Where I work they have been running in-house video meeting infrastructure for close to 20 years. They abandonded all the equipment and expertiese a few years ago in favor of Zoom. For all its faults, it's just so much easier for users. They probably saved 10 or more minutes per meeting of "Can you hear me? Can you see us? Can you see my screen?" BS at the start of each meeting.

I guess it also helps that these days most people are working with phones or laptops that have integrated and well supported cameras and microphones, vs. then when that stuff would have been external peripherals and required installation of the proper drivers.

Odds of any company spending the millions of dollars required to do that poorly, let alone going the extra distance to do it right: about zero.

I don’t know, we might be closer to quality of service parity than we think.

Even without taking into account “costs” of blatant privacy disregard / violation, data theft, potential industrial espionage, etc.

If the tools continue to get better at the current rate; then the SREs you have to hire anyways will probably be able to deliver about equal results (while staying in control of the data).

I’m thinking about those GPU “coops” we heard about emerging, shared between SV startups.

And then think about what Oxide are doing.

Then binding all of those trends together through the promise of Kubernetes and its inherent complexity finally getting realized / becoming “worth it” at some point.

Multi cluster, multi region - multi office attached server rooms across CO’s locations? Everything old could be new again. Wireguard enabled service meshes, Cluster API, etc. We will get there at some point probably sooner than later.

Then you “just install” the fault tolerant Jitsi helm chart across that infra… with all the usual caveats of maintenance taken into account of course. Again hassles will be reduced on all fronts and SREs needed anyways.

I do lots of terraform and k8s in my day job but at this point I deem any work that isn’t directly related to k8s as some kind of semi (at best) vendor specific dead weight knowledge. Kind of why I’d never would want to be knowledgeable about browser quirks - I hate how much I know about these proprietary cloud APIs.

I know some people who work on Kubernetes for “real-time” 5G back-ending if you can believe it. Lots of on-prem there on the cellular provider sides etc. We are getting really close already.

You're not going up against "how hard is it to roll your own", you're going up against "how inconvenient is it compared to Zoom". You can spend millions to make something that works but unless it's as good as Zoom is (and that's going to cost you a few million to develop from scratch, even with off-the-shelf FOSS components, and FAR more if you're hiring experts to write it scratch) your CEO should, and I stress *absolutely should* (because their responsibility is to shareholders, not to employees) go "how is this better than zoom, and why are we not using that instead so we can put that money in our own wallet?".

What is so hard about it? It's a web app and some video manipulation. It would be nice if computers were usable enough that this would take a weekend.

The part where "it's a web app and some video manipulation" requires hiring about a million dollars worth of "at least three developers" (which costs a company their salary plus that entire salary again for insurance, health care coverage, etc) to write and maintain that app for you, plus the at least another million that it'll set you back ensuring that you have all the hardware in all your offices to make that smooth rather than "OH FOR FUCKS SAKE CAN WE PLEASE JUST USE ZOOM WHAT THE FUCK" from every single employee.

Basic video calls? Absolutely, I've done it in a weekend with webRTC. All the other features that enterprise customers require? That's years of work.