For mid-sized companies where you're paying someone to maintain things, whether that's an employee or a 3rd party, I think you need to assess your tools in terms of your negotiating power and how important it is to maintain control of everything. What if GitHub bans you? I don't think I'd try to self host a customer facing app at this scale either.
I think you can be short-term successful by throwing caution to the wind and using every shortcut available, but will the first to market advantage be enough to offset the price competition of people that aren't locked in to some proprietary API gateway or WAF? For example, what if I take extra time to build on OpenFaaS and you build on AWS everything. Who wins long term? You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors.
Or is the idea of switching hosting vendors detached from reality at this point? Is hosting cost so negligible it doesn't matter? All I know is that everything looks crazy expensive from where I am.
We see the ”scaling” argument a lot, but honestly it's overrated for most businesses: for 95%+ percents of the businesses you can run online, the traffic you have can easily be handled by a single cheap machine running a PHP backend, as long as everything is properly set up (caching, using a CDN for media, etc). Modern computers are fast!
Same for redundancy: your business is unlikely to fail because your website is down for 2h every month (heck, this even that much worse than github /s).
Independent developers almost never need to care about scaling and redundancy.
This is one of those things that I was talking about them sympathizing with.
It's unrealistic. If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing.
> You're faster, but I have better negotiating power (ie: less costs) by threatening to switch vendors.
Okay, but AWS isn't expensive as it is. If you build to the way these resources are meant to be built you can seriously minimize your costs.
I've seen plenty of lift and shifted apps get their costs dramatically reduced once redesigned in a "cloud native" architecture. The lift and shifted design was in the thousands of dollars a month. Rebuilding for AWS resources brought our costs to almost literally nothing on this same app. I'm talking $5,000 a month to $5 per month.
So I have a hard time following the premise that you'll do it cheaper with an on-prem or self-managed system.
> If you're getting banned from github or a cloud provider maybe you should reconsider what you're doing.
That’s a sentiment popular among Big Tech types (such as Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”), and distinctly unpopular among those who consider the cloud providers’ decisionmaking arbitrary, capricious, or dangerous.
There's still some topics that are taboo and that some businesses refuses to touch.
Self-hosted organizations that I think of off the top of my head are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Backblaze, Microsoft, Stack Overflow, and possibly Wal-Mart & CloudFlare.
They moved everything including the hardware and the data in house, and next year they’ve doubled the provided storage (to 1TB) with no additional cost.
Lastly, they’ve doubled the storage to 2TB and added some features for $20 more.
Because for us it was different. We got rid of Slack and decided to just use basic Google Chat we already had with Google mail. It was definitely a productivity boost and insanely decreased the number of times people messages each other. It was helpful.
So what, in your case, it had to with self hosting? Or did you mean it was just the magical effect of Slack being Slack?
Slack has a lot more product thought and nice features that keep on getting added. Our competency is not managing mattermost, it's doing what the company is made to do.
If you want to reduce communication, well that is a different thing altogether and you can choose if you want chatroom software for your company or not.
The thing though; is that this argument can be used to outsource everything.
Office space, HR, recruitment, even making coffee.
At some point the externality puts restrictions on your maneuverability, in the case of office space it's because you might not be able to just run a few power cables somewhere, for HR (imagining a scenario where it's outsourced) there's limitations on speed, or in the worst cases limitations on how you can even interface with the HR department.
Making coffee is one of the cheapest things you can do, outsourcing it may mean, though, that you lose choice of what beans you have, or what types of milks you want to stock, and there's a premium on the price because another company wants to make a profit supplying this service.
This is a contrived example, but overall my point is: there are times that in-sourcing your tools actually gives you the time and freedom later. It's a gamble you make.
We'd love to improve, are there one or two things top of mind for us to change? You mentioned occasionally missing notifications?
Once recent new feature slack added that I like was scheduled messages, but that is a pretty new thing.
The most fractured and worst run companies have been concerned with self-hosting and frankly they sympathized with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on here.
But I recognize we still need people self-hosting because it drives innovation and competition. I believe there are ways of doing things well while self-hosting, but I'm not sure what those ways are.