Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)
Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.
Not that my tiny customers have enough of an IT budget to buy their own servers with the recent price hike on memory and ssds.
Self hosting doesn’t necessarily imply you need your own hardware.
I’m of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
