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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

> we favor cloud-based applications over those that are privately deployed or homegrown open-source products

no, thanks

The older I get, the more I've slid towards the opinion that I'd much rather configure cloud SaaS via terraform than waste days of work maintaining a self-hosted application.

Yea reading HN comments gives me the impression most of the readership has never had to manage anything of complexity beyond their "homelab".

When I was younger I thought it is cool to be admin and have access to stuff, run things on my own being like Neo in Matrix.

Then I had admin access to wi-fi router in dorm, it stopped being funny when people shitty laptops could not connect and they would blame you or for any kind of connection issue for that matter :)

Then I had a job with support duty, 1 A.M. calls because you need to check logs are not cool.

Now I don't want to have any privileges unless I really cannot do my work. If I don't have to run some application and someone else is getting called for outage or I can say that is our provider can't do much - I am definitely making company I work for - pay to another company and stay out of equation.

If I run some software for myself by myself I am not going to pay for that - but as soon as other people are involved I would tell them to go and buy that service. If it is work related even more so.

Yep. Again, the nuance of this point is lost on the "homelab" crowd, but if you're in a software business, your software is what your business is.

Not running a monitoring platform, not running a logging system, not building your own PaaS. Outsource this as much as possible to 3rd-party agents with a sizable economy of scale.

Nearly all engineering teams(outside of FAANG) simply aren't resourced to re-invent the wheel over and over, especially when it means providing after-hours support for the wheel as well.

Agree to a point. I'd say that "nearly all" teams outside those in medium to large companies aren't resourced enough to maintain existing well-packaged wheels. It's a gradient, not a binary. If you've got someone who's capable of deploying EKS and setting up a CI/CD that lets developers move quickly, it mightn't be a big deal for them to deploy the Grafana stack (loki, mirmir, grafana) and have logs and metrics on the cheap. Log/metric/APM services can get ludicrously expensive and unless you're in fintech, you might only need them for debugging and capacity planning.

me too

but for me the SaaS offering has to be either:

a) based on open-source

b) interoperable (S3, MQTT)

otherwise prepare to be screwed over by greedy corporates

Up front: I agree with your “no, thanks”, but, I do think there is a philosophical point the author has to not host software themselves, which 86’s most OSS.

Not that I agree with their “rules”, but I can at least understand why they’d choose to not host.

(Fair warning: I host other peoples software (Heroku architect) for a living so I’m probably very biased)

many open-source vendors offer hosted options or link consultancies who will host on your behalf

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