Re:Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
by sokoloff on Thursday May 07, 2020 @07:16AM
(#23101725)
In quarantine, I’m doing exactly that, fooling about at home with old enterprise gear you can buy seemingly by the pound on EBay now. It’s super fun and I somewhat enjoy getting all the power management right, all the networking setup, and ultimately running Proxmox and a bunch of small containers and VMs for things like Minecraft servers and file storage.
In my day job and my side projects, I’m 100% paying for AWS for 99% of our workloads. I choose to let Amazon deal with all the staff issues and all the other, to use their words, undifferentiated heavy lifting.
There’s some scale point at which you have to ask the question whether you ought to be in the cloud, but IMO if you think a cloud provider is only 50% more than you could DIY, you should probably be in the cloud.
I'd wager a guess that a properly-configured server won't actually cost that much to maintain. Unless you're frequently updating the OS and other stuff - but that's a software issue. I don't expect the hardware will fail that frequently at all. If there's a HDD failure, a good RAID system (with tolerance for 3 or 4 disks failing simultaneously) will alert you to it, and you'd grab the spare HDD (you should have a few spares), and pop it in, and the RAID would recover from the failure. What other hardware components frequently fail? RAM? CPU? Not really.
The engineer who sets up the server should be someone who is a generalist, and a full-time employee who when not tending to the server, works on other stuff (like the product). Then you have someone on staff who is familiar with the system, and can fix something that goes wrong, without needing to ramp up on it first. I know a lot of programmers would love to set up a server. Any who enjoys buildings PCs (which many generalist programmers do) would probably love to have a one-month project where they pick parts and set up a powerful server.