Another upbeat, feel-good America article? What is this, optimists day?

I don't like it. Everything is going into the shiatter and we all know it! Journalists, stop writing positive articles about the U.S. economy!

This is absolutely the case. A friend of mine runs a business intelligence firm. His capital outlay was virtually nothing with Amazon EC2. He acquires infrastructure as customers come, and divests himself of it when they leave. Risk is eliminated, as is the need for capital. He opened his business with a personal credit card, rather than a half million dollar loan for computer equipment.

It was impossible to do this ten years ago.

Babwa Wawa: This is absolutely the case. A friend of mine runs a business intelligence firm. His capital outlay was virtually nothing with Amazon EC2. He acquires infrastructure as customers come, and divests himself of it when they leave. Risk is eliminated, as is the need for capital. He opened his business with a personal credit card, rather than a half million dollar loan for computer equipment.

It was impossible to do this ten years ago.

yeah it blow my mind how you can spin up servers with almost zero up-front investment other than putting a couple hundred dollars on your credit card. the ability to scale IT directly with demand has made starting up a company so much less capital intensive, and it will only get cheaper as XaaS continues to develop.

Now if I can only figure out what the next "fart" app will be.

thomps: Babwa Wawa: This is absolutely the case. A friend of mine runs a business intelligence firm. His capital outlay was virtually nothing with Amazon EC2. He acquires infrastructure as customers come, and divests himself of it when they leave. Risk is eliminated, as is the need for capital. He opened his business with a personal credit card, rather than a half million dollar loan for computer equipment.

It was impossible to do this ten years ago.

yeah it blow my mind how you can spin up servers with almost zero up-front investment other than putting a couple hundred dollars on your credit card. the ability to scale IT directly with demand has made starting up a company so much less capital intensive, and it will only get cheaper as XaaS continues to develop.

I'm on both sides of this. I'm a small IT support shop, that deals with these sorts of tradeoffs all the time (local vs hosted infrastructure is the crux of the matter). However, it's not like you aren't paying for the care and feeding of that infrastructure just because it's remote. Pretending that IT support concerns magically disappear because of remote hosted computing is pretty naive, and is a lesson that some guys learn the hard way.

As the owner of that small business whose primary capital is intellectual, I can definitely speak to the overhead side, though. I have no office to speak of, no servers critical to the company's running, and all of my 'employees' are independent businesses in their own right, contracted to me to support my client base. They generally get paid at the same speed I collect at, meaning that I rarely have any capital at-risk, even carrying costs. When things went south in 2008/2009, my business changed too- but because of this flexibility, everything kept on ticking until our clients recovered.

That's the real flexibility- near zero administrative overhead, and a workforce that is by it's nature flexible. The other upside is that because everyone is essentially a self-incorporated business unit, everyone can take advantage of write-offs of vehicles, laptops, etc, provided that they're smart enough and organized enough to do so.

I encourage everyone to be self-employed, where possible. It puts all of the incentives in the right place.

unyon: I encourage everyone to be self-employed, where possible. It puts all of the incentives in the right place.

self-employment has been a long-term goal of mine for a while, and the increasing ability to match cash-flows has really helped me take strides in that direction.

unyon: IT support concerns magically disappear because of remote hosted computing is pretty naive, and is a lesson that some guys learn the hard way.

True dat. The kind of support you need changes. And you give up some control, some security, and the ability to dictate SLAs.

But if the data and processing you're doing supports the model, cloud computing is just amazing stuff.

Our ditzy receptionist with huge fake tits just set up a website that somehow ties to Etsy to sell stuff from her native South-American country.

God Bless America.

unyon: Pretending that IT support concerns magically disappear because of remote hosted computing is pretty naive, and is a lesson that some guys learn the hard way.

Not sure what you mean. I don't think anyone says they dissappear completely, its just that IT support is much, much less important. Back when I started my business- all internet based- we had a bunch of "single points of failure" because we could only invest so much in redundancy.

For example, we had one database server for our 4 redundant web and application servers. We technically had a backup DB server on a local machine behind a cable modem- but that's not really elegant.

And all the main servers were dedicated. So they were physical machines that could have hardware fail. (Fan blows out, server is down.)

Now with cloud hosing (we use Rackspace Cloud)... the hardware won't fail because its not really our hardware, all virtual machines. And I can store a base image of an entire server. With this I can:

1. Have 4 redundant servers running with almost no additional cost (we really only pay for bandwidth, so 4 servers each taking 1/4 the load costs almost the same.)

2. If one virtual machine goes down, is hacked, whatever, I can kill it and bring up a brand new one- completely ready to go- in 10 minutes. Heck, I can do this on my Android from a bar if need be.

3. As demand increases (or main product is seasonal- the sheer majority of traffic happens November-February) I can bring up 10, 100, heck- 1000 servers in minutes by clicking 3 buttons. Then kill them when demand goes down.

We basically only need our mediocre IT expertese, and near zero IT support on hardware. All that matters is the software we write.

bravian: Babwa Wawa: It was impossible to do this ten years ago.

I was doing it ten years ago. Now - twenty? Another story.

/the story of entrepreneurs doing things on the cheap to build a business isn't a new one - the tools are just getting better

You may have been outsourcing, but you weren't doing anything like what EC2 can do (not that Amazon's the only game in town nowadays).

This is absolutely true. I started my own company a little over a year ago (from home) and am now making more than $200K/yr - net. This is a big deal for me since I hadn't made more than $60K/yr before. I never could have done it without technology (internet, video conferencing, etc.) and feel extremely grateful that I live in a time when I.T has afforded me this opportunity. Frankly, I can't wait to hire my first employee and call myself a "job creator" - seriously.

/Going to work in your bathrobe is awesome. Making enough so that my wife doesn't have to work - even awesomerererer.

jjorsett: 8 inches: This is absolutely true. I started my own company a little over a year ago (from home) and am now making more than $200K/yr - net. This is a big deal for me since I hadn't made more than $60K/yr before. I never could have done it without technology (internet, video conferencing, etc.) and feel extremely grateful that I live in a time when I.T has afforded me this opportunity. Frankly, I can't wait to hire my first employee and call myself a "job creator" - seriously.

/Going to work in your bathrobe is awesome. Making enough so that my wife doesn't have to work - even awesomerererer.

What sort of work are you doing?

Financial Services.

downstairs: unyon: Pretending that IT support concerns magically disappear because of remote hosted computing is pretty naive, and is a lesson that some guys learn the hard way.

Not sure what you mean. I don't think anyone says they dissappear completely, its just that IT support is much, much less important. Back when I started my business- all internet based- we had a bunch of "single points of failure" because we could only invest so much in redundancy.

For example, we had one database server for our 4 redundant web and application servers. We technically had a backup DB server on a local machine behind a cable modem- but that's not really elegant.

And all the main servers were dedicated. So they were physical machines that could have hardware fail. (Fan blows out, server is down.)

Now with cloud hosing (we use Rackspace Cloud)... the hardware won't fail because its not really our hardware, all virtual machines. And I can store a base image of an entire server. With this I can:

1. Have 4 redundant servers running with almost no additional cost (we really only pay for bandwidth, so 4 servers each taking 1/4 the load costs almost the same.)

2. If one virtual machine goes down, is hacked, whatever, I can kill it and bring up a brand new one- completely ready to go- in 10 minutes. Heck, I can do this on my Android from a bar if need be.

3. As demand increases (or main product is seasonal- the sheer majority of traffic happens November-February) I can bring up 10, 100, heck- 1000 servers in minutes by clicking 3 buttons. Then kill them when demand goes down.

We basically only need our mediocre IT expertese, and near zero IT support on hardware. All that matters is the software we write.

I get what you're saying, and if you can't afford the proper redundancy levels for the business criticality of the application, that's a real problem. But whether you buy or 'lease' that infrastructure, you're paying for it. That SQL server at Rackspace, or its VM equivalent, is costing you $1200 a month, but only because you've offloaded the care and feeding aspect to the Rackspace NOC. I get your design principles, though. A lot of networks I support look very similar to what you've discribed.

Mawson of the Antarctic: Semi-serious question (only because it's extreme and I'm speaking to a bunch of IT people it seems)

If you don't like spending the majority of your time with computers, and uninterested in programming or development, are you screwed forever in this increasing digital world?

/graphic designer, 32
//loves print and objects, hates web

Not necessarily, but you better know the tools and how to use them, even if it's not day-to-day. It's a pretty reasonable expectation of a graphic designer. You can design with poop on bread on a bathroom wall, but at the end of the day it's going to need to be digitized.

unyon: That SQL server at Rackspace, or its VM equivalent, is costing you $1200 a month

I get your points, but RackSpace is nowhere near $1200/month per server. Its dirt cheap, and you really are just paying for any public bandwidth you use. So it could be $1200/month if you were getting millions of large downloads.

I don't work for them or anything- I just absolutely love their cloud service. Total game changer for our business.

Mawson of the Antarctic: Semi-serious question (only because it's extreme and I'm speaking to a bunch of IT people it seems)

If you don't like spending the majority of your time with computers, and uninterested in programming or development, are you screwed forever in this increasing digital world?

/graphic designer, 32
//loves print and objects, hates web

Not screwed at all. It sounds to me like you have what it takes to be an artist, a proud member of one of America's mostly highly paid and highly respected professions.

Shazam999: How much are you paying for this? When I price out stuff at Amazon, it costs a fortune, about as much as it would cost me to just buy servers, software and stuff it into a rack

Amazon sucks, and is stupid expensive. RackSpace Cloud is the way to go. (Again, I have no skin in the game here- just love them.)

RackSpace's base cost for a server is by the hour. Like 16 cents/hour for a smaller server (2 GIG RAM, large dirve). It goes up from there for more RAM/disk space. But we're at like $120/month.

Then the bandwidth is 15 cents or so a GB. But internal network transfers are free (so if you set up a web server and a SQL Server, and the webserver is the only thing talking to SQL, you wouldn't be charged for that. You'd just be charged for the web traffic to the public.)

And since you're charged by the hour, if you needed to test a new server, or quickly mirror tons of servers because traffic picked up... you're exposure is pennies/hour.

All in all- highly recommended.

Mawson of the Antarctic: Fair enough, I'm a pretty sharp 'shopper and digital artist, and am currently teaching layout, digital illustration, and design at the college level full time, but making those things for motion or web leave me cold for some reason. In fact, I worry that people see how "young" I am with little interest in web design and say "WTF is his problem? Aren't all young people into Internet?"

I say stay where you're at. Web design (and even programming) has hit rock bottom in terms of being able to make a living. Whereas 10 years ago you could charge $150/hour or $3-5k for a small business website... now small businesses can get that for next to nothing.

You should only be interested in web design and programming if you have an idea for a unique product/site and you want to design it yourself.

downstairs: unyon: That SQL server at Rackspace, or its VM equivalent, is costing you $1200 a month

I get your points, but RackSpace is nowhere near $1200/month per server. Its dirt cheap, and you really are just paying for any public bandwidth you use. So it could be $1200/month if you were getting millions of large downloads.

I don't work for them or anything- I just absolutely love their cloud service. Total game changer for our business.

If you have them host a 2x 4 way SQL box, ~50G ram, ~1TB usable fast disk, then I can tell you that it is *precisely* $1200/mo, just completed a contract with them a few weeks back on behalf of a client. If they didn't already have a bunch of RS infrastructure to shoehorn this into, then I definitely would have liked to have gone the VM route.

Mawson of the Antarctic: unyon:

of the Antarctic: Semi-serious question (only because it's extreme and I'm speaking to a bunch of IT people it seems)

If you don't like spending the majority of your time with computers, and uninterested in programming or development, are you screwed forever in this increasing digital world?

/graphic designer, 32
//loves print and objects, hates web

Not necessarily, but you better know the tools and how to use them, even if it's not day-to-day. It's a pretty reasonable expectation of a graphic designer. You can design with poop on bread on a bathroom wall, but at the end of the day it's going to need to be digitized.

Fair enough, I'm a pretty sharp 'shopper and digital artist, and am currently teaching layout, digital illustration, and design at the college level full time, but making those things for motion or web leave me cold for some reason. In fact, I worry that people see how "young" I am with little interest in web design and say "WTF is his problem? Aren't all young people into Internet?"

I worry in a decade or so, if there's even a market around, that everything that is paying is going to involve glass panels and books are now relegated to how we view letterpress objects, art products for a specialty audience.

You're probably right. And I have to say, when I saw you were just 32, I did ask myself WTF your problem was, as it were.

But design is a very analog thing, perhaps one of the most analog of things, since at some level it needs to interact with meatspace.

unyon: If you have them host a 2x 4 way SQL box, ~50G ram, ~1TB usable fast disk, then I can tell you that it is *precisely* $1200/mo, just completed a contract with them a few weeks back on behalf of a client. If they didn't already have a bunch of RS infrastructure to shoehorn this into, then I definitely would have liked to have gone the VM route

What do you mean the VM route? Isn't RackSpace a VM?

Also, yeah, you have a pretty big setup there. We're more of the "lots of redundant smaller-end servers."

(our) Web servers don't need much memory and disk space when you can round-robin tons of them.

Shazam999: Hmm. Thing is I need 8GB of RAM, and the SQL Server needs about 32GB. That's what makes so farking expensive at Amazon

Yeah, that's a fairly intense setup. So RackSpace will be more expensive than my account.

However, the whole point is that with cloud machines... you should be able to match what you're charged with what your income is easily. (Plus a profit, of course.)

Take our setup... we're at $100/month because the project hasn't gone live. So we're making $0. But when the project is bringing in the projected $30,000/month or whatever a month... we should be able to turn on new servers and deal with more bandwidth at a cost that doesn't go above income.

Then when the heavy season is over in May, when we'll be maybe making $1000/month during the dead months, we can turn off all but a few servers.

Next Novmeber hits, repeat.

downstairs: unyon: If you have them host a 2x 4 way SQL box, ~50G ram, ~1TB usable fast disk, then I can tell you that it is *precisely* $1200/mo, just completed a contract with them a few weeks back on behalf of a client. If they didn't already have a bunch of RS infrastructure to shoehorn this into, then I definitely would have liked to have gone the VM route

What do you mean the VM route? Isn't RackSpace a VM?

Also, yeah, you have a pretty big setup there. We're more of the "lots of redundant smaller-end servers."

(our) Web servers don't need much memory and disk space when you can round-robin tons of them.

Rackspace does hosting of all sorts, including VMs of the sort you're talking about. My client develops software, and we essentially maintain a private cloud inside of our hosted network at Rackspace, 6 hosts and SAN doing a variety of roles related to SaaS, including citrix sessions, application, and DB. It's a pretty intensive suite of apps (think: risk assessment modelling on thousands of miles of pipeline, taking into account populations, geography, aquifers, maintenance schedules etc), so some of the iron is a little larger, especially on the DB side.

wombatsrus: pudding7: Our ditzy receptionist with huge fake tits just set up a website that somehow ties to Etsy to sell stuff from her native South-American country.

God Bless America.

[www.shotpix.com image 369x640]

Approves.

I don't think those are fake.

Bless her heart.