never sleeps and is 24/7 on-call, right?

and isn't about to quit once they have a little more money saved up?

Beware of the bus factor! Going in house is great, as long as everything is well documented and your company has good backup resources.

It's Sunday. Please wait for Monday office hours for your immediate response.

At work we have a 24/7 20min response time clause. If the phone for work emergency calls we are ready to help in 20 minutes at any time around the clock even on Sunday.

Why would you do anything else for your sysop/sysadmin?

You surely realize that no human being can be available 24/7 within 20 minutes. It's beyond slavery to expect that from any employee.

You need at least 10 sysop/sysadmin to achieve anything close to that SLA, with a sustainable rota. Contrary to the parent posters who believe it can be done with THE right guy.

We manage it with 3 sysop/sysadmins. I think you vastly overestimate how many people you need to keep a 20 minute SLA.

That’s a shitty life.

I find it rather insulting that you think it must be a shitty job.

Expectation of 24/7, 20 minute response to a callout is bullshit. If that’s not shitty, you’re a victim of some sort of employee Stockholm syndrome.

Not all 3 have to respond all the time. It's a rotating schedule for having the overnight phone and the weekend phone (during weekend nights the SLA is relaxed to 1 hour).

And keep in mind, 20 minute response doesn't mean you fix the problem in 20 minutes, it means you respond in 20 minutes to the callout.

I think you're victim of an easy-going startup culture.

I misread it.

I’ve been oncall for escalations for like 15 years. That’s miserable enough, IMO frontline guys need fixed schedules and rotation if the volume is high.

I definitely cast my perspective on this and apologize if I came on too strong,

Sorry to say, you're right and he has Stockholm syndrome. It's a very aggressive schedule, must be missing holidays half of the time to keep the phone.

With 3 people you can have a "follow the sun" rotation during business hours which takes care of the entire week, and I don't think you would need 7 more people for the weekend.

Why would you hire just one person?

person

This just doesn’t make sense. Google/Amazon employees basically are some random DevOps “dudes”. Whereas your own people would be...whoever you decided to hire to work on your infrastructure.

It's like an insurance. You wouldn't be able to hire as many and as highly paid random DevOps on your own. So you and others pay a 3th person to do it, just in case you need a competent person.

Infrastructure (ops, software, hiring, social) matters.

Hiring some dude won't give you that.

Hiring the right dude will. The trouble is, most of them are happily employed elsewhere.

at AWS/Google? :P

yeah, by google and amazon.

The right dude if both on week end AND on holidays right now.

Please wait until Monday 20th to get a status on the issue. Thank you.

Problem being that Infrastructure is made to be very, very compicated because they're selling tons of managed features that have reliance upon each other. I don't know why this idea of having your own devops is suddenly now bad. renting your own bare hardware and managing solutions yourself is still very much a thing and something you have to do if you're using lots of bandwidth. Dropbox for example made their own infrastructure to get off of AWS [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...

I don't think that anyone thinks having your own infrastructure is bad, or if they do, they likely don't have much experience. Rather, I think it can be a nightmare if it's not properly managed, and it's hard to develop the skill to properly manage the process unless you've been burned in the past.

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