This is surprisingly myopic from someone who supposedly works in the field.
Where do your full stack applications run, my friend?
Because unless you’re in China or Russia, the answer is either AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Nobody is looking to reinvent the wheel. The call is for the EU to invest heavily in infrastructure, like building its own chips, creating its own data centres, and yes, developing its software industry to provide alternatives to all the proprietary/closed stuff.
Would absolutely love to see the EU fix the fedual kingdom style Interfaces of US cloud offerings. Like you can use things like Rancher to create a open interface that Interfaces with the absolute mess that is AWS/Azure/GCP/VMWare but it’s just because they want to pretend their all just so special, which it’s just network and compute for 99% of the time and the other one percent established open source software preconfigured on network and compute
Don’t get me wrong hyperscailing infrastructure is fucking impressive to me (and the EU should lean with Open compute there IMHO), but the Interfaces I swear are intentionally garbage to lock people in.
Nobody is forcing you to use the cloud, you can host your apps on your infrastructure. Of course the cloud has its uses, but I think it is way overutilized and many companies could save quite a lot of money if they returned to on premises.
As a software house, running our own infrastructure would be a nightmare in so many ways… Just thinking of all the hardware that needs to be deployed, and how many sites worldwide we’d need just to provide the same level of service we have now, and then being able to scale up massively during peak time but have all that capacity go to waste during low season, then dedicated teams on all sites to handle emergencies 24/7, the massive loses of revenue anytime the services are down…
“Just in-house it” is definitely not the answer, there’s a reason AWS makes so much money.
true epically for smaller companies. Some really big companies like the could because they need to network all their 100 plus buildings. There is also externalizing responsibility and costs. But a doctor’s office as no need for the could. But they all just pay for azure to get ms office.
Honestly I would be surprised if micro or on site cloud solutions becomes a real things for smaller sites.
Running on prem is certainly possible, but requires a dedicated sysadmin team for anything serious. It is very important to be able to have availability guarantees and some expert you can count on to solve your problem with a phone call.
I mean, often enough even that phone call won’t help.
But you’re right, as long as everything is working normally, working on premises slows you down to do maintenance, updates etc etc. Cloud (of all kinds) takes that work away and you can work faster. And in the VC-driven daily and eternal grind, moving faster is the only thing that matters.
Running the stuff on someone else’s computer still requires a dedicated team for “something serious”, unless you stuff everything in specific “serverless” platforms, in which case you’re still paying for admins, just not yours.
It’s really not that hard. I’m the IT department for a medium sized bakery operation. Around 200 employees. This just means that I’m available when it really is necessary. I’m in situ or on call when orders come in and when shipments go out.
In the end I’m cheaper than outsourcing all the in house software and hardware. And I’m available at 3am when the bakers do their thing.
And yeah, I do have somebody somewhat trained in every bakery. When they’re at end of their wit I’m the person they call.
In the end, I’m around 1% of the payroll. IT is not that special.
Brother. I work in a company with 10k workers. The company loses thousands of dollars per second of downtime, if it’s something that affects the availability of the main page or the checkout process.
If that happens during the peak season, it could be hundreds of thousands per second.
With those kinds of stakes, you don’t just jerry rig your hosting, and very frequently, you don’t take your chances with in-housing.
You put it in one of the big 3, because they don’t fail, and if they do fail you, you sue their ass.
Usually AWS (or Vercel and Mongo Atlas if it’s a Node/MongoDB situation or an early dev situation). I forget all the brand names the other cloud providers use and have to do a search for “EC2 equivalent Azure” or whatever. You can’t be an expert in everything, after all. Plus, Azure has admin pages where I have to use Chromium instead of Firefox and it’s like, “Come on, assholes.” I don’t mind Google Cloud but it’s rarely cheaper and I can’t justify it to someone paying me.
I know Amazon is evil. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription — I lived in DC so I kept it longer than most would — because Jeff Bezos is a fucking menace. But you kind of have to pick one or keep a chart on your desk with all the different brand names and what equals what.
This is surprisingly myopic from someone who supposedly works in the field.
Where do your full stack applications run, my friend?
Because unless you’re in China or Russia, the answer is either AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Nobody is looking to reinvent the wheel. The call is for the EU to invest heavily in infrastructure, like building its own chips, creating its own data centres, and yes, developing its software industry to provide alternatives to all the proprietary/closed stuff.
Would absolutely love to see the EU fix the fedual kingdom style Interfaces of US cloud offerings. Like you can use things like Rancher to create a open interface that Interfaces with the absolute mess that is AWS/Azure/GCP/VMWare but it’s just because they want to pretend their all just so special, which it’s just network and compute for 99% of the time and the other one percent established open source software preconfigured on network and compute
Don’t get me wrong hyperscailing infrastructure is fucking impressive to me (and the EU should lean with Open compute there IMHO), but the Interfaces I swear are intentionally garbage to lock people in.
Nobody is forcing you to use the cloud, you can host your apps on your infrastructure. Of course the cloud has its uses, but I think it is way overutilized and many companies could save quite a lot of money if they returned to on premises.
As a software house, running our own infrastructure would be a nightmare in so many ways… Just thinking of all the hardware that needs to be deployed, and how many sites worldwide we’d need just to provide the same level of service we have now, and then being able to scale up massively during peak time but have all that capacity go to waste during low season, then dedicated teams on all sites to handle emergencies 24/7, the massive loses of revenue anytime the services are down…
“Just in-house it” is definitely not the answer, there’s a reason AWS makes so much money.
true epically for smaller companies. Some really big companies like the could because they need to network all their 100 plus buildings. There is also externalizing responsibility and costs. But a doctor’s office as no need for the could. But they all just pay for azure to get ms office.
Honestly I would be surprised if micro or on site cloud solutions becomes a real things for smaller sites.
Running on prem is certainly possible, but requires a dedicated sysadmin team for anything serious. It is very important to be able to have availability guarantees and some expert you can count on to solve your problem with a phone call.
I mean, often enough even that phone call won’t help.
But you’re right, as long as everything is working normally, working on premises slows you down to do maintenance, updates etc etc. Cloud (of all kinds) takes that work away and you can work faster. And in the VC-driven daily and eternal grind, moving faster is the only thing that matters.
Running the stuff on someone else’s computer still requires a dedicated team for “something serious”, unless you stuff everything in specific “serverless” platforms, in which case you’re still paying for admins, just not yours.
It’s really not that hard. I’m the IT department for a medium sized bakery operation. Around 200 employees. This just means that I’m available when it really is necessary. I’m in situ or on call when orders come in and when shipments go out.
In the end I’m cheaper than outsourcing all the in house software and hardware. And I’m available at 3am when the bakers do their thing.
And yeah, I do have somebody somewhat trained in every bakery. When they’re at end of their wit I’m the person they call.
In the end, I’m around 1% of the payroll. IT is not that special.
Brother. I work in a company with 10k workers. The company loses thousands of dollars per second of downtime, if it’s something that affects the availability of the main page or the checkout process.
If that happens during the peak season, it could be hundreds of thousands per second.
With those kinds of stakes, you don’t just jerry rig your hosting, and very frequently, you don’t take your chances with in-housing.
You put it in one of the big 3, because they don’t fail, and if they do fail you, you sue their ass.
I’m going to give a sincere answer.
Usually AWS (or Vercel and Mongo Atlas if it’s a Node/MongoDB situation or an early dev situation). I forget all the brand names the other cloud providers use and have to do a search for “EC2 equivalent Azure” or whatever. You can’t be an expert in everything, after all. Plus, Azure has admin pages where I have to use Chromium instead of Firefox and it’s like, “Come on, assholes.” I don’t mind Google Cloud but it’s rarely cheaper and I can’t justify it to someone paying me.
I know Amazon is evil. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription — I lived in DC so I kept it longer than most would — because Jeff Bezos is a fucking menace. But you kind of have to pick one or keep a chart on your desk with all the different brand names and what equals what.
Thanks for the straight answer, brother.