Use One Big Server (2022)

Regardless of the cost and capacity analysis, it's just hard to fight the industry trends. The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real. I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front). And above all, if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.

To be clear - this isn't an endorsement on my part, just observations of why cloud-only deployment seems common. I guess we shouldn't neglect the pressure towards resume-oriented development either, as it undoubtedly plays a part in infra folks' careers. It probably makes you sound obsolete to be someone who works in a physical data center.

I for one really miss being able to go see the servers that my code runs on. I thought data centers were really interesting places. But I don't see a lot of effort to decide things based on pure dollar cost analysis at this point. There's a lot of other industry forces besides the microeconomics that predetermine people's hosting choices.

For anything up to about 128GB RAM you can still easily avoid capex by just renting servers. Above that it gets a bit trickier

> and server hardware is expensive up front

You don't need to buy server hardware(!), the article specifically mentions renting from eg Hetzner.

> The benefits of "just don't think about hardware" are real

Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

Renting (hosted) servers above 128GB RAM is still pretty easy, but I agree pricing levels out. 128GB RAM server ~$200/Month, 384 GB ~$580, 1024 GB ~$940/Month

> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues.

I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

It's not like it's a huge capex for that level of server anyway. Probably less than the cost of one employee's laptop.

the benefits of don't write a distributed system unless you really have to are also very real

> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front).

Yes, there is.

Honestly, it looks to me that this school of thought is mostly adopted by people that can't do arithmetic or use a calculator. But it does absolutely exist.

That said, no, servers are not nearly expensive enough to move the needle on a company nowadays. The room that often goes around them is, and that's why way more people rent the room than the servers in it.

If you rent dedicated servers, then you're not worrying about any of the capex or maintenance stuff.

Connectivity is a problem, not the room.

I ran the IT side of a media company once, and it all worked on a half-empty rack of hardware in a small closet... except for the servers that needed bandwidth. These were colocated. Until we realized that the hoster did not have enough bandwidth, at which point we migrated to two bare metal servers at Hetzner.

It's connectivity, reliable power, reliable cooling, and security.

The actual space isn't a big deal, but the entire environment has large fixed costs.

> I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.

You don't deal with that either if you rent a dedicated server from a hosting provider. They handle the datacenter and maintenance for you for a flat monthly fee.

They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times. For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy.

> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs

Yep, and it's mostly caused by the VC funding model - if your investors are demanding hockey-stick growth, there is no way in hell a startup can justify (or pay for) the resulting Capex.

Whereas a nice, stable business with near-linear growth can afford to price in regular small Capex investments.

> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.

The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread has even already had the argument "if the cloud provider goes down, it's not your fault" as a cloud benefit. Either cloud is strong and stable and can't break, or cloud breaks often enough that people will just excuse you for it.

I think you hit the nail on the head. What enterprise are paying for is abstraction of responsibility. Suits would never criticise going with Microsoft or Amazon.

Exactly, same for microservices I feel. Why have enterprise org problems if you don't have an enterprise org.

There's a reason semiconductor manufacturing is so highly automated, and it's not labor cost. Humans err. Computers only err when told. But they'll repeat a task reliably without random mistakes if told what to do by a competent (manufacturing process) engineering organization. Yes it takes more than one engineer.

In abstract yeah.

In practice, all that except connectivity is relatively easy to have on-site.

Connectivity is highly dependent on the business location, local providers, their business plans and their willingness to go out of their way to serve the clients.

And I am not talking only about bandwidth, but also reserve lines and latency.

Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.

> if an AWS region goes down, it doesn't seem like your org's fault, but if your bespoke private hosting arrangement goes down, then that kinda does seem like your org's fault.

Never underestimate the price people are willing to pay to evade responsibility. I estimate this is a multi-billion dollar market.