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0 pointsRantenki5y ago0 comments

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$.

Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down.

Yes, you need to manage the infrastructure, but now it's a software configuration task instead of a physical maintenance one.

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anonfornoreason5y ago

I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend < 20 hours a year at the datacenter. Everything else is almost 1:1 with what it would take to manage that using AWS.

Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but with the correct planning and setup, physical infrastructure isn't that big of a deal for most web businesses.

kroolik5y ago

You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great!

This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora.

Once you have expertise doing X, it might seem wrong paying premium to cloud providers to do the same thing for you. But other companies don't have you on board. They save themselves time recruiting two sysops with partcular skillset, and spin up a working HA rdbms in a day.

Comparing ec2 and vms on xenserver doesn't sound convincing because ec2 itself is simple. But comparing HA Aurora or Dynamo cluster to on-prem solution is a different beast. As a dev, I don't really want to know all the gore details of managing HA rabbitmq, and might opt for SQS instead.

anonfornoreason5y ago

This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while.

I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website.

Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.

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mekster5y ago

Why pay premium when there are cheaper cloud alternatives? Just get your team to learn a thing or two than being sold by AWS.

I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing.

To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwidth cost.

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munk-a5y ago

That's true - I was comparing managing a server rack in the office building against AWS - not comparing the relatively light hardware interaction needs when it comes to co-location.

addicted5y ago

I'm pretty sure the original article is talking about Colo.

shiftpgdn5y ago

99.9% of colo facilities offer 24/7 remote hands. With the extreme cost savings of colo you could build in very significant redundancy, which is to say nothing of how infrequently modern server hardware fails.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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anonfornoreason5y ago

kroolik5y ago

You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great!

anonfornoreason5y ago

2 more replies

mekster5y ago

Why pay premium when there are cheaper cloud alternatives? Just get your team to learn a thing or two than being sold by AWS.

I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing.

To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwidth cost.

1 more reply

munk-a5y ago

That's true - I was comparing managing a server rack in the office building against AWS - not comparing the relatively light hardware interaction needs when it comes to co-location.

addicted5y ago

I'm pretty sure the original article is talking about Colo.

shiftpgdn5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse