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Comment by y4mi | Hacker News Reader

> Even if you can manage more uptime on your own than through the cloud (which I doubt)

Getting higher uptime is super easy for smallish inhouse deployments.

You just don't install any updates and let the server run, trusting your VPN to shield you from possible security issues.

The maintenance burden is the reason why people often prefer the cloud services, not the uptime. Because maintaining the instance with updates, reading all patch notes and steps for migration, keep every health metric monitored and respond quickly on issues without getting stuck googling for possible reasons is quite a bit of work and quickly forces you to employ n+1 people.

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This is particularly true with modern fully solid state hardware. Uptimes of decades are likely possible if you don't mess with anything.

We run some bare metal servers. They just never go down. Solid continuous pings for years as monitored from elsewhere on the Internet. That's because they're just boxes on a rack somewhere running an OS and some steady-state services (ZeroTier roots). Simplicity is more robust than complexity.

SaaS is definitely about the pain of managing and upgrading software, but it's also about OPEX vs CAPEX. Many companies will pay more for things to put them in the OPEX column for various entirely synthetic accounting, investor relations, and tax reasons.

I do wonder if the pendulum there will swing back though since if you price out cloud vs. physical hardware the market has become extremely distorted. Many companies spend enough on AWS to buy an entire rack of hardware at a different data center every month and pay 2-3 employees to manage it. That hardware would be up to 100X as fast and powerful as what they rent at AWS and bandwidth would be almost free. That's a really distorted market. The amortized costs should not be this different.

>Many companies spend enough on AWS to buy an entire rack of hardware at a different data center every month and pay 2-3 employees to manage it. That hardware would be up to 100X as fast and powerful as what they rent at AWS and bandwidth would be almost free. That's a really distorted market. The amortized costs should not be this different.

I think the issue here is that it's not zero-cost to switch. Your processes will adapt to some implicit assumptions that aren't true outside AWS, Azure, or whatever vendor you locked yourself into.

If we somehow managed to have a completely standardized interface here, the market would be more competitive.

Things like OpenStack are promising if they can become easier to install and run.

https://www.openstack.org

It’s been a decade. Openstack is still a disorganized, unstable mess. It’s not gonna happen if it hasn’t by now.

That is true. But hope a drive by ddos doesn't pick you that day!

How do the attackers ddos an inhouse deployment that cannot be accessed from the internet without joining a VPN?

They can try to saturate the VPN host maybe, but that's going to be challenging considering that it's going to be limited to connection requests without valid credentials.

and these are likely set to be ignored on multiple failed attempts through fail2ban or similar tooling

You have a connection to the internet with an IP address do you not? That connection can easily be saturated with traffic and fail2ban would not have a chance to do anything.

Zero Day VPN vulnerabilities

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