Spending serious engineering time to wrangle with the complexities of cloud orchestration is not something that should be taken lightly.
Cloud services should be required to have a black-box Surgeon’s General warning.
Until you get quite big, all necessary interactions with the cloud provider are just bills. It's just much easier, even though it is often expensive
It's still true? In my experience it used to be, nowadays most of the organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal.
Internal data center organizations that need to be argued with to acquire quota. They usually don’t care for internal or dev stuff, but as soon as something needs prod levels of quota or new licenses, prepare to wait.
Which will create things in cloud…
I've spent the last decade or so wondering if the emperor was wearing clothes and not really getting what everyone else has been talking about. Which isn't to say that cloud is useless, but it's not the universal panacea that it was often sold as, and it seems that others are waking up to that.
Another past employer switched because we hit our scale up limit, and needed to start scaling out. A small refactor allowed us to scale out, and we moved to azure's managed database, queue, and blob storage. The web frontend could scale based on connections, and the queue and blob storage was slower than our current approach, but it was better once we added the autoscaling. Since the slower speed was PER connection. Minimum scale was 5 instances, so that there was no bottleneck when scaling.
There are many reasons to go "cloud" but for most small businesses (or at least small departments of large organizations), cloud-first doesn't seem like a great option unless you have 10s of thousands in credits each month. Just build your software, scale up first on-prem or at a datacenter - it is LOADs cheaper and predictable.
Always felt I was too stupid to see what everyone is so excited about.
Bare metal and datacenter orchestration is leaps and bounds more complex. You're paying for the abstraction.
In most cases, managing software on bare metal is more complex in exactly one case: when engineers only know cloud abstractions.
1. managing compute clusters has gotten a lot easier but managing storage clusters and running good storage products for block & object storage on them is very very very far from a solved problem and quite frankly it sucks and is not fun.
2. planning out buying, installing, upgrading, patching, and retiring hardware, server/hypervisor OSs, takes waaaaaaaaay more engineering management skill and experience than 99.9% of companies have. Plus you probably have to fight for every dollar of investment against a board / investors. Even at the cloud provider we were constantly getting kneecapped by upper management not wanting to spend money on hardware.
Orchestration is dead simple and mostly automated using off the shelf, open source tools. If a server goes down, it’s a few minutes to replace it. The cloud based hosting is a fixed cost each month - no usage based surprises.
Meanwhile, for clients, spent huge amounts of time fixing broken Kubernetes setups and hit serious design constraints because of usage based pricing on their PaaS infrastructure like being unable to do complex queries from a database.
I wouldn’t think twice about the same query on our in house hosted DBs on $400 servers.
Like you drive to the server rooms and have a stack of new servers, physically replace the old one with the new one and re-set everything in a few minutes? Or is your “bare metal” an ec2 instance?
I’ll add this is a really good write up ! Love this comment :
“There is no harm in using boring/simple methods if the results are right.”
Of course, given stable demand and known requirements, bare metal can be a great option. But it’s not strictly better than public cloud hosting.
I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering.
Not just engineering, but deploying it too. I'm building a whole business around deploying it based at least partially on the fact that it has been forgotten. I've just been doing it long enough that I remember how to do it and it isn't getting any easier as the need for compute grows into even more complex and powerful hardware.
Disclaimer: Checkly founder.
The same 3s runtime startup cost (and need for more hardware) would happen if they were running their own servers.
Routinely: oops, our API usage slipped and we mistakenly paid more than the staff to avoid this would cost
Keep fucking up, tech industry. My job role depends on it (SRE)
There's asymmetry you aren't considering: one engineer can make/solve many problems. Not even all on either side.
To be clear: I'm not taking a dig at this specific case. Larger patterns. It's more nuanced than X of these or Y of those. I'm not arguing in your vacuum/hypothetical
There need-not be an increase in staff in a lot of cases. Just better, or different, staff. If I wanted to earnestly dissect/solve this I wouldn't have opened with snide jokes.
The engineers hired to stave expense tend to go on to create it
The positive spin is: 'get the engineers anyway, self-hosted or not'. They'll help you optimize $solution. My point is things are rarely this positive. Things can be optimized to the point of being non-optimal.
Cloud stuff is really alluring at first. Works for awhile then the costs become above what it would cost to run it yourself. Cloud is not a 'set it and forget it' sort of thing. You have to manage it too.