Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)
Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.
Most of our customers are priced out of the hardware we bought zhrough the official distributor channel.
They hiked the prices to 100% of the previous batch.
Meanwhile we bought what we could from numerous resellers to make it DIY.
Not many small customers can afford to drop 10k on a mid/low tier enterprise grade hardware (2x 1.92TB TLC SSDs, RAID controller, Intel E-2434, 64GB DDR5 RAM)
A few months ago this was (fully assembled mind you) around 2-3k
Vegetarians nowadays eat eggs, vegans wear leather and self-hosters do it on someone else’s computer.
I’m old and grumpy and will stick to calling the modern vegetarians lacto-ovo-vegetarians, tell the modern vegans that veganism is a lifestyle not a diet and insist that a VPS on Hetzner is hosted by Hetzner, even if you have to manage and maintain the VM.
I have also found that self-hosting, even with your own hardware, is significantly cheaper than the premium cloud hosting (AWS, etc). We priced out a VM server at my company and we found we could rebuy the hardware for it every FIVE months, just from the cloud hosting costs. And that is if we were decently disciplined about turning VMs on and off every day (which we all knew was a fantasy).
That caused us to strike out the premium providers. Leaving us with the non-premium ones (Digital Ocean, etc), co-locating, or in-house hosting.
I hear you. Personally I never understood the appeal of costly hosting at AWS and such. It just always seemed so expensive. The only benefit it provided, imho, is when you legitimately need to scale very quickly or if you’ve got a really huge variance in load.
Everything else? My own servers please, and thank you for reading 😁
What I read so far:
The dynamic scaling is what makes it worth it.
Many of the traditional hosting offerings just give you a monolithic VPS/dedicated hardware.
But if you want to up/downscale depending on peak demand during lunch hour it get’s complicated.
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
The end result is the same:
You control what the machine does. The data as well as backups (assuming you arent using specific hardware offerings but just compute and storage)
Example:
I am done with AWS pricing and Azure gave me a fat stack credits to go over there.
Agnostic VMs could be backed up and migrated over to Azure.
Essentially the same as migrating Hyper-V or VMware to Proxmox-VE
Operating and administering your own systems infrastructure requires that your business invest in the people to do so, this builds institutional knowledge which makes the important bit, the data and knowledge, portable. If the VM in the cloud gets too expensive you can use another provider, or you can buy hardware and run it locally. If the VM provider cuts your service you still have access to your data because you never lost control of it. Problems can be fixed by in house staff that don’t suddenly evaporate for arbitrary reasons or have service outages.
If your entire business depends on Microsoft services and it gets too expensive you have no options but to pay more. If your account gets locked then you’re out of business until you can get Microsoft to give you access again. If you want to migrate away, there isn’t another Microsoft to move your data to and you’ve replaced all of your technical staff with a support phone number, which isn’t currently accepting your calls.
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
The idea is that your services run on remote systems without regard for what those systems are (as a VM, docker image, etc.) Your architecture is decoupled from theirs - you can run on an Amazon host one week, and a server in your closet the next.
And as a bonus, systems hosted this way are often harder to scrape as they’re all structured differently. Additionally, you can (and should!) take additional measures to protect your data from your provider - something that just can’t be done when the provider controls the data architecture.
Depending on what they’re hosting, it could still be cheaper. My company wants to move a bunch of our old “tech debt” servers to AWS from the physical rack they’re in now. The estimated AWS cost for that hosting is about the same as replacing 1/6 of the entire server infrastructure every month.
There is no sound fiscal reason for us to do that, and probably likewise for many others, but Amazon is a nice, big famous company that makes an excellent scapegoat for bad planning, I guess.
Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)
Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.
Yep.
Its… pretty much apocalyptic.
C Suite finally ‘won’; they decided they could do the job of engineers.
They can’t, of course, but their hubris will burn down the world before they admit they don’t know something.
Not that my tiny customers have enough of an IT budget to buy their own servers with the recent price hike on memory and ssds.
Most of our customers are priced out of the hardware we bought zhrough the official distributor channel.
They hiked the prices to 100% of the previous batch.
Meanwhile we bought what we could from numerous resellers to make it DIY.
Not many small customers can afford to drop 10k on a mid/low tier enterprise grade hardware (2x 1.92TB TLC SSDs, RAID controller, Intel E-2434, 64GB DDR5 RAM)
A few months ago this was (fully assembled mind you) around 2-3k
Self hosting doesn’t necessarily imply you need your own hardware.
Vegetarians nowadays eat eggs, vegans wear leather and self-hosters do it on someone else’s computer.
I’m old and grumpy and will stick to calling the modern vegetarians lacto-ovo-vegetarians, tell the modern vegans that veganism is a lifestyle not a diet and insist that a VPS on Hetzner is hosted by Hetzner, even if you have to manage and maintain the VM.
I have also found that self-hosting, even with your own hardware, is significantly cheaper than the premium cloud hosting (AWS, etc). We priced out a VM server at my company and we found we could rebuy the hardware for it every FIVE months, just from the cloud hosting costs. And that is if we were decently disciplined about turning VMs on and off every day (which we all knew was a fantasy).
That caused us to strike out the premium providers. Leaving us with the non-premium ones (Digital Ocean, etc), co-locating, or in-house hosting.
Use a Cronjob to turn the servers on or off.
Automate everything you can
I hear you. Personally I never understood the appeal of costly hosting at AWS and such. It just always seemed so expensive. The only benefit it provided, imho, is when you legitimately need to scale very quickly or if you’ve got a really huge variance in load.
Everything else? My own servers please, and thank you for reading 😁
What I read so far:
The dynamic scaling is what makes it worth it.
Many of the traditional hosting offerings just give you a monolithic VPS/dedicated hardware.
But if you want to up/downscale depending on peak demand during lunch hour it get’s complicated.
I’m of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
The end result is the same:
You control what the machine does. The data as well as backups (assuming you arent using specific hardware offerings but just compute and storage)
Example:
I am done with AWS pricing and Azure gave me a fat stack credits to go over there.
Agnostic VMs could be backed up and migrated over to Azure.
Essentially the same as migrating Hyper-V or VMware to Proxmox-VE
Operating and administering your own systems infrastructure requires that your business invest in the people to do so, this builds institutional knowledge which makes the important bit, the data and knowledge, portable. If the VM in the cloud gets too expensive you can use another provider, or you can buy hardware and run it locally. If the VM provider cuts your service you still have access to your data because you never lost control of it. Problems can be fixed by in house staff that don’t suddenly evaporate for arbitrary reasons or have service outages.
If your entire business depends on Microsoft services and it gets too expensive you have no options but to pay more. If your account gets locked then you’re out of business until you can get Microsoft to give you access again. If you want to migrate away, there isn’t another Microsoft to move your data to and you’ve replaced all of your technical staff with a support phone number, which isn’t currently accepting your calls.
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
The idea is that your services run on remote systems without regard for what those systems are (as a VM, docker image, etc.) Your architecture is decoupled from theirs - you can run on an Amazon host one week, and a server in your closet the next.
And as a bonus, systems hosted this way are often harder to scrape as they’re all structured differently. Additionally, you can (and should!) take additional measures to protect your data from your provider - something that just can’t be done when the provider controls the data architecture.
Depending on what they’re hosting, it could still be cheaper. My company wants to move a bunch of our old “tech debt” servers to AWS from the physical rack they’re in now. The estimated AWS cost for that hosting is about the same as replacing 1/6 of the entire server infrastructure every month.
There is no sound fiscal reason for us to do that, and probably likewise for many others, but Amazon is a nice, big famous company that makes an excellent scapegoat for bad planning, I guess.