It's refreshing to read an article that admits this:
> > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.
I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own. And I especially don't want to have to handle security for large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I make one wrong misstep.
For sure. I ran my own servers for many years. And I still enjoy playing with hardware at home. But a couple years back I shut down my last colocated physical server and I do not miss it. The background stress of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap a motherboard just got to me.
Now all my must-stay-up stuff is built via Terraform in a a public cloud. If there's a hardware failure, it's not my problem. It's such a relief!
> The background stress of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap a motherboard just got to me.
I would miss mine terribly. I couldn't afford colo and hosted on VPS for a while but just didn't cut it. The Cloud is the same. Kind of like having two monitors and downgrading to only one.
In all honesty how often does that requirement come about? Did you not have fail over? 2u is mandatory if you want to fully exercise colo, 4u is ideal.
> If there's a hardware failure, it's not my problem. It's such a relief!
Not for me, if AWS or Azure fall over I'm at the mercy of the engineers to fix which could take hours just due to the processes standing up the cloud. And when those occurrences happen its normally fatal. If the same happens in colo their are only three reasons.
Datacentre,
Server or DDoS
Granted you can either live on the edge and having no spare hardware and hope they don't die. Or have kit ready to ship and rack. My colo servers are eight hours from me and always happy to jump down to my rack to fix whatever.
But I do respect your opinion because I don't know the variables you live in. Colo forever with me.
Is hardware failure a common problem making you can't sleep? I don't get it. I run several desktops and servers at home for decades. Other than my baby pulled keys out of keyboards, I never had any hardware problem at all. And some of computers are more than ten years old.
It's not a particularly common problem. But it's one I always had to plan for. I was, in effect, always on call. If I was going to be out of town, I had to have somebody to cover for me. Somebody who was on the list for physical access and knew what to do enough that I could talk them through it.
It's worth making a distinction between running a server and managing it. People don't want the hassle of managing all the complexity of server infrastructure, but they appreciate the benefits of owning your data, and the hardware it is stored on. It's just that right now the centralized solutions that store data centrally are the only ones available for web-scale applications.
However, that doesn't have to be the case. If you look at consumer appliances and mobile computing, you can build managed environments that are physically distributed but partially or fully managed, with the actual code and data as close to the user as possible.
> > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.
I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own. And I especially don't want to have to handle security for large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I make one wrong misstep.