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Comment by floatinglotus | Hacker News Reader

This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there.

My new startup is focused on helping application owners repatriate their workloads into their own infrastructure.

Our goal is to solve the network complexity challenges with a fully open network stack (open source software with all of the hardware options you would expect, and some you wouldn’t). The solution is designed to be turnkey and require very little network experience. It will use standard DevOps tools that you’re already using.

We’re announcing it in two weeks and will be posting info here on HN!

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Damn that's really interesting thanks for sharing. Do you have like an authorative link on this paradox?

I've been getting by on like 80$/month hetzner servers (Like ancient 10 year old pizza box machines) for my businesses for a long while. Never did the cloud thing, I can run like three or four websites on one of those bad boys. I guess stuff like AWS makes sense if your computational workload happens in bursts or whatever? But 80$/month overhead costs are like nothing, I spend more than that on a good night out level.

Having an issue pasting at the moment! Just search Trillion Dollar Paradox Casado.

> This is the Trillion Dollar Paradox described by Martin Casado. You’re crazy if you don’t start your business in the cloud, you’re crazy if you stay there.

That's not a paradox. You're not crazy in either case.

Starting in the cloud reduces costs for some strategies by removing necessary engineering. Starting in the cloud increases costs for other strategies by charging too much for commodity offerings.

It's relatively straightforward to make the choice as soon as you put a specific business in the crosshairs.

Edit: why is this downvoted?

You’re going against the party line.

It's getting to the point where even if I just say "that isn't what I meant" or "that's a paraphrase, not a quote," I get flagged for it

What does your product offer over what Sovereign Cloud Stack (See https://scs.community/) already offers?

(And before anyone falsely claims no commercial offers for this exist yet:

https://www.plusserver.com/en/products/pluscloud-open [no affiliation])

Our solution targets the physical network in off-cloud, edge and distributed cloud use cases.

The physical network is most likely the absolute root of trust and attestation. Physical devices gain their personalities from what network they are connected to.

Physical networking is still the biggest impediment to operating on-prem infrastructure. You need to hire very expensive engineers, deal with a bizarre purchasing paradigm dictated by a few large companies (Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc) and the management of these devices is pretty close to being from the Stone Age.

So we’re looking to fix all of that with a pure open source play, using components that everyone is familiar with.

The end goal is that a Devops person with basic network skills should be able to build their own physical network for modern cloud native applications, with very low levels of friction but similar cost efficiencies as cloud operators like AWS, Azure, GCP.

Ah. i.e. something akin to Meraki except not run by imbeciles which neither comprehend neither VLANs, nor Mesh Routing, nor Machine Learning, trying to sell second-rate hardware at a premium, with actual SDN instead of a fancy GUI pretending to be SDN, and vendor independent instead of with Vendor lock-in?

It’s not going to be any of those things.

I've had tons of greenfield web apps with thousands of users (not millions) and setting up a server was a problem I didn't need help solving. I'm versed in AWS now but, I don't see any benefit. The only big headache I had with server admin was running email services/deliverability.

Very interested - you need people?

Absolutely! We’re hiring for a number of spots including dev/systest/kernel-dev/k8s.

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