Your point is well made... The other thing you need to think about is that all those extra services can come with a reliability cost if your provider is not 100%. Most outages we've encountered have been because the HA infrastructure has decided to have problems rather than the underlying hardware or actual service we need to run.
Having all that "best practice" service is great if it works well, but when it becomes a checkbox on the purchase order then it can cause far more problems than it solves.
I have found that a lot of the push to outsource hosting is simply an attempt to deflect responsibility for problems rather than in expectation of actually providing more reliability.
It’s great if you need that reliability in practice - and not just that you think you need it.
For every company or startup that thinks they need 100% uptime the reality is that they can not only get away with much less but in practice will end up with much less anyway because the effort and moving parts (load balancing, distributed database, etc) will typically result in something failing anyway even if the underlying hardware is indeed 100% up, and somewhat surprisingly to quite a bit of people here, manage to survive and thrive despite that (the recent AWS outages took out a lot of services and products and they still seem to be around somehow).
Ugh. I hate that phrase. The translation into plain English is almost always "What I read in some blog" or "Because I want to" or "It's what our sales rep told us." Even from C-levels who should know better.
I generally use it as shorthand for, “when and not if we call the vendors with this configuration, they cannot pass the buck and say it isn’t a configuration they support”. “Best practice” as an endorsed configuration blessed by the vendor support engineering organization is my go-to sign-off to get quick cooperation from the vendors.
It should mean something. There are things that are just good ideas you probably shouldn’t stray from. But the moment a concept like this materializes it gets hijacked by marketers and celebrity developers and distorted into oblivion.
> Exactly. Imagine paying for all that when all you need is bare metal.
Yes.
The opposite is also true though: Imagine not wanting to pay for that and needing it!
There's a reason why most homes connect to the power utility companies. Yes, we can run generators ourselves. Does it make sense to do that? Not usually.
Same thing with this server. If it makes sense for your use-case, outstanding. In many cases, people are better off offloading this to another company and focusing on their strengths.
>"Yes, we can run generators ourselves. Does it make sense to do that? Not usually"
The minute gens/solar/wind/batteries combo becomes less expensive than public utility I'll switch. For now it makes no financial sense.
With the clouds it is the other way around. My dedicated servers running my software kick the shit out of AWS performance wise for a fraction of the price. And no I do not spend my days "managing" it. I can order new dedicated server and the same shell script will reinstall all prerequisites, restore data from backup and run it in few minutes add (however long it takes to import database from backup). Where needed I also have standby up to date servers.
Other than running this script to test restoration once a month my management overhead is zero.
Exactly! Who needs a kitchen in their home, it's better to just order in all the time. All that complexity of cooking daily, preparing and storing food, cleaning dishes, etc, etc. I mean, who's going to even do the cooking!
See... anyone can pick <random thing>, and describe how people don't do it. Of course, you cite a generator, others use solar cells, right?
And that's fine. People should make choices like that. I was objecting to saying people paid X for RDS and others paid Y for one bare metal server. Those are not in the same category, there's no point comparing those prices without a lot more information.
I am buying IaaS it is so nice to use VPS with snapshots every 4 hours that I don't have to think about.
I don't care where those snapshots are stored and how much space those take. In case I need to restore my IaaS provider gives me 2-click option to restore - one to click restore and 2nd to confirm. I sit and watch progress. I also don't care about hardware replacement and anything that connects to that. I have to do VPS OS updates but that is it.
I do my own data backups on different VPS of course just in case my provider has some issue, but from convenience perspective that IaaS solution is delivering more than I would ask for.
I use customer cast offs and even employee cast offs. My desktop was cast off by a customer because Win 10 ground to a halt. I slapped an ancient nvidia card in to get a couple of screens and popped in a cheap SSD. According to dmidecode it is a Lenovo from 01/06/2012.
My laptop at the moment is a HPE something ... HP 250 G6 Notebook PC according to dmidecode. I used to have a five year old Dell 17" i7 based beast but it ... broke. I whipped out the SSD, shrank the root fs a bit (with gparted) and used a clonezilla disc and an external USB link to get my system onto a Samsung EVO M.2 thingie from the SSD. This laptop was an employee cast off/
As is probably apparent from the above, I use Linux. I have some decent apps at my disposal but in general I don't need much hardware. Decent: RAM >= 8GB and SSD storage are key. I don't play games much. I've always specified 17" screens in the past for my laptops but now I have to use a 15" jobbie, that's becoming less of a hard requirement.
I am a Managing Director (small business - IT consultancy) but I do spend rather a lot of my time doing sysadmin and network admin stuff. I also do business apps. I once wrote a Finite Capacity Plan for a factory in Excel with rather a lot of VBA. Before you take the piss, bear in mind I used the term finite and not infinite. That meant that quite a few people had employment in Plymouth (Devon not MA) in the 1990s. I won't bore you with my more modern failures 8)
Anyway as you say, modern laptops are phenomenally powerful. Mine have wobbly windows 8) I can't be arsed with MS Windows anymore for my own gear - it gets in the way. Me and the wife said goodbye at Windows 7.
When considering the cost of having a secure server room, a commercial internet line, electricity, cooling and hardware - plus the cost of my time (or someone else's on the team), AWS gets more and more attractive. The business side paying the bill agrees fully.
People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff
There is a continuum between "I run servers in my basement" and "I pay mid 5 figures monthly to have autoscaled autofailover hotstandby 1s-interval backed up cluster across three AZs".
I use AWS, DO and Hetzner (bare metal) for (different) cases where each makes sense.
In the past few years, maintenance burden and uptime between AWS and Hetzner hosted stuff was comparable, with the cost being an order of magnitude less for Hetzner (as an added benefit, that machine is more beefy but I wasn't even comparing that).
> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff.
I am not surprised software developers would prefer doing software development :-)
No, they often don’t understand the alternatives available because the wolves are guarding the henhouse (software devs who don’t want to work with the pace of on-prem IT).
> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff
No shit, that’s why software devs aren’t sysadmins.
[bunch of stuff I don't need]
Exactly. Imagine paying for all that when all you need is bare metal.
Now imagine paying for all that just because you've read on the Internet that it's best practice and that's what the big guys do.
Way back the best practice was what Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco wanted you to buy. Now it's what Amazon wants you to buy.
Buy what you need.