Hacker News Reader

Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds.

1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.

2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.

View on HN

> But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.

It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.

> The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.

I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?

OCP was designed by vendors, including ones that didn't want to get sunsetted. It was never going to be practical for homeless until EOL hardware started to filter down.

EOL hardware is usually fine for home labs.

Some of the ethernet switching top of rack 1U stuff used to show up on ebay. I think large other portions of it go into an industrial shredder/recycling process.

> other portions of it go into an industrial shredder/recycling process.

This is just criminal. Reusing is much better than recycling.

Practically speaking, most of it would sit waiting for a buyer.

I'd pay more than the recycler.

I'm referencing the premium you pay to get some paltry VM in a public cloud with bizarre storage and networking that primarily make sense for the market maker versus the actual cost of the hardware. There are ways to make cloud economics work as a user, but only where staffing costs would dwarf spend (i.e. small businesses) and I've never seen them in practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com