On-Prem vs Cloud

So over the weekend I saw an interesting article from David the CTO of Basecamp:

Servers can last a long time

We bought sixty-one servers for the launch of Basecamp 3 back in 2015. Dell R430s and R630s, packing thousands of cores and terabytes of RAM. Enough to fill all the app, job, cache, and database duties we needed. The entire outlay for this fleet was about half a million dollars, and it’s only now, almost a decade later, that we’re fina…

Overall it provides a lot of interesting points around hardware. Most people always seem to think that hardware goes bad quickly, but as David points out this really isn't the case. While it is absolutely a CapEx expenditure and should be planned well. High quality hardware can last for a long time and even continue working long into the future.

Ultimately most home labs are built off of old hardware. That old Dell server that a large company has decided is no longer worth it is a great addition to a home lab that gets used until it just completely dies off.

The fact that Basecamp runs their own servers has always been an interesting fact to me. At one point they did move into AWS and ultimately ended up moving back. I remember reading a few articles and while I certainly think there were some missteps on their part (that I do feel they owned up to) I never disagreed with them moving back to on-prem.

Ultimately a random hobby app that someone is running doesn't need to have a whole server rack full of shiny new Dells to run it. Something like fly.io or Heroku are fantastic alternatives for the short term. However as things grow and get more and more complex moving to on-prem may prove to be more cost effective.

Self-Hosting Tools

So I feel like I have seen more and more groups begin trying to self-host tools and bring them back internal as of late. Overall I think there is a lot of value in this truly. There can be a lot of benefits for different data retention requirements, but also just the ability to be in control of your own destiny with what is happening to your data.

With this however there is a lot of trade offs. You have to ensure that you have the time and ability to support this. Make sure that you can handle if it goes down due to something you did. Ultimately by taking on hosting something yourself you have moved the help desk from being a dedicated group to something you have to manage.

OpenAI and the Super Bowl

So if you watched the set of ads interrupted by Football you probably saw the OpenAI ad that was taken out.

So they are trying to put AI next to all the other great inventions. Overall I do believe that AI has a spot as we continue to move forward. I think that people who start to embrace it will be rewarded as they continue to move forward with items quicker. Those who continue to resist it will hit issues.

Overall this is an interesting ad that I think will have some interesting outcomes over the next few months. I think AI has a long way to go, but will be curious as to what ends up coming of it.