I think people overestimate the expenses related to maintaining their own infrastructure. I work for a large org that does both. We have a lot of workloads running in the public cloud, and many more on premises (for various reasons, including compliance).
Having worked on these for years, building solutions, diagnosing problems and so on I'd risk saying we have reached the point where the cloud is slowly getting more complex than traditional setups. In theory, it should be simpler, right? A Transit Gateway is a virtual device so easier to configure than a Cisco router, right?
The problem is, as the cloud providers offering gets richer, with time it has to be more complex in response to various customers' requirements, so basically you need to learn both: traditional Linux operations and networking, and a whole new class of interactions between dozens of services with hundreds of API calls. It quickly becomes overwhelming. IaC obviously helps but anybody who has maintained a large repository of CloudFormation code will tell you its not a panacea.
And then a million small quirks that basically come from you not owning the infra. E.g. Amazon is pushing the Control Tower as a model for new setups especially for larger orgs. Guess what, this thing has almost no API. Last time I checked it allows you to maybe check a state of a control. This means you need to set it up manually! In 2023! After 5 years of development! And if you add an OU, you need to register it (you guessed it - also manually!). Say you want to create a dozen of VPC endpoints - they won't have names because there is no API, you need to name them manually. And so on and so forth. Why? because you are living in someone else's place, so you you are totally dependent on them.
I am lost in trying to start off a sensible / official / approved AWS setup but I can use some years old bash and salt s riots to setup my raspberry pis sitting there in front of me.
It's not just me (maybe mostly me) but there is a new layer of complexity - I can learn and understand the FOSS but trying to learn AWS means piercing the layers of marketing that are creeping in - one of the huge advantages of a FOSS readme is it comes from the head of the person who designed the system i want to use. not a product manager who probably misses the technical point anyway
> anybody who has maintained a large repository of CloudFormation code will tell you its not a panacea.
CloudFormation is one of the worst IaCs out there, so it's not really a good example.
One really nice model is managed Kubernetes with IaC/GitOps via tools like ArgoCD or Flux CD. This eliminates the need for things like CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, OS version and patch management, etc. - most of the stuff that those tools are used to manage is replaced by the cloud provider's management of the cluster nodes. This lets you focus on the application layer, which is where the business value is. IaC in this context is pretty seamless. It also makes you much less dependent on the cloud provider's specific APIs - Kubernetes becomes your interface to all that.
I agree it's a reasonable solution as far as workloads are concerned, but at the same time you still need the infra around it. Most of the time you need to store data outside of Kubernetes, so you'll need to deal with things like S3, RDS, DynamoDB. You will probably want ECR etc. All these things need policies and configuration. And, depending on the size or your org, also security/governance/compliance services, and you end up with a complex setup even if your main focus is k8s.
You have a lot of business travel wherein your employees currently stay in hotels whenever they visit major cities? Don't use hotels, they are expensive! Build and operate your own company owned full-service apartments in those cities.
For most companies their software is their business. Take away the software and the company stops functioning.
Their employees aren’t just visiting their software every few weeks or so. They’re using it every day from morning to evening.
There is no travel involved. Your software is your home.
So really a better analogy would be renting vs buying your home. The rental comes with the furniture and for several things that might go wrong the landlord will come and fix it, whereas when you own the house, you have to buy the furniture and arrange it, and if anything goes wrong you are responsible for fixing it.
Of course, the analogy breaks down in many ways because when you’re on Prem you are buying established software with a support license so if something does fail the support license should provide as much, if not more service than you would get on AWS.
The entire analogy is completely pointless because it adds a layer of indirection for no reason other than for some reason tech people absolutely love making analogies to physical objects.
While browsing around my synology, I found their own note taking app - synology notes. Export from evernote and import to notes took about five minutes and I've been using it ever since.
It looks and works almost the same so I didn't even notice much of a change.
It is worth giving it a try, why not. I'm a Firefox user and I gave it a try for ~3 months out of boredom (and perception of higher speed). The novelty wore off and I went back to FF, but now I know why I like it more.
With Brave I never really bought into the advertising model so all those little donation buttons and crypto suggestions started to bother me.
You're pushing into a direction you might not like. Should we start executing people that aren't positively contributing to the society (disabled, sick..)?
I think the decision between life and death shouldn't be made based on cost.
Yeah, I don't think that's the case. If you look at justice systems all over the world, you will see that countries with harshest punishments usually don't enjoy a low crime rate. I'd say it's quite the opposite.
We use vibrating alarm clocks. If you're only hard of hearing, a regular alarm clock can still work as well. My favorite alarm clock had a vibrator and sound, but it also had a socket for my lamp to plug into, so it would wake me up in all 3 ways. Fantastic for waking up at 6AM when I just wanted to either kill myself or go back to sleep. (Sadly, when I was at NTID, the socket for the vibrator to plug in broke.)
