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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent -- that would also mean to invest in relations with your employees and not alienating them. Shareholders prefer to sacrifice a little more of their profit so they deal with less potential problems. And the pull of the idea that every human in the org must be an inter-changeable cog is too strong (even if that idea continues to be absurd, and always was).

Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.

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This isn’t it, you might not know or if you haven’t been in an environment like it.

Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never.

You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget.

With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction.

A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).

I used to be a big proponent of self-hosting. The raw hardware cost makes it look like a great deal. However in my experience hardware is less than 5% of salary cost and having enough admins on hand to make your infra reliable is usually going to end up costing you more in the end.

Don't some of those salary costs transfer over to the cloud. Someone still has to manage it

You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?

> You need a lot less people per computer when you have millions of computers like big tech has than when you have 10.

That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.

The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

> The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.

But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.

That doesn't explain why their pricing for generic VMs or bandwidth is so high, or why anybody should want to pay them for that.

It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is going to have some line of business software to run their textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things, because they're custom and don't have a huge installed base of people who already encountered and solved all the problems you're going to have. But for the same reason, they're the things AWS doesn't provide.

What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was going.

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if you want to be known as a team player

> Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much...

I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.

You are talking big businesses here, I've seen people just ask the CEO if they can buy 3 brand new servers and him agreeing, verbally, and the servers arrived next week, and two weeks later were completely setup and were useful.

This lasted for 11 years and only stopped because two of the 5 senior engineers retired and because the company was bought a few weeks earlier.

So again, don't look at this through Silicon Valley lens. Most of the companies in the world have a very different mold compared to SV.

Then there are service contracts to make surr the systems keeps running with little downtime. Which may be impossible to get for 11 year old equipment. Then there are pesky details like needing a disaster recovery site.

Professional hardware is expensive and server h/w is a small part of it.

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but it simply wasn’t true. Enterprises would plan ahead and buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn’t apply to 99% of enterprises, and even if it did it’s probably a result of bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.

In general it's really the opposite. In 2004 you needed a rack full of $3000 servers to run your medium business. Now it's two physical machines using 5% of the power to virtualize everything that used to run on two dozen.

Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper by more than most businesses expand. When you need to expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to save money because the faster machine uses less power than the existing one.

> Outsourcing culture. Nobody wants to nurture talent.

Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly).

The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..

AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have opportunity cost while they try to do it.

What about scaling down? Once you bought hardware for self hosting you are stuck with it.

What about it? We're talking small businesses here, this will not be a warehouse full of racks worth of machines to try and sell. We're likely talking 3 to 10 PC-sized machines in a closet or storage room. You can sell those on 2nd hand market pretty quickly and even if you sell them at 30-40% loss you are extremely likely to have already paid off the other 60-70% during the machines' service time.

old laptop is fine then :)

The costs the OP described are pretty minimal.

You never know. While working in an ITAM role, I've had a manager point out a line item asking why we need 30 DisplayPort cables. This was in an org with multiple sites, 2000+ employees, using dual monitor setups both in house and remote. Whether physically, or in the cloud, companies whose primary business isn't tech-related see the IT side as an annoying cost center rather than a cost of doing business in the 21st century.

This selfish outsourcing culture is killing all the Gilfoyles out there!

I'm curious as a hosting and cloud noob, do you have an estimate how much that would cost monthly or yearly if hosted on a cloud?

Not really, because AWS costs aren't transparent. You can't drill down properly and even where you can, the prices are disappointingly high.

It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...

Interesting. I am not intimately familiar with the subject matter, so I will be curious then to see how the next 10 years play out.

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