This is, in my opinion, a falacy perpetuated by the marketing departments of "big cloud". Don't forget that pre-2006 there was no S3, and we managed just fine. They are not challenging skills to learn, the zeitgeist has just convinced itself they are not worth learning

It's condescending to think that someone can't reasonably choose to pay for a service they are capable of doing.

Cooking isn't hard either but I still go to restaurants, and don't go around laughing at patrons telling them that they never bothered to learn how to cook if they are there.

Eating in the restaurant once in a while is fine. Lage range of choices delivered quickly. But is it sustainable? Price higher, usually less healthy and not tailored to special needs.

In any case one does it professional IT done right is costly but cheaper than e.g. IT without offsite backup in case of a disaster.

Do you eat every meal at a restaurant though? That would not be sustainable. To roll with your analogy it would be like the hospitality sector persuading the majority to ditch home meals entirely

The problem was your assumption which is condescending. I gave you an analogy to make it clearer. Taking the analogy apart doesn't change the point.

It's not condescending at all. You are saying they could reasonably pay for it, but they quite obviously cannot (hence the existence of this whole post). What I'm principally challenging is the assumption that this required effort is substantial. I'm making the point that it is not, certainly (in my view) compared to the effort to run an entire operating system project and all of the ancillaries that come with that. This is an area they have chosen to pay for that (again, in my view) they don't need to. They have gone to great lengths to architect a system that allows deep pinning of very specific versions, it's not a stretch to think about the architecture required to deliver that. Instead they have stopped that line of thinking at [insert S3 here] rather than carry on solving. A direct consequence of that now is a $9k/m hole they need to fill in their budget. I'm being critical, sure, but not condescending. Overall, it frustrates me seeing opinions that operating infrastructure is difficult and therefore must automatically be avoided. In this particular example avoiding operating said infrastructure potentially is putting the project in the red and at risk, but nowhere on the NixOS call for help does it suggest they have considered operating this themselves. And there in is the crux of my point. The zeitgeist has turned against operating infrastructure, and yet is frequently caught out by the cost of this decision.

> They are not challenging skills to learn, the zeitgeist has just convinced itself they are not worth learning

Next time you see someone paying for something you think it's easy to learn, that the "zeitgeist told them not to learn", go up to them and say what I quoted and you'll see real fast if it's condescending or not.

This is a silly thread.

The difference in situations here is literally that on the one hand large corporations have spent money to market the idea that their services are essential because the alternative is incredibly difficult. On the other hand, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, "Big Restaurant" etc have not spent large quantities of money trying to persuade the populace that cooking at home is incredibly difficult. It's possible to sell someone a convenience without also telling that person that it's the only real option and this is what the person you're replying to is highlighting.

It's not condescending, it's the reality of the situation. Yes in the examples you've described it would be condescending but in the situation we're actually talking about there are actually large numbers of people who genuinely believe (as a result of successful marketing campaigns) that the equivalent to cooking your own meals at home is incredibly dangerous, difficult, expensive and error prone.

> On the other hand, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, "Big Restaurant" etc have not spent large quantities of money trying to persuade the populace that cooking at home is incredibly difficult

They haven't because it's a ridiculous proposition. The same way cloud providers would be laughed out of the room if they tried to say the same thing and they didn't actually have a better product with trade-offs that are genuinely better for some use cases. The fact that you believe that everyone using cloud products is either too lazy to learn or has been fooled by marketing because they can't think for themselves, unlike you who see the light, is the condescending part. Mind you, on the face of overwhelming data showing most companies have, or are moving large parts of their infrastructure to the cloud, so everyone else are dummies either too lazy or too stupid to see what you can see.

> The fact that you believe that everyone using cloud products is either too lazy to learn or has been fooled by marketing because they can't think for themselves,

I never said anyone was too lazy, just misinformed about the benefits, and it's a more far fetched statement to claim that marketing doesn't work than it is to state that it does work.

As evidenced by some people in this thread claiming that not using S3 would be basically impossible (despite a large number of popular distributions literally doing exactly that) there are clearly plenty of people who have fallen for the marketing.

Moreover, you're the one implying that falling for marketing is something only people who can't think for themselves do, that's also not what I'm saying. I think everyone is susceptible to marketing, and in this case, clearly a lot of intelligent people who are otherwise capable of thinking for themselves have fallen for this blindspot.

I think you are the one being condescending here.

The original post did not come off as condescending to me, but instead just highlighted how BigCorp cloud marketing departments have an incentive to sell developers on “infrastructure is tough, just pay us”. (I say this as a consumer of AWS services and fan of their products).

“Assume good faith”[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reading back over that, I'm not seeing the condescending bit?

Who managed just fine? IT-based services very a minor fraction of what they are today. And IT departments in some random company were much bigger.

> And IT departments in some random company were much bigger.

Not sure about that. There appear to be just as many people in IT, it's just that they're not that technical anymore, mostly producing policy documents and pushing tickets around. The actual work is outsourced to the cloud, SaaS products and outside consultants (for duct taping the mishmash of SaaS products together). But that may be just my lacking understanding of my strange little part of the globe.

Not for the people behind NixOS. If it is challenging then that would cause me to re-calibrate my opinion of the project as a whole.

We do this at work, albeit much larger scale than this and I'm the only one who spends any time on upgrades, replacing failed disks and so on. Honestly, apart from upgrades every 3-ish months I don't spend any time at all on this, it's all chugging along without intervention.

Things don't fail as much as they used to, at least not from using something mature as minio and of course hardware can fail as they do specifically spinning rust, which is non trivial to replace if you have hot-swap capable servers in the first place.

I don't possess any decade worth expertise in either minio or running this kind of setup so personally I believe you are exaggerating that this is even worth calling challenge at all.

But that's just my take :)

So I’m sure you’d be more than happy to volunteer your services to NixOS and be responsible for the setup, including when there are issues (which will inevitably happen regardless of tools and technologies used), right?

It’s so easy, after all.

I'd volunteer to do it, if they paid for hardware, colo and transportation for initial install. After things settle down, it takes no more than half an hour or so every month.

Pretending to know how much work something is when it's not your area of expertise is a bit silly.

Actually, yes, it is easy, after all :)

The money that are paid as the exorbitant AWS egress fees could be used to pay a competent SRE to handle that. I don't think that running the package mirror would require a full-time dedicated paid position. Initial setup, maybe some heavy restructuring operations as storage requirements grow, maybe some firefighting, but not the daily operation.