So you wanna go on prem (2016)
6 comments
·March 16, 2025alexpotato
hackerthemonkey
Interesting. I didn’t know they did. Though can’t help but thinking that this is all going be a lot less valuable if your ovservability platform is on those mainstream cloud providers.
supriyo-biswas
Is it still very common to use VMs for this, as opposed to hosting your application in Kubernetes since it's stateless anyway?
dehrmann
Not answering the question, but k8s doesn't entirely solve this because of the DB. If you're a SaaS provider that reached this scale, there's a good chance your architecture isn't just stuffing everything in one Postgres instance, so shipping a VM with Mongo, Postgres, Zookeeper, and Cassandra sorta makes sense.
If you'd had ample foresight, it might have been nice to have an architecture where the DB is truly abstracted away. Or not. Maintaining two backend implementations is a pain and error-prone.
null
dark__paladin
Hugo is cool
I always think about the PagerDuty example:
They have their own datacenters, telco infra etc b/c if Amazon, Azure or GCP goes down they want to be able to say:
"They all went down but PagerDuty alerts still went out to our clients".
In other words, there are examples where managing your own infra IN ADDITION to using cloud services is adding extra tolerance for giant failures in the tech suppliers.