Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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I'm honestly sick of this conversation.

Have we as an industry forgot how to make systems? that's pretty telling if so.

Why are people so utterly afraid of running their own systems.

If a SaaS platform goes down it's followed by "#hugops; running large systems is hard!", when someone says "Well, if it's hard, why not break it into smaller pieces and run it myself" it's met directly with "Do you think you can do better!?!".

Honestly, probably, maybe not. Why does it matter?

Those two things cannot be true simultaneously. You cannot say "running big systems is hard" and "they can run a big system better than you can run a small system".

I'm not going to fall into the trap of arguing points like the fact that if you own the data you can have your own D/R & backup strategies and the fact you can run maintenance's on your own time (hell: you can run maintenance's to migrate things around, which is more than github can do, which is not an indictment of them, just the nature of being a hosted service).

Honestly, I miss sysadmins. People who were not afraid of servers, even if they said "no" sometimes. Because, you know, being afraid of servers and hosting things is just pathetic.

From an organisational perspective, outsourcing infrastructure is the safest and cost effective way to meet Regulatory & Compliance requirements.

When you run your own servers, not only do you need to maintain them, you are also responsible for their certification and getting them audited.

As a manager in a medium sized company, I think it is essential to identify what "needs building" and what could be bought to ensure the needs of stakeholders are met in a timely manner.

Heh, time was "compliance" was the reason to host your own services. It is a lot easier to be compliant with many things if you're hosting your own services.

Back when I was working in eCommerce (PCI-DSS Tier 1, Cardholder data on premises) it was basically impossible to use hosted services.

As then, it is now: "Compliance" is just enough nebulous of a word to prevent critical thinking.

I wouldn't call compliance a deterrence to critical thinking. The end goal for any business is to make a profit, if an option exists that complies with industry standards, which also happens to be the most inexpensive one in terms of resourcing, it would be foolish not to take it.

I think you misunderstand the intention. The parent comment is comparing uptime to their own system and declare superiority, and the one you reply to is asking the the opposite — the duration of downtime.

Sure you can build your own infrastructure but don’t pretend that’s superior. Each has its pros and cons.

The last line probably is making fun of their reaction — any person as dogmatic as the parent commenter would comment someone with their own infrastructure going down with that comment.

> Those two things cannot be true simultaneously. You cannot say "running big systems is hard" and "they can run a big system better than you can run a small system".

They can absolutely be true simultaneously. In fact, I can't name a logic system where those two statements comprise a contradiction. They are logically completely unrelated to each other.

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