Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

As an infrastructure engineer (amongst other things), hard disagree here. I realize you might be joking, but a bit of context here: a big chunk of the success of Cloud in more traditional organizations is the agility that comes with it: (almost) no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc. There is no reason that baremetal shouldn't provide the same customer-oriented service, at least for the low-level IaaS, give-me-a-VM-now needs. I'd even argue this type of self-service (and accounting!) should be done by any team providing internal software services.

View on HN

The permissions and ownership part has little to do with the infrastructure – in fact I've often found it more difficult to get permissions and access to resources in cloud-heavy orgs.

This could be due to the bureaucratic parts of the company being too slow initially to gain influence over cloud administration, which results in teams and projects that use the cloud being less hindered by bureaucracy. As cloud is more widely adopted, this advantage starts to disappear. However, there are still certain things like automatic scaling where it still holds the advantage (compared to requesting the deployment of additional hardware resources on premises).

I think also this was only a temporary situation caused by the IT departments in these organisations being essentially bypassed. Once it became a big important thing then they have basically started to take control of it and you get the same problems (in fact potentially more so because the expense means there's more pressure cut down resources).

"No need to ask permission" and "You get the same bill every month" kinda work against one another here.

I should have been more precise… Many sub-orgs have budget freedom to do their job, and not having to go through a central authority to get hardware is often a feature. Hence why Cloud works so well in non-regulatory heavy traditional orgs: budget owner can just accept the risks and let the people do the work. My comment was more of a warning to would-be infrastructure people: they absolutely need to be customer-focused, and build automation from the start.

I'm at a startup and I don't have access to the terraform repo :( and console is locked down ofc.

don't underestimate the ability of traditional organisations to build that process around cloud

you keep the usual BS to get hardware, plus now it's 10x more expensive and requires 5x the engineering!

This is my experience, though the lead time for 'new hardware' on cloud is only 6-12 weeks of political knife fighting instead of 6-18 months of that plus waiting.

That's a cultural issue. Initially at my workplace people needed to ask permissions to deploy their code. The team approving the deployment got sick of it and built a self-service deployment tool with security controls built in and now deployment is easy. All it matters is a culture of trusting other fellow employees, a culture of automating, and a culture of valuing internal users.

Agreed, that's exactly what I was aiming at. I'm not saying that it's the only advantage of Cloud, but that orgs with a dysfunctional resource-access culture were a fertile ground for cloud deployments.

Basically: some managers gets fed-up with weeks/months of delays for baremetal or VM access -> takes risks and gets cloud services -> successful projects in less time -> gets promoted -> more cloud in the org.

Well ye it is more like I frame it as a joke but I do mean it.

I don't argue there aren't special cases for using fancy cloud vendors, though. But classical datacentre rentals get you almost always there for less.

Personally I like being able to touch and hear the computers I use.

> no need to ask permission to anyone, ownership of your resources, etc

In a large enough org that experience doesn’t happen though - you have to go through and understand how the org’s infra-as-code repo works, where to make your change, and get approval for that.

You also need to get budget, few months earlier, sometimes even legal approval. Then you have security rules, „preferred” services and the list goes on..

Like https://oxide.computer/ ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com