37Signals Left the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

37Signals Left the Cloud

world.hey.com

53 pointsleroman14 comments

This all seems very confusing.

The Cloud was too expensive, so they saved money by just buying servers up front without talking about the hosting costs.

They didn't need to hire more people because all their folks are doing sys admin stuff. Oh except for the fact that the actual reason they didn't need to hire was because they have outsourced all the hardware management.

Sure, it really might be cheaper, especially with egress considering their products, but there is a lot of caveats that are getting glossed over here.

> Oh except for the fact that the actual reason they didn't need to hire was because they have outsourced all the hardware management.

Actually, they hired someone to do the unboxing and then it's over. They didn't say why they did that (maybe their colo's were out of town). Having done it myself it's a case unbox it, plug in the network and power cables. The only remaining step is make the Dell iDRAC IP appear on some VPN, but that VPN is usually what's on the other end of the ethernet cable they plugged in. The iDRAC allows remote control of the BIOS, power and reset switches, and download a boot image (think KVM switch on steroids). (Other manufacturers have other systems that do the same thing. Intel has their management engine for instance.) Once you can connect to the iDRAC's IP Address it may as well be sitting on the floor beside you.

Hardware management will happen in 5 years, but until that time it's a case of "if it breaks it's Dell's problem - they go to the site and fix it". In the mean time they have to migrate stuff off that box, but business as usual in a web environment and is done that remotely. If the machine has to be replaced, Dell will re-attach cables. You probably won't need more than that because

As for sysadmin'ing, there are lots of tenancy out there like proxymox and vmware. Once that's running it looks like lots of EC2 instances. From there it's like sysadmin'ing any 'nix installation, but without all the proprietary interfaces.

I have the vague feeling that way to many manager with poor technical skill make decisions like "We're going to the cloud. All-in!" or "Use a cloud-native™ approach!" without understanding all implications or to tackle problems (like fossilized business processes) that have nothing to do with the server infrastructure as such.

> No, because we didn’t change the team composition after our cloud exit.

This has been my experience with my major enterprise company’s cloud transition as well. The ops payroll has only grown since the transition. And our company had 4 major platforms before transitioning to the cloud and now only has 3.

I won’t deny the cloud doesn’t have any benefits. Distributing services and DBs geographically is much easier than with Colo for example. But really yhwts where the cloud benefits really lie. Since everyone is spending all their money building services for the cloud, that’s where innovation in tech lies right now (although whether we need more innovation is indeed arguable, and whether one benefits from being at the vanguard of innovation is also an open question).

This is where I see K8s fit in, future proofing and un-vendoe-locking (mostly). My own experience running on DO and moving to AWS (free credit ) while using DO S3 clone, managed pg and K8s, the move was rather straight forward..

> > No, because we didn’t change the team composition after our cloud exit.

> This has been my experience with my major enterprise company’s cloud transition as well.

Except in classic double speak they did, because they have hired an extra contracting company to look after all the hardware installation and maintenance.

Tangent: I love that this includes a list of frequently asked questions in the literal sense of questions that are asked frequently.

Related last week:

Leaving the Cloud: Cloud Computing Isn't for Everyone

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38644550

It might be semantics, but it looks like they’re still using ‘the cloud’. It’s just their cloud.

It’s all just racks in a data centre.

Yes, maybe the better wording would be "public cloud", still probably everyone reads this as "cloud" vs "private hosting"

But it was all just racks in a data centre before the invention of the cloud.

But what would be the definition of "cloud" then? I'd say it boils down to managed services, so that you don't have to care about basic system configuration, hardware or networking. The only thing 37Signals outsourced is the hardware part and basic network infrastructure. That is pretty much what was known as "colocation" in the pre-cloud era.

"Cloud" has an industry definition which amongst other things requires multi-tenancy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Definition

Bravo.

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