Security. I host personal sites on Linodes and other external servers. There are no inbound ports open to the world. Everything is accessed via Cloudflare Tunnels and locked down via their Zero Trust services. I find this useful and good, as I don't really want to have to develop my personal services to the point where I'd consider them hardened for public internet access.
Then I log in to Linode or whatever and open a hole up in the firewall. That's easy. But Cloudflare rarely goes down, not really something I worry about.
I feel like every week there's a new doomsday article about coming recession, and yet one has not appeared. Of course, if you print it weekly, people start to believe it and eventually you'll be right for one reason or another.
Couldn't agree more, negative feedback loops tend to reproduce the same outcomes. Maybe I'm pessimistic but seems like most folks aren't reading much at all beyond the headlines and tend to just regurgitate the negative prose on topics they haven't bothered to do basic research on, or repeat whats trending. Things change, economies shift, were all a part of the whole no matter how disconnected we think we are. The social reinforcement of gloom and doom becomes the market of consumption. It's time we put our heads together to produce solutions, focus on what we can do now, be proud of what we did today. Yesterday already happened, tomorrow will be the result of what we do with the time we have.
Something I feel like these conversations seem to miss is that it is not binary; you don't have to host hardware on-prem if you don't want to be in AWS. There are other clouds. There are Sungards of the world were you can pay for racks of managed hardware. There are a lot of options between buying and managing your own hardware and AWS.
Seems like the way to know for sure is to test it. Wouldn't seem like it'd be hard to do that, especially if you have access to Catchpoint or something similar.
Sometimes S3+Cloudfront is a bit faster, sometimes Cloudflare, and sometimes either of them are _really_ slower than the other one as well. I don't see any pattern yet, both in comparing the two but also for which locations are affected and so on.
Which might mean it would be roughly the same on average - but I was hoping someone else could help me go beyond this napkin math by sharing there practical experiences.
I 100% think this is the long term play. Once we figure out how to really have "remote only" companies, the "remote" part won't be "remote in the USA" but "remote in some cheap part of the world". We tried this with outsourcing but it failed because we didn't have the "remote" part down... now we do...
As someone that has dealt with local (Australia) and remote (Slovakia, Mumbai, Phillipines, Thailand) outsourcing, the problem is not the individual workers, or even language, time zones etc.
The problem is more about the company/organization that is doing the outsourcing than the outsourced work itself. You have to have a clear definition of what you are trying to outsource. Is it "just coding"? Is it "some design, but not analysis"? Is it "do everything below a certain level of management" (the worst)?
If you don't know what you want other than "cheap" then you won't get either of the other two qualities of "good" or "quick".
Developers aren't fungible, neither are designers, or analysts or architects. About the only people that are fungible and easily replaceable are project managers (sorry, buzzword compliant "product owners" and "SAFe scaled Agile practitioners").
Yes. Agree. The only thing preventing this going all the way is the friction in timezones and difficulty in co-ordination (i.e. still requires someone local to the remote people to manage their work).
Well for my line of work (app dev/cloud consulting) there is lot of face time, video conferencing with clients, travel to client sites, etc.
But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.
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