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Oh boy I got triggered, wall of text incoming.

Competent ops being expensive wasn't part of the discussion, Good people are expensive period. In the long term, competent people provide better value. Competent ops would figure out to provide the same reliability guarantees at a lower price. Security likewise, nothing to do with it. That's just using circular logic to say using commodity hardware = bad security (wtf!?).

Sofware and by extension infrastructure gets expensive because of incompetent dev/ops, who are too incompetent to implement efficient systems and use a 'hardware is cheap, throw hardware at the problem' mentality in ops. This especially shows today with the fact that we have have mobile phones with 1000x the processing power of desktops 20 years ago that are sluggish when running a simple TODO app. LET THAT SINK IN. Those same 20 year old computers running the first pentiums were running Quake 1(!).

Back to ops, Google before they were "Google" were using custom built commodity hardware using a 'nodes die, deal with it' approach to software development. Obviously this pattern is a win with the popularity of k8s today / ephemeral nodes but it requires a more complicated development process.

This extends to incompetent ops as well. Who are outsourcing all their work to the cloud, paying a crazy premium for it, calling it a day, whereas the competent guys are able to do it properly.

Closer to the subject, Backblaze engineered a from scratch design to create a highly reliable/available/secure system based on non enterprise class storage that lets the offer storage at a fraction of existing solutions.




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