Re:We use our own hardware at Fastmail
by hamandcheese on Sunday December 22, 2024 @11:16AM
(#42487240)
I feel like IAM may be the sleeper killer-app of cloud.
I self-host a lot of things, but boy oh boy if I were running a company it would be a helluvalotta work to get IAM properly set up.
I strongly agree with this and also strongly lament it.
I find IAM to be a terrible implementation of a foundationally necessary system. It feels tacked on to me, except now it's tacked onto thousands of other things and there's no way out.
Re:We use our own hardware at Fastmail
by andrewfromx on Sunday December 22, 2024 @11:44AM
(#42487451)
like terraform! isn't pulumi 100% better but there's no way out of terraform.
That's essentially why "platform engineering" is a hot topic. There are great FOSS tools for this, largely in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
To be clear, authentication could still be outsourced, but authorizing access to (on-prem) resources in a multi-tenant environment is something that "platforms" are frequently designed for.
And IAM and other cloud security and management considerations is where the opex/capex and capability argument can start to break down. Turns out, the "cloud" savings comes from not having capabilities in house to manage hardware. Sometimes, for most businesses, you want some of that lovely reliability.
(In short, I agree with you, substantially).
Like code. It is easy to get something basic up, but substantially more resources are needed for non-trivial things.