[HN Gopher] Parler's epic fail: A crash course on running your o...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Parler's epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers
        
       Author : fireeyed
       Score  : 63 points
       Date   : 2021-02-14 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.alexgleason.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.alexgleason.me)
        
       | dd36 wrote:
       | This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting
       | is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the
       | lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad
       | the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they
       | can't seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives
       | to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of
       | the hosts.
        
         | rShergold wrote:
         | The physical network itself evolved away from peer -> peer back
         | to client -> server. With IPv6 I'd hoped we would today be
         | living in a world where I could send my friend the url
         | fe80::1ff:fe23:4567:890a/cat.mov and they could download a
         | video directly from my phone. No matter where my phone happens
         | to be in the world. People could host "micro services" on their
         | personal devices and the whole world could access them. If
         | someone wants to know if I'm free on a date they could connect
         | to my phone's calendar app directly and ask. There are so may
         | possibilities of truly peer to peer applications.
         | 
         | But the network itself prevents this. Bittorrent has to jump
         | though multiple NAT busting hoops to allow two internet users
         | to talk to each other directly. limited IPv4 addresses mean
         | home internet connections have dynamic IP addresses which means
         | no one can realistically host at home. Because no one hosts at
         | home they consume far more than they upload. Because of this
         | the physical network was built with a much higher download
         | bandwidth than upload. It's a vicious cycle that wasn't
         | intentional it just sort of evolved that way.
        
       | yannoninator wrote:
       | this is all good except when people in a different country try
       | access your service, they start to complain about your service
       | being slow due to massive latency and lagging.
       | 
       | and then you wished you would have went to the cloud after all.
       | 
       | now you've got another problem.
        
       | endisneigh wrote:
       | Does there exist a de-platform proof way of hosting something on
       | the internet?
       | 
       | Even if you host your own server on your own premises they could
       | forbid you from using the location, shut off your electricity,
       | etc.
       | 
       | Is it possible to host a website entirely on bittorrent? I
       | suppose there's also IPFS but I'm not entirely familiar.
       | 
       | Maybe once solar is cheap enough you could launch some sort of
       | array of powered drones into the sky that follow the sun that
       | send files to people via P2P - solar mesh network if you will.
        
         | madamelic wrote:
         | Yes, there are.
         | 
         | IPFS, I believe, has a solution. The one I am most familiar
         | with is Dat Browser.
        
         | swebs wrote:
         | 4chan has survived the wannabe-stasi deplatform mob all these
         | years simply by hosting the servers in the admin's basement.
        
           | rvz wrote:
           | Like 4chan, Gab also survived the de-platforming witch hunt
           | and are self-hosting almost everything.
        
         | spijdar wrote:
         | "They" in that case would typically be the government (assuming
         | you own your property), which at least in the US would have to
         | (at least nominally) follow more regulations and protocols for
         | restricting your speech, while a private business doesn't
         | really have those same obligations.
         | 
         | I'm not sure how ISPs fit into this though, and to what extent
         | they can say "we don't like the content you're serving" and cut
         | your net. Obviously if the content is outright illegal that's
         | one thing, but I wonder if they can "pull an Amazon".
        
           | sjg007 wrote:
           | Even if you had a data center other peers could refuse to
           | peer with you, remove you from DNS etc...
        
             | spijdar wrote:
             | Yeah, it kinda ties back to the question of under what
             | circumstance can an ISP cut you off.
             | 
             | You could at least get around DNS level stuff with a P2P
             | application layer. But if you're cut off at the routing
             | level by everyone then yeah, no go...
        
         | kevan wrote:
         | Make a dark web[1] site? Basically make it impossible to link
         | what you're doing to who your infra providers/internet
         | connections are.
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web
        
       | tpmx wrote:
       | It's kinda funny that apart from the headline this post is a
       | typical circa 2005 tutorial on how to run your own large volume
       | website cheaply.
        
         | gerikson wrote:
         | That's when I stopped learning how to admin systems so I am
         | very down with this...
        
           | tpmx wrote:
           | Well, it works.
           | 
           | So much money is wasted with AWS. (Look at at their margins.)
           | 
           | It's useful in development/testing. It's irresponsible to use
           | managed services that don't have an easy migration path to
           | something open.
        
             | rvz wrote:
             | It works for comma.ai as they are self-hosting their deep-
             | learning system in house and not in the cloud with these
             | huge costs.
             | 
             | Deep-Learning in the cloud really is a scam and a complete
             | waste of money.
        
       | TameAntelope wrote:
       | > freedom minded
       | 
       | > tech oligarchs
       | 
       | ...here we go.
       | 
       | I really struggle to understand how some folks didn't realize
       | they were using other people's things until recently. Maybe the
       | fact that they weren't physically in a space was hiding the
       | proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen
       | or so times as you travel to twitter.com.
       | 
       | It _is_ free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom
       | minded individuals seem to think freedom only goes in one
       | direction. I will defend DJTs right to tweet stupid shit all day
       | and every day, just as I'll defend Twitter's right to kick him
       | off the platform.
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | Is it freedom of speech to cut off your power supply and
         | running water if I don't like your face? What about mobile
         | connectivity and internet? Can we refuse to sell you groceries?
         | 
         | Can you live without 'using other people's stuff' except like a
         | hermit in a cave?
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | None of those are freedom of speech, because none involve
           | speech acts, or refusal to engage in speech acts.
           | 
           | They are freedom of _association_ , but in some cases--in US
           | law for the first consideration--they are within the scope of
           | such freedom that government can (under the strict scrutiny
           | test) and has chosen to (e.g., either as part of regulation
           | of monopolies or as part of public accommodation law) limit.
        
           | SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
           | Power supply and water are utilities. Mobile connectivity and
           | internet are not. Groceries are not.
           | 
           | Someone else's speech isn't a protected class, except for
           | speech due to religion. Discrimination based on things that
           | aren't a property of being in a protected class is legal for
           | any non-utility.
           | 
           | Personally I'd say that internet service providers should be
           | utilities and regulated as such, but currently they aren't so
           | the ISPs are allowed to decide what speech to carry.
        
             | TechnoTimeStop wrote:
             | Authenticity plays a huge role here. Why do we let shit by
             | the metric ton over the firewall attack free liberties and
             | social discourse online? China literally has payed 3
             | million + people for years to do this, that's two agents
             | for every social group in the free world.
             | 
             | Most of the bullshit our western democracies have
             | experienced in the last years online should be archived and
             | studied for the crimes our Russian Chinese friends have
             | committed against our free democracy.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | I don't like how it's fashionable to point finger at
               | China/Russia for every possible issue.
               | 
               | We literally have registered political parties in the
               | west that do the exact same thing and the matter was
               | proven in a court of law (Leave EU). They have faced no
               | material consequences.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | 542458 wrote:
           | If it's a government service (like power and water in many
           | cases), that's why freedom of speech as a right exists - to
           | protect you from government retaliation for speech. For
           | mobile connectivity and internet, similar rules apply if the
           | service is a common carrier which recognizes the fact that
           | while private, these organizations operate as government-
           | allowed monopolies.
           | 
           | For groceries, that's a private business. If you run into a
           | grocery store and cause a scene or do something the owner
           | doesn't like the owner can remove you. There are fairly
           | narrow exceptions to this, such as how you can't usually be
           | discriminated against for being a member of a protected
           | class.
           | 
           | Freedom of Speech in the US was never designed to protect you
           | from other people, it was designed to protect you from the
           | government.
        
             | ClumsyPilot wrote:
             | I think we both have an understanding that a person should
             | not be left without essential services or be punished
             | without some kind of due process.
             | 
             | If so, the government centric line of argument does not get
             | you anywhere, because there are many essential services are
             | not government owned or controlled monopolies..
             | 
             | My electric, water, internet and mobile suppliers are
             | private Same goes for the bank. There are only a handful of
             | companies in each category in the country, and they could
             | wake up tomorrow and remove me from their network.
             | 
             | You can either have personal liberty, or oligopolies with
             | contracts 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'.
             | Not both.
        
             | sneak wrote:
             | No, the 1A was designed to protect you from the government.
             | "Freedom of speech" is a separate matter entirely.
        
               | 542458 wrote:
               | That's fair, I should have written that.
        
           | oneplane wrote:
           | Depends on where you live and what the law says. I believe
           | some Americans would answer 'yes' to all of those. A
           | transaction between private individuals (or non-governmental
           | organisations) is a privilege, not a right.
           | 
           | In other parts of the world there would be limits and
           | requirements set by the parties elected by the people, i.e.
           | rules on what things you can and can't discriminate on (like
           | ability to pay you can measure, but skin color is not allowed
           | to be a factor for selling electricity). Generally there is a
           | list of factors that you cannot use to allow/deny sale.
        
           | threatofrain wrote:
           | In the US, people can refuse to sell you groceries, and for
           | many people that's pretty impactful. Presumably Amazon also
           | bans people for abuse, but life without Amazon sounds like a
           | huge loss of access.
           | 
           | Under the US Constitution, Christians can also refuse to bake
           | gay cakes, fire gay employees, or evict gay members from
           | positions of leadership.
           | 
           | At the heart of cancellation is the freedom of association;
           | perhaps we should redraw the boundaries on where that freedom
           | begins and ends, but while keeping in mind the balance of
           | affairs.
        
           | TameAntelope wrote:
           | You can't live in a society without using other people's
           | stuff (practically, I'm sure we could come up with examples
           | of ownership concepts being challenged).
           | 
           | But living in a society means not upsetting people so badly
           | that they won't sell you groceries. There's tons of ways to
           | do that while retaining your ability to speak what's on your
           | mind, you just have to be thoughtful about how your words
           | effect others, even if just to make sure you don't get kicked
           | out of society.
        
             | AnHonestComment wrote:
             | A former director of the CIA who spied on the US senate
             | while they were investigating the CIA got on the news and
             | said mainstream ideologies like libertarianism should be
             | treated like an insurgency by the government. His
             | radicalizing speech wasn't silenced -- it was beamed across
             | the country by the establishment.
             | 
             | Your post is just gas lighting.
             | 
             | People are realizing that other people mean them serious
             | harm over political differences, and using means like
             | censorship to achieve it.
        
             | ClumsyPilot wrote:
             | That argument works if by "upsetting people" we mean actual
             | real people with normal psychology.
             | 
             | But it falls apart when 'people' are multinationals and
             | "upsetting them" means their PR department gets a funny
             | idea. In that case we need a contract that provides more
             | protection than 'we can remove you at any time for any
             | reason'
        
               | TameAntelope wrote:
               | The whole, "they're faceless greed machines" works both
               | ways, though, doesn't it? You've got to do something
               | pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking
               | corporation actually turn down your money...
        
               | acover wrote:
               | Not really. When a corp has billions in revenue, your
               | $2000 is nothing compared to any possibility of
               | jeopardizing a fraction of their revenue.
               | 
               | Imagine a corp optimizing click through. Any negative
               | news could dampen that and require immediate action.
               | 
               | You have to be perfect or too big to remove.
        
               | TameAntelope wrote:
               | And yet I'm neither of those things and I've never been
               | kicked off of a platform, so clearly there's something
               | off with what you've said, otherwise people would be
               | getting deplatformed for saying or doing anything at all
               | that might go against popular sentiment.
               | 
               | Parler wasn't removed from AWS because it was a
               | conservative site, it was removed because it wasn't
               | willing to handle the legally troubling volume of
               | potentially criminal activity. You can post your thoughts
               | on any conservative idea you want on Twitter, no one is
               | getting banned for that. The only reason anyone has been
               | removed from any popular social media (or AWS) is because
               | they became unwilling to recognize the fact they owe more
               | than nothing to their fellow man, which includes not
               | trying to silence others through intimidation.
               | 
               | Ideas have not been and are not still the problem, is the
               | refusal to think carefully about how to express oneself.
        
           | greesil wrote:
           | Nice strawman argument.
        
         | swebs wrote:
         | "There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer"
        
         | robertlagrant wrote:
         | Would advise using brain rather than simple pattern matching
         | and memorised response. Author didn't mention a violation of
         | freedom of speech.
        
         | oneplane wrote:
         | It also seems to miss the point that you will always use
         | something owned by someone else as long as you exist in a
         | connected world. It's also why the problem exists: being
         | together also means having to deal with conflicting directions
         | and since you don't "own" everything your direction might not
         | "win".
         | 
         | The same goes for getting deplatformed: if you are being nasty
         | the problem isn't the non-governmental org removing you, that's
         | a symptom of nobody wanting to deal with you. (or nobody 'big
         | and easy')
         | 
         | Just because it looked good, or looked like a lot of people
         | were 'with' you, doesn't mean it's true and doesn't mean it
         | keeps looking that way if the barrier to entry gets higher.
         | Hanging around in a browser and 'liking' or otherwise
         | interacting/spreading things isn't actually a replacement for
         | "a group of likeminded people sharing ideals", it's much more
         | comparable to schoolkids forming groups.
         | 
         | At some point we might see a digital platform that is expensive
         | enough and has a higher entry complexity to actually only grow
         | and maintain people that are 'true' to the ideals fostered by
         | that platform. Only then do we have an example that would be
         | 'real' enough to converse about.
        
         | njharman wrote:
         | Rtfa. It says and agrees with the exact straw man you are
         | invoking.
         | 
         | Namely run on your own stuff and not on someone else's
         | platform.
        
         | reddog wrote:
         | Fair point. But I get my electricity, telephone service, water,
         | gas, groceries for entities owned by someone else and I don't
         | have to worry about having any of these services pulled because
         | of what I posted on twitter yesterday. Imagine the phone
         | company telling you that you will no longer recieve service
         | because of something you said on a call.
         | 
         | Some people's livelyhood depend on their google or facebook
         | accounts every bit as much as they depend on telephone service.
        
         | wwww4all wrote:
         | Does Twitter have right to kick someone out for being gay or
         | being Asian or for belonging to some LGBT group?
         | 
         | According to your logic, Twitter can do that.
        
           | njharman wrote:
           | They can. But won't.
           | 
           | Why allowing (socially as in bad PR) any censorship is bad.
           | 
           | Otherwise you get where we are at. What the mainstream deems
           | bad is silenced. What transient outrage seems bad is
           | silenced. What authorities convince the masses is scary gets
           | silenced. Any voice that platform doesn't like and isnt
           | popular enogh gets silenced.
        
       | zxcvbn4038 wrote:
       | This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own
       | server become a lost art?
       | 
       | One of parler's problems was they didn't scrub headers which made
       | it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they
       | were using.
       | 
       | AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo'd their front
       | end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo
       | and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on the
       | backend (assuming their AWS account didn't have Parler Inc in the
       | payment details). From there getting taken down from one colo
       | would just be an issue of spinning up a front end at another
       | colo. Front that setup with a couple CDNs and now you have layers
       | where you have to coordinate between half a dozen companies to
       | bring the site down completely, meanwhile your data is safe in
       | AWS because nobody knows your using AWS or even if they do it's
       | hard to pick you out from the millions of other AWS users.
        
         | wging wrote:
         | AWS publishes which IPs it owns, so scrubbing headers is not
         | enough for secrecy. (Not that doing something that relies on
         | secrecy is a smart plan for a business, anyway.)
         | https://isitonaws.com/
        
         | nacs wrote:
         | Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-
         | boggling.
         | 
         | Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though
         | they claimed before they went down that their app could run
         | without AWS without issue).
         | 
         | Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again
         | on non-cloud hardware..
         | 
         | And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the
         | frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type service and
         | have all the heavy lifting continue to be done via
         | AWS/Azure/Google till you can run 100% on your own hardware.
        
       | 13415 wrote:
       | I doubt running your own server is always the right
       | solution.There are pros and cons for and against hosting
       | yourself. A small company without dedicated security team may get
       | hacked and all customer data exposed, for example.
       | 
       | Contrary to what this article insinuates, the vast majority of
       | companies do not have to worry about violating the terms of
       | services of cloud providers and other external services, because
       | they don't offer services designed to violate besaid terms of
       | services.
       | 
       | As for Parler, of course they should have seen that coming. It's
       | pathetic that they didn't. They should have looked at sites like
       | the Piratebay for how to do it and prepared a bit more.
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | "the vast majority of companies do not have to worry about
         | violating the terms of services of cloud providers"
         | 
         | https://blog.checklyhq.com/why-the-recent-digital-ocean-kill...
        
           | 13415 wrote:
           | A personal anecdote why some blog poster is scared and
           | worried about ToS of cloud providers? Sure, go ahead and host
           | your website in your mom's basement. That's exactly my point,
           | a company who has reason to believe they will violate the ToS
           | of business partners should not make business with those
           | business partners. It's kind of trivial.
           | 
           | That's why Parler was such an epic fail, not because they
           | didn't host everything themselves. They were acting as if
           | they'd care about free speech - unless it wasn't totally
           | compatible with their personal views, in case of which they'd
           | ban instantly - and did not prepare in the slightest for
           | contingencies and were caught in the cold. All of that in the
           | light of plenty of precedents, ranging from Napster over
           | Piratebay to ISIS propaganda websites. It baffles my mind how
           | a company could be so unprepared.
        
       | HenryBemis wrote:
       | The photos though.. If you are reading this remove the server or
       | the rug/carpet!!!! All the fluff from the carpet and the dust
       | from the floor invading your box and will be chocking the fans!!!
        
       | helsinkiandrew wrote:
       | I'm not sure running their own hardware and relying on an ISP or
       | colocationg at a datacentre would help Parler compared with
       | renting services/VMs from someone like Amazon.
       | 
       | Just about all ISP have terms and conditions that prohibit use
       | that they find offensive.
       | 
       | Data Foundry, mentioned in the article, acceptable use policy is
       | below and I'm sure could be used to kick out Parler
       | 
       | https://www.datafoundry.com/legal/aup
        
         | rbanffy wrote:
         | It's possible to hide one's presence from the datacenter by a
         | shell company and a CDN.
        
           | duhast2020 wrote:
           | How? It would take one minute for a dude with some sniffer on
           | his wifi to find the DNS entries and CDN used. Go to the
           | press with "Parler is being hosted out of domain Foo w/
           | CDNfront" and viola.
        
       | ping_pong wrote:
       | The "reason" given why Parler failed is awfully glib and one
       | dimensional. You can't just serve content to millions of people
       | per day and think you can just up and move to another provider.
       | 
       | Had Parler just moderated their posts like they were asked to do,
       | they would still be around. You can still have right wing, even
       | extreme right wing views without calling for violence or
       | organizing insurrections. The fact they essentially refused to
       | moderate and let calls for violence fester on their platform is
       | why they were shut off.
        
         | rbanffy wrote:
         | That and their hardware footprint seemed ridiculously
         | overprovisioned. You can serve content to millions of people
         | per day with fewer boxes than they were using.
         | 
         | I always try to design a "degraded mode" read-only into my apps
         | that covers maintenance windows and unscheduled outages. That
         | is usually easier to lift and shift than the full app and can
         | even be hosted someplace else if you don't mind it lagging
         | behind the live website.
        
       | amluto wrote:
       | > Most datacenters only lease by the rack. These racks can hold
       | up to 42 servers and are far too expensive.
       | 
       | Hurricane Electric will happily lease you an entire rack for
       | $400/mo with a 1Gbps connection. I would argue that, in
       | comparison to the prices the OP mentions, Hurricane Electric's
       | price is quite good. Also, there is one fewer middleman between
       | you and the Internet (and power, and rack space, etc, and the
       | front door, etc).
       | 
       | (I believe that $400 number does not include vast amounts of
       | power, so the actual price tag for filling that rack with
       | conventional hardware may be rather higher. On the other hand,
       | depending on your use case, fitting in a small power budget may
       | be straightforward.)
        
       | julienfr112 wrote:
       | Nice post and inspiring, but one small point bother me: "I feel
       | GREAT not living in FEAR". Well, you just traded the fear of
       | being shut down by big corpo for the fear of having your hard
       | disk or memory or fan or whatever fail.
        
         | nacs wrote:
         | Most rackmount servers double up on everything like power-
         | supplies. Harddrives should be on RAID so a single drive
         | failure shouldn't be a problem and you would have some time to
         | goto the colo and switch out the hard drive.
         | 
         | CPU and RAM last a very long time so it shouldn't be a problem
         | (I've had literally 1 RAM stick failure in over a decade of
         | hosting and the datacenter swapped out the bad memory stick in
         | less than 30 minutes -- it also didn't bring down the server
         | either, the kernel log started showing a bunch of ECC issues
         | and a quick memory check pointed to the stick that had the
         | problem).
         | 
         | And of course you can just get double or triple the amount of
         | servers with IP failover and such to be even more resilient to
         | hardware failures.
         | 
         | This article is just showing how to get started. Throw more
         | servers at it for more redundancy and scaling as needed.
        
       | 542458 wrote:
       | I can't help but find the introductory quote a bit much, given
       | that Parler's moderation scheme (judgement by other Parler users)
       | typically resulted in the removal of all opinions other than
       | those held by the majority of Parler users.
       | 
       | In any case, Parler's problem (well, one problem of many) was
       | that they had MASSIVE hardware requirements that dramatically cut
       | down on the number of places that could practically host them.
       | 
       | It also seems that despite assurances and good sense, Parler had
       | deeply tied itself to Amazon's APIs, making migration off AWS
       | slow even once a host was found.
        
         | treeman79 wrote:
         | My initial thought was it can't be that hard to migrate off
         | quickly. Then I thought about all the major sites I've worked
         | on or built over the past decade.
         | 
         | Oh crap. There is zero chance I could do it quickly.
         | 
         | So a turn around from 20 years ago when I would setup LAMP
         | applications on new new hardware in an afternoon.
        
       | john2010 wrote:
       | Very likely many isps whitelist speedtest.net to show amazing
       | speeds.
        
         | 542458 wrote:
         | That's why you also check Fast.com - it's on Netflix's servers,
         | so you can't whitelist Fast without also whitelisting Netflix.
        
           | rhencke wrote:
           | It really was such a brilliant move on Netflix's part.
        
           | TheRealSteel wrote:
           | Surely it'd be trivial to increase the user's speed to
           | Netflix servers if they've visited Fast.com in the last three
           | minutes or similar?
        
             | 542458 wrote:
             | Thanks to TLS, Netflix and Fast are indistinguishable. All
             | your ISP knows is the IP address you're talking to. They'd
             | only know that you visited Fast in particular if you were
             | using your ISP's DNS, which you shouldn't be using anyways
             | :)
        
               | tomatotomato37 wrote:
               | It's indistinguishable from an protocol perspective, not
               | a data analysis perspective. Or to put it more
               | practically, if a large data stream from Netflix lasts
               | more than 10 seconds, it's video.
        
               | cortesoft wrote:
               | Except SNI will leak the domain name of the host you are
               | connecting to.
        
               | Lammy wrote:
               | Personally I trust my ISP DNS a hell of a lot more than
               | Google/Cloudflare. Why would I want to give them even
               | _more_ data about me?
        
               | nyx_ wrote:
               | I've had ISP DNS servers that redirect NXDOMAIN responses
               | to spammy "search" pages full of sponsored crap and
               | banner ads.
               | 
               | There's always OpenNIC, DNS.watch, or Quad9 if you're
               | after something that isn't operated by a creepy megacorp.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | rhencke wrote:
       | I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just
       | generally accepted practice.
       | 
       | It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint
       | has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel
       | idea to do so.
        
         | 542458 wrote:
         | I switched my personal website to a Raspberry Pi 4 in my
         | basement a while ago, with cloudflare caching and roll-your-own
         | DDNS - I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy the whole
         | thing was to do (although my requirements are far from exotic).
        
           | Balgair wrote:
           | Any good resources to share?
        
         | ping_pong wrote:
         | I worked at a startup that managed its own bare metal. It was
         | very hard and time consuming. And when things went down it was
         | on you. You needed a really good datacenter partner to make
         | sure that they were on top of things and could drop things at a
         | moment's notice. But you don't know how responsive they will be
         | until you're actually experiencing an outage.
         | 
         | The level of convenience that cloud providers give is just
         | orders of magnitude more efficient and easier.
        
           | muststopmyths wrote:
           | I have worked for companies in the past with horrible
           | datacenter partners (one of them did not know that one of the
           | two switches they routed our traffic through was completely
           | dead), so I definitely agree with you on that.
           | 
           | On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a
           | cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not
           | something that's setting twitter aflame.
           | 
           | If it takes a cloud provider in the order of hours to get me
           | back online, I could probably get the same sort of service
           | from one of the better colos/hosting providers, especially if
           | they were local and I had the ability to make a call to get
           | support.
           | 
           | There are other conveniences to cloud providers of course,
           | but I think I if I could find highly skilled ops people and
           | pay them well, I would run my own servers every time. For the
           | kind of games I've worked on, the money/CPU cost of cloud is
           | ludicrous.
           | 
           | The trick these days is even finding high-level ops people
           | who aren't already working 3-400k jobs for AWS/Azure/GCP
        
         | Jochim wrote:
         | I wonder how much of this is just the industry
         | maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most
         | people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long
         | as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for
         | someone else to do it for us.
         | 
         | In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care
         | what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets
         | some bar of quality/cost that's appropriate for them. If
         | someone else is delivering this then you've removed a small
         | department's worth of overhead/planning from your corporate
         | structure.
        
           | angelbar wrote:
           | If you need to have your baked goods constaltly, you will be
           | better prepared with many flour providers in case of that one
           | provider does NOT LIKE YOUR RECIPE and stop selling the
           | ingredients to you... Or get your own flour mill.
           | 
           | So, not a ideal analogy...
        
             | rhencke wrote:
             | I think your underlying point is fair, but I'd like to see
             | you post a more constructive explanation of where it would
             | be useful for the analogy to capture a truth about cloud
             | services that is not true for, say, flour - switching cloud
             | providers is incredibly difficult due to vendor lock-in.
        
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