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0 pointsDrakim11y ago0 comments

If it's my own fault, I can at least curse my own lack of knowledge and expertise, and I can strive to do better in the future.

When the cloud is down, all we can do is fiddle our thumbs and hope it doesn't happen again. Or maybe we could send an angry letter to Microsoft, and hope somebody reads it.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

cmdkeen11y ago· 2 in thread

It's about abstracting away the cost of it being your own fault. Realistically the cost of employing enough people, and buying enough hardware, to provide anything close to 99.X% uptime is much more than punting that over to a Cloud Provider.

vidarh11y ago

I've found very few cases where "punting that over to a cloud provider" has been remotely cost effective for base load. It's gotten closer over the years, but the gap is still massive for all but some very specific types of workloads.

It's great for convenience, and it's great for managing without certain skillsets that may be hard to obtain, and it's great for temporary capacity, but it's not cheap.

cmdkeen11y ago

It's not cheap to have any confidence of any uptime realistically at all. The thing is that most people either live without that guarantee, or just get lucky enough not to care. It becomes problematic if you've made promises to others about uptime that are built on a house of sand.

Unless your base load cloud costs are more than the cost of full time, ready at a moments notice, experienced ops people you don't get close to any guarantee of uptime by non-managed hosting. The salary cost alone of that is substantial, let alone hardware spread across multiple locations. My firm pays at least 7 figures a year on IT ops and don't come close to 99.9% uptime across everything.

LLWM11y ago

Sure. But in the end, what do you care about more? Better results? Or personal responsibility for those results? It's the same argument as self-driving cars.

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