SpaceMartini

This hit me when moving from a start-up to a FAANG. There is effectively an infinite amount of work for me to do on any given day, so at some point I just have to decide to stop - if I don't, I'll just end up tired tomorrow with an equally infinite amount of stuff still to do.

Solving storage at the tens of TB scale with commodity hardware is fine to a point (I have a ZFS NAS at home) but has much more ongoing maintenance burden than S3 and you need at least 2 copies for it to be a remotely comparable solution in terms of durability.

Ultimately you just have to design for what is important to you; I don't want to spend time managing this stuff any more, so keep a local NAS for my partner to access and put the bulk of my "cold" data into 2 different cloud object storage providers. Note that neither of these is actually S3; for business use I would absolutely use AWS but for personal files I can manage with the reduced capabilities and lower prices others offer.

> Are you saying we should stick with AWS because most stick with AWS?

Broadly speaking yes - there is a lot of value in having a deeper pool of skilled people to hire from, and there are enough differences between cloud offerings to knock at least a couple of "effective years" of experience off someone who changes provider.

I have heard too many horror stories about Ceph (and OpenStack) to be confident about that. I certainly don't think I can truly beat S3 on cost or performance at the terabyte scale for household data - and while larger scale would give on-prem savings there are also higher expectations (in terms of availability and performance) of a multi-perabyte storage array.

Those are fair points - I have seen truly spiky workloads like that very occasionally, but more often those spikes are a precursor to more sustained usage in a similar manner and so would quickly warrant hardware purchases.

As an addendum to this: if you absolutely must use cloud, stick with AWS. Using Azure is (IMO) a fucking miserable experience and their only advantage (InfiniBand) is better served by buying your own hardware. GCP and OCI might be fine if you are getting a lot of credits, but the skills will not be useful down the line - while AWS is expensive, you will at least learn a bunch of in-demand operational skills.

I work in HPC for a cloud provider, and fully endorse this move. Anonymously, of course.

You can make an economic argument for or against cloud in practically every IT domain, but in HPC the case for on-prem is really compelling; none of the cloud networking/resiliency value-add is relevant to batch workflows, and costs per core-hour are only remotely comparable if you use spot - which is itself a major compromise.

The only real advantage cloud has for science is object storage, which is genuinely a much better idea than trying to manage your own long-term archival storage.

If I were independent I would recommend people buy and build on-prem clusters and shuffle data out of fast scratch into Glacier, but other than that just don't worry about cloud until price pressure kicks in and we are down to 1-2 cents per core-hour on-demand.

I'd love a role where I can say these things non-anonymously, but the salary for such a position would be at least 50% lower than working for a cloud provider. Keep that in mind when talking to your supplier - we may not believe the pitch ourselves, but making it is just part of the job.

Anything by Rooster Teeth is worth a try for comedy; not to everyone's taste, but if you like the main RT podcast there is a long backlog worth listening to. Skipping back 200 episodes got me through my PhD write-up.

Any shows hosted by Joe Ressington are good for Linux news if you want down-to-earth, honest conversation. Jupiter broadcast shows may also be worth a look, but personally I find most of the hosts quite annoying and their discussions superficial.

The Economist has a good spread, I mostly stick with Babbage and "Checks and Balance".

For hipsters talking about "productivity" (ie podcaster autofellatio) using Macs and other expensive tools, check the relay.fm offerings.