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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

I use to enjoy having a cheap desktop under my table or in a closet serving traffic to people across the internet. Computers have gotten faster, software has gotten better, network has gotten faster, things have gotten cheaper.

Sadly instead of seeing more of these, most of these are now being outsourced to cloud providers, we have bought and drank the kool-aid that they can do it better and cheap. Which is not true, perhaps this is why it's so hard to find good unix and network admins these days.

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As an ex big iron commercial UNIX sysadmin, let me tell you; they can do it way better than most sysadmins.

Developing IT policies for physical security, server security, update policies, purchasing, wiring and so on takes a huge amount of knowledge, and the possibility that a middle-of-the-road sysadmin is not only competent at, but excels, in all those areas is literally zero.

Cloud providers have world-class experts in each area whose sole responsibility is providing for their specific area. It's economies of scale at its best. It doesn't mean that it's always the best choice, but having to have someone do full-time server maintenance at no additional value to yourself or customers is just a huge drag.

> As an ex big iron commercial UNIX sysadmin, let me tell you; they can do it way better than most sysadmins.

I'm pretty sure that is true. However, the parent said "they can do it better and cheap", and cheap it isn't.

I don't think cost is the benefit of cloud. For tech companies the benefit is scale (you won't know how popular a product is until you deploy). For non-tech companies the benefit is not having to deal with things that aren't related to your core business.

I think you can argue that tech is always related to your core business and you only need a few servers to handle a million simultaneous users but those kinds of arguments aren't usually good enough to businessmen or entrepreneurs.

Yeah, you don't know how big you'll need to scale, but I think that's a bit of a boogeyman for a lot of companies. Servers have a relatively massive amount of cores and memory these days, along with screaming fast IO, and you can handle quite a lot of web traffic with only a few dual socket servers if you don't bog them down with incredibly inefficient code.

> we have bought and drank the kool-aid that they can do it better and cheap

The few times I've done the analysis, cloud servers tend to cost about as much as self-hosting, when you factor in the cost of electricity.

There are reasons one may argue against cloud servers, on the basis of the internet's health, user freedom, etc. But for me and for many people they are at least both better and cheaper.

Looking at Knative to mature in a couple of years and with it on top of k8s we may see a slow migration back to self-hosting where it makes sense

How does it work with the consumer ISP? Can you elaborate on any special considerations? Obviously not for customers, but I'm interested for it as a hobby thing.

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