(no title)
bird_monster | 5 years ago
This complexity exists either way, is my point. Whether you're managing your own servers, or using barebones cloud VMs, or using a bunch of cloud fanciness, the complexity you just defined still exists. And if that complexity is a constant, why is it only being used as a negative against cloud services?
> Just look at the number of anecdotes about even quite large and well-established businesses that have had systems go down because they didn't fully understand AZs and failover arrangements, or have been landed with some crazy high bill because they didn't fully understand all the different things they were going to be charged for, or have been breached because they left some S3 bucket open.
If your argument is "It's not better when done badly", definitely, I agree, because what is?
I guess, my overall point is that cloud-based infrastructure shifts your focus. Yes, you have to know how to configure cloud resources, but in 2021, do you think it's easier to find people with AWS experience, or people with custom in-house or colo server management experience?
Silhouette|5 years ago
AWS and similar services are an abstraction over hardware, software and networking all at once. There are well over 100 different services available on AWS alone. Just to get a basic configuration up and running, someone new to the system has to figure out which of those services they actually need, which is a barrier in itself given the obfuscated names they have.
Then you have much the same network and security details to set up as you would have for on-prem or colo infrastructure, but now with lots of non-standard terminology and proprietary UIs, which are so cumbersome at times that an entire generation of overcomplicated "orchestration" tools has been developed, each of which typically adds yet another layer of leaky abstraction.
Hopefully some time before this all happened you tried to work out what it was going to cost, and maybe you were close or maybe you are in for a nasty surprise because those handy managed services cost several times what the equivalent server + software would have cost either running on real servers or just on cloud VMs.
And if you fall back to that latter case as your safe default, you still get all the same issues to deal with as you would have had on your own servers and network, except that now you need to figure out what is really going on behind all those virtualised systems and quasi-geographical organisation layers before you can tell whether one unfortunate event could take down all the instances of any vital services you need.
In comparison, literally every small business I have ever worked in as a tech worker has had several people at the office who were perfectly capable of buying a switch or firewall or router and spending the few minutes required to configure it or buying a server and installing Linux/Windows and then whatever server software it needed again very quickly. Cloud systems can make it faster to deploy new hardware and connectivity, because you save the time required for all the physical steps, but after that the time and knowledge required to get a small network's worth of equipment up and running really isn't that great. After all, we used to do that all the time until the cloud hype to hold, and it's not as if that has suddenly stopped working or all the people with that knowledge suddenly left the industry in the past 5 years.
bird_monster|5 years ago
Agreed (but probably on the opposite end as you)
It seems a lot like you've been scorned in the past and that's driving a lot of your statements now (which is totally fine and fair). I'm trying to bring up that, for every problem you've just defined, the literal exact same problem exists for colo/managed servers, except it is now also your problem to keep the lights on and the machine running.
> literally every small business I have ever worked in as a tech worker has had several people at the office who were perfectly capable of buying a switch or firewall or router and spending the few minutes required to configure it or buying a server and installing Linux/Windows and then whatever server software it needed again very quickly.
I'm sorry, if you believe that building and deploying production-ready server infrastructure is as easy as "Just going out and buying a switch and spending a few MINUTES installing linux" (emphasis mine) - I feel like we aren't talking about the same thing at all. Not even close.