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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

The question I've often heard asked when deciding on build vs buy (which can apply to cloud vs. bare metal) is:

Are we in the business of building, maintaining and operating <thing to build> or do we want to buy that as a service instead and focus on our actual core business?

There's more to the cost of building and operating than just the hard costs.

Retaining good modern IT talent is getting harder and harder - and I'm not even talking about salaries.. You need a whole department including strong leaders who can hire, train, and lead the right people, etc..

This is something most companies wouldn't even know where to start with.

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I don't think you need a whole department to rack a few minis and run some buildkite agents on them.

You need one good motivated sysadmin.

But if you can motivate that same sysadmin to spend his skills on something more directly benefiting your company, then you should still buy it in.

Now your business depends on that one person, congratulations. Hope they don’t realize that their skills are better suited to working at AWS/Azure etc. for 2x the money. Which they are.

It's not core stuff. If the one sysadmin leaves, you buy in a solution.

I mean, fair enough I guess. Why play the OpEx vs CapEx game when you can just pay both.

I think you need one motivated developer who likes to tinker with hardware for a few hours a month.

Given how popular homelabs are, I don't think this would be too hard to find.

I don’t want to build a business around a dev who likes to “tinker with hardware”.

Why the scare quotes? It's a skill like any other. Startups are built by folks who wear many hats.

It depends on how important it is to you.

You can throw a bunch of boxes in a closet and it'll work. A surprisingly large amount of the early Internet was "a spare box under my desk."

The problems start when they become part of your critical path and you're on vacation and nobody knows WTF is happening.

I mean, it's a risk. If you're OK with that risk then go for it.

It's really about the politics of your office.

If everyone is OK with the idea that the box is in some closet somewhere that's fine. I've been part of a bunch of startups where we were running infrastructure on spare hardware. Sure it's not HA, but we didn't need it...or it was at least HA enough for what we needed.

Yeah, to be clear I wouldn't advocate this route for your core product. But running CI workers? Sure. Especially macs, which have onerous usage restrictions in the cloud that negate most of the elasticity benefits you might otherwise see.

Sure, like any other high-level fictional situation you can surely come up with many valid fictional counter-points of your own, but cloud hosting is popular for a reason.

And I think in most cases companies want to focus their employees and efforts on their core business, and if that doesn't include setting up and maintaining hardware in the long-term, then you don't build, you buy.

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