Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jiggawatts

> Right up until something crashes or some hardware fails.

Unlike the public cloud where Nothing Ever Goes Wrong (tm).

There are never brownouts.

There are never latency spikes.

No undocumented quota limits.

Documented but confusing quota limits.

Unexpected performance issues caused by other customers.

Forced upgrades.

Forced patching.

Shock bills.

No siree Bob, that kind of thing just doesn't go on in the public cloud! It's all rainbows and unicorns....

View on HN

I fail to see how this supports your claim that you can get by with "a few minutes per month" of devops. In fact, it's a classic red herring.

Your original claim is quite unrealistic and you'd do well to retract it. It's bad advice both for public cloud and for self-managed efforts alike.

When I used to work for an MSP, we would sell Dell servers to rural banking groups.

We supported disaster recovery and high availability deployments.

Any failed component, Dell would send us a replacement in less than 24 hours.

24? I guess it's that long because it is rural? We use Dell servers and I sleep a bit better having seen their 4hr support replace a motherboard with a bad lifecycle controller within 2 hours of the initial call.

Try calling Amazon and getting that kind of response for your problems.

Yeah, my closest Target store and major airport is over 2 hours away.

But, yeah, that is worse-case scenario.

But it is a few minutes per month. A properly architected application won’t depend on a single server so a hardware failure will be as unimportant as it is the serverless world.

Architecting a system properly is one of the key functions of devops. You don’t get it by investing a few minutes per month, whether public cloud or bare metal.

You have all that DIY too, except maybe shock bills, but it's your problem to fix. Like with everything, extremes are bad and all managed or all unmanaged are both bad. My personal guideline is use off-the-shelf services if they are cheaper than DIY, including labor, or if DIY provides no competitive advantage and off-the-shelf is cheap enough. But if DIY is much cheaper or gives a competitive advantage, do it yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com