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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

With the rise of WFH, I wonder if there could be a model (with some kind of trusted computing angle to prevent physical tampering) where you host your servers at employee locations/homes in a very distributed manner. Probably wouldn't fly with things like SOC2, but it's probably cheaper to pay/reimburse employees than pay for rack and network, especially with a small footprint.

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The heat, noise, and space consumption would be unbearable, I think.

My garage (in Texas of all places) does fine

Not to say we're free of challenges... but hey. We can make this happen. I have a couple racks in the space where car doors are expected, yet can still park.

Think of the business continuity wins! Each employee has a Starting Google!

Reliability is one reason, residential internet and power is less reliable than commercial. You will have to provide UPS to everybody. Plus, if employees are located together then there is risk that regional power outage could take the system.

Then there is latency. Most apps talk to a data store, which is now separated from clients. The load balancers are going to be separated from the backend. Also, database servers tend to be beefy servers so either need to shared it or someone hosts a rack.

Another is that need write software to really be distributed. There is difference between distributed when things break and distributed all the time over the internet.

I wonder if that's less efficient though because now every employee has to manage a server, rather than having a small dedicated team that can manage hundreds or thousands of servers.

Just have a fleet of NUC like things (that have ECC RAM ones) that you ship around if they break. You could have them boot from network/CDN and never worry about imaging, too.

With 1Gb+ residential internet speeds, you could probably build a fairly robust and scalable platform like this.

If companies are seriously considering this, they should instead figure out how to distribute applications across their workstations to begin with, no need to distribute extra hardware if you can ensure security, connectivity, and uptime of a single laptop at each employees house.

Rack servers are significantly more powerful than NUC. This means going to need more little servers. And more employees or employees that host lots of servers and turn into point of failure. There are also powerful servers, like database, that can’t be split.

How many people do you think have symmetric gigabit? The company is going to have to pay for employees to upgrade. And do some separation to keep from saturating link from either work or home.

If there is access to the hardware, then the data and software are not secure. So you couldn't run any business applications or anything were you would need to have an assumption of data privacy.

This is ludicrous and I’d revolt. A desk is already too much space to give up to my workplace.

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