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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Expensive. I've got all these machines sitting here at home, why not use those?

Hard to beat the uptime of a cloud provider with on prem, if you literally mean “at home” even harder, my Comcast goes out a few times a day. Even in offices you don’t benefit from the economies of scale and redundancies in the power and network systems that cloud providers have.

If you're really trying to serve the outside world, then you want colocation. Cloud providers are way more expensive.

Colocation isn’t a binary on-or-off thing. As a crappy example, Kubernetes pods maintain the invariant that all containers within a pod exist on the same Kubernetes node. So you can avoid the most egregious waste of resources/time that comes from having no collocation.

To your point, when talking to your db or [insert shared infra here], then you may want to thinking about real collocation. But it very much depends on your application’s needs - and remember that cloud providers can offer guarantees about which AZ or region you’re in.

I did mean real colo. If I ever run a serious public-facing website, I have a colo facility picked out, just drive down there with my custom server. Only a few hundred bucks a month to serve data to a CDN, along with whatever services I want to directly expose.

With the magic of VPN, I can put my colo box on the same k8s cluster as the rest of my home stuff, in case I want to live dangerously.

Depends on what you’re doing and at what scale. Especially for smaller orgs it’s really hard to duplicate the level of service the big boys can provide yourself.

I just thought of another reason. Rolling your own cluster forces you to understand what Kubernetes is at a basic level. If you never get that experience, and just roll with cloud services, you aren't really getting that and will tend to get mystified by errors which, you'd have a much better idea of where they're at if you've rolled your own.

Kubernetes is very complicated, but the complexity can be managed if you approach it from the bottom up. Using a cloud service robs you of that ability.

> Kubernetes is very complicated, but the complexity can be managed if you approach it from the bottom up.

s/Kubernetes/Computers

The pitch for Kubernetes is kind of supposed to be “infrastructure as a service,” isn’t it?

No, that's the pitch that Amazon / Google makes. Kubernetes has a much more complicated value proposition that you have to grasp the hiring dynamics of Google to really understand. Google hires really smart people but smarts isn't necessarily skills. So it builds tech to leverage that workforce.

Other companies hire skilled people that aren't necessarily super-smart, because super-smart people can make a lot more money at Google. So other companies use Google / Amazon, they don't really care what underlying techs it uses, so long as they know they'll be able to hire people with the skills.

If you're rolling your own Kubernetes, you're putting your faith in your own smarts, because you're largely on your own. K8s rewards a certain kind of developer, and badly punishes someone thinking running their own k8s is going to be as seamless a process as consuming GCP resources.

Yeah but that’s my point, not everyone needs to actually set it up. The intent is for most to just be users and concern themselves with editing yml files to bring up their services.

It's certainly not for everybody.

> my Comcast goes out a few times a day

I’m really sorry to read this. Given that you’re a Comcast customer it’s probably because you have no other viable high speed choices, but please know that regular outages at home are not normal in other parts of the world.

Lol, this is great to know but I live in downtown Dallas within spitting distance of AT&T world headquarters and literally the only "high speed" provider available to me is Spectrum (I can't explain why AT&T itself can't provide service to someone in walking distance of their own corporate headquarters compound - do they even provide service to themselves?). It goes out on me all the damn time. Heck, I lost service a few weeks back because someone moving into the house next door accidentally gave the wrong address when signing up for a new service account and Spectrum canceled my account, assuming I'd moved out since apparently someone else was moving into my house.

I have never been madder at a service provider of any service. But there is nothing I can do, at least not for six more months until Starlink finally goes online in my area and sends me a dish.

This in what? The heart of the 4th largest metro area in the richest nation on the planet? Maybe this is legitimately not a problem in most of the developed world, but U.S. residential communications infrastructure is amazingly pathetic.

Mine has never gone out, but when I had AT&T DSL it dropped whenever it rained and it was impossible to fix. (the other mystery being why we only had 1.5MBit DSL in the middle of Atlanta.)

What’s he meant to do with this information?

Lament alongside the rest of us Comcast customers paying our "protection money".

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