Hacker News Reader

Comment by _alex_ | Hacker News Reader

that works as long as there are enough of you for every team/app/service/whatever to build and operate all that around the clock and without bus risk.

A lot of these threads end up talking about "scaling" from a pure hardware perspective. Once you start talking about medium-to-large companies, the real scaling headache is people, process, and organizations.

View on HN

Not sure if I made myself clear but I definitely meant my above as aimed at small businesses (which my current employer is).

Obviously from one scale and on the cloud is very much worth it. IMO the discussion has to be shifted to "before which point you can easily get away without the cloud?".

At some point, an internal cloud starts being interesting and gives a clear org boundary, using cloud-based software and interfaces.

That's true as well. It all depends on how much is the employer willing to invest in their employees in the end; if they foster longer-lasting relationships then many interesting internal projects become feasible or even desirable.

Those invested-in employees will probably still leave, especially if they're very good and you can't match big tech salaries. And, in any case, you need redundancies for when they're on vacation, out sick, etc. Not to say you shouldn't develop in house competencies but you should do so deliberately because there are probably a lot more costs and risks than are obvious.

We're not blind to the tradeoffs. It's a long process to both change culture and nurture the necessary skills in your staff, AND take care of having human redundancy.

My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in other comments that from one point and on the cloud absolutely wins.

I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+ monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

Absolutely. I'm definitely not in the "You're crazy if you don't just use AWS/GCP/Azure" camp. I'm just also not in the "See how cheap it is to just stick a system under my desk" camp. Totally dependent on use case and circumstances.

True. It's not a religion or a credo. We're simply evaluating our options because our cloud bill is way too high for what we do.

Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your costs.

We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.

And figuring out those costs can be really hard. People like Corey Quinn have built a whole business out of helping people make sense of their AWS bills.

Yep, but it's all self-interest. At one point you ask yourself: must I really go down this rabbit hole?

>I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

I don't think that setting it up is main problem here. Keeping it up to date and secure is the hard part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com