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Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

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Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#11

Post by aantix »

joefourier wrote: post #7

Dedicated hosting is much better bang for your buck, especially for bandwidth. If you do something like video streaming and have relatively predictable loads, I've found that you have to pay at least an order of magnitude more with public cloud compared to dedicated servers on OVH or Datapacket. Maxing out a 2gbps server on Datapacket would cost you just $320/month for 648 TB of outgoing bandwidth monthly, versus at…

If you look at something like WholesaleInternet, their offerings are even cheaper. (96gb of ram with a 1tb ssd drive for $100).

If daily backups are enough it can’t be beat.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#12

Post by swebs »

Not a company, but I've found Nextcloud to be a better alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc for personal use. I don't think Google even got around to putting out a Linux client. The straw that broke the camel's back with Dropbox was when I accidentally unzipped the MNIST dataset in a watched folder and the Dropbox sync client completely shit the bed. I couldn't even fix it through the web interface since their site is such a mess.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#13

Post by ChicagoDave »

joefourier wrote: post #7

Dedicated hosting is much better bang for your buck, especially for bandwidth. If you do something like video streaming and have relatively predictable loads, I've found that you have to pay at least an order of magnitude more with public cloud compared to dedicated servers on OVH or Datapacket. Maxing out a 2gbps server on Datapacket would cost you just $320/month for 648 TB of outgoing bandwidth monthly, versus at…

Even if you're running everything else serverless and have no compute time at all?

I know a VOD training service runs serverless with videos on S3 and they're very successful.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#14

Post by ChicagoDave »

I suspect there's still a lot of FUD regarding public cloud as well as on-prem admins and engineers actively pushing back for fear of losing their jobs. (I've seen this in action)

There certainly are legitimate reasons not to move to public cloud, but it shouldn't be an emotional one.

Measure cost (including manpower), SLA's, performance, governance, and compliance. After that it should be simple to stay on-prem, go hybrid, or move full force into public cloud.

I think a more complex problem is that many companies have legacy web applications that probably should be rebuilt cloud-native/serverless. Doing a lift and shift can be cost-effective, but decomposing these applications and rebuilding them in serverless would probably provide significant savings.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#15

Post by virmundi »

Cost. Linode is cheaper than AWS if you are willing to do your own ops. Lack of vendor lock in. Yes, AWS provides load balancing. When you look at their offerings they hook you by offering thing their way. You can use AWS messaging or run Rabbit. Many people start to adopt AWS since they are deployed there rather than thinking about doing things on their own.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#18

Post by glup »

Academic lab in computational cognitive science / computational linguistics: we haven’t transitioned fully because of storage costs. ~$10 tb/month even for infrequent s3 storage is way too much when we have lots of 10+ tb datasets. Otherwise it’s great to be able to scale compute (scale the number of machines/ cores / GPUs as necessary) and to maintain different images for different projects (NVIDIA driver, cudnn, TensorFlow version). Open to solutions for the storage problem!

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?

#20

Post by pvg »

closeparen wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Regulatory compliance, risk management, security controls, business continuity/SLAs, and cost. Financial services industry.

Those seem like problems the public cloud providers would be highly motivated to solve. Why haven’t they?

They are and they have, but they certainly haven't solved all of them for everybody and probably never will. But if you look at their offerings, there's a bunch of stuff there aimed at various specialized uses.
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