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0 pointsscarface742y ago0 comments

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself.

And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack.

I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps.

When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled.

When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers.

Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

0 comments

re-thc2y ago

> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.

> Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!

> I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage

How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

scarface_742y ago

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case

So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?

“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”

> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

CogitoCogito2y ago

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

Your examples here are just examples of situations where you basically need a cloud solution by definition. If these are your requirements, then yes obviously you should use cloud for it. That said, your points are a bit confusing. It's not an either-or. For situations like you're describing, you use cloud. For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.

scarface_742y ago

> For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

I literally just gave examples where a colo or on prem makes complete sense - anytime that managing infrastructure is a competitive advantage.

If you have a static workload and your company has the competencies to manage infrastructure, go for on prem.

I’m the last person to recommend someone move to any cloud provider just to treat it like a colo.

1 more reply

magikstm2y ago

Without a cloud it would take longer.

But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

I've quite often seen the need for 5-10 meetings or 2-3 written documents to get approval for 10 new VMs for developers or new servers for backups.

scarface_742y ago

> But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

When testing something or you want to spin up your own isolated environment for yourself or for your team? Very often.

> Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

And that’s get back to my other point that when you do a “lift and shift”. If you don’t change your processes both IT and technical, you won’t see any benefit from the cloud and you will end up spending more.

There are so many ways that you can both give developers freedom and still have the necessary guardrails. I’m speaking about AWS because that’s the one I know best (and where I work). But I’m sure there are equivalent services on other providers.

For instance you can have a vending machine type of setup where you allow department heads to set up non prod accounts with organization controlled service control policies. You can use a Service Catalog approach where you surface Terraform or CloudFormation defined products where the users can only provision infrastructure defined by their administrators. But they can do it themselves.

Depending on which level of the organization I’m working with, I try to convince the IT department to give individual departments their own organizational unit to monitor and to embed someone from IT into their team - ie a “DevOps” philosophy.

CoolCold2y ago

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators.

Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev environment in terms of ssh/db endpoints.

scarface_742y ago

At my n-2 job (2017-mid 2018), I was the dev lead when management decided to “move to the cloud”. They hired a bunch of “consultants” who were old school operations people who only knew how to do lift and shifts.

I didn’t know cloud from a whole in the wall. But the internal IT department treated AWS just like they did their Colo. I thought AWS was just a bunch of VMs and I treated it as such for a green field implementation.

I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.

I ended up leaving that job and working for a startup. The CTO knew I had only theoretical knowledge of AWS. But I had good system design instincts and he liked my ideas. I was hired as a senior developer. But that rapidly morphed into a cloud architect role. I took advantage of AWS and all of its locked in goodness including moving everything to either Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker).

I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.

We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.

Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

re-thc2y ago

> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.

> Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!

> I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage

How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

scarface_742y ago

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case

So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?

“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”

> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

CogitoCogito2y ago

You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.

scarface_742y ago

> For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

I literally just gave examples where a colo or on prem makes complete sense - anytime that managing infrastructure is a competitive advantage.

If you have a static workload and your company has the competencies to manage infrastructure, go for on prem.

I’m the last person to recommend someone move to any cloud provider just to treat it like a colo.

1 more reply

magikstm2y ago

Without a cloud it would take longer.

But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

I've quite often seen the need for 5-10 meetings or 2-3 written documents to get approval for 10 new VMs for developers or new servers for backups.

scarface_742y ago

> But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

When testing something or you want to spin up your own isolated environment for yourself or for your team? Very often.

> Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

CoolCold2y ago

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators.

Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev environment in terms of ssh/db endpoints.

scarface_742y ago

I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.

I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.

We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.

Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse