Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

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

#41

Post by YawningAngel »

closeparen wrote: post #33
anothergoogler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business continuity: Providing a good SLA isn't in the AWS business model, which allows for widespread, lengthy outages. They have a so-so SLA and if they miss you get AWS credits, big whoop. They make their money on people who are insensitive to high cost, middling performance and reliability. Not sure about the other providers. At a certain point it's cheaper and easier to do it yourself than to support a hybrid cl…

Sure, but is there some structural reason AWS can’t have an offering tailored to requirements like yours, or have they simply not bothered to start one yet?

It's expensive to do and most customers don't care, or even know.

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

#42

Post by vidarh »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #13
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.

Bandwidth on S3 costs something like 50x what I'm usually paying for bandwidth (Hetzner etc.) or 5x what you'll get from smaller cloud providers.

You can be successful on AWS, but you're leaving money on the table, and for relatively commodity services it's just a question of time before a competitor realise they can do the same with much better margins and lower prices elsewhere.

If your hosting is a small portion of your costs, that might not matter, so I have certainly run services on AWS too, and do in my current job as well, but it's a very expensive convenience. I've yet to come across any systems I know the internals off that couldn't cut hosting costs by moving off public cloud services.

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

#43

Post by CyanLite2 »

Cloud migration specialist here. Biggest thing I see is the culture. Large shops will be 80% infrastructure and 20% developers. Infrastructure folks almost always will be fired after a successful cloud migration. Middle Managers want to keep a large staff and budget to justify themselves. CIOs often come up through the infrastructure career path and don’t trust firewalls if they aren’t made by Cisco or SANs that they can’t touch. (“So you’re telling me that their homemade switches are better than Cisco?”) I even had a CIO of a Fortune 1000 ask me what brand of fiber optic cables are in use in AWS. Overall it’s mostly shops putting their head in the sand hoping they can go another 2-3 Years in their cushy “Director of Infrastructure” jobs.

Most of my success comes not from selling to IT but the CFO or Board. Once they realize they can eliminate a dozen or so SAN Storage or networking engineers then the cloud doesn’t seem so expensive after all.

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

#44

Post by chx »

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…

It's not just bandwidth -- if you are not utilizing the various services of a cloud provider just use it as a glorified VPS (which many do) then it's really hard to beat dedicated providers like those you mentioned and then Incero or Dedispec -- Incero has an E3-1230, 16GB RAM, 2x 1TB HDD 2x 120GB SSD, 30TB transfer for $40, Dedispec has a E3-1230v2, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD, 100TB transfer for $55. A real lot of websites would run just fine with servers like these. The major selling point of clouds of easy scaling often turns out not to be necessary with machines at these price points -- one machine is just enough.

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

#45

Post by toomuchtodo »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #43

Cloud migration specialist here. Biggest thing I see is the culture. Large shops will be 80% infrastructure and 20% developers. Infrastructure folks almost always will be fired after a successful cloud migration. Middle Managers want to keep a large staff and budget to justify themselves. CIOs often come up through the infrastructure career path and don’t trust firewalls if they aren’t made by Cisco or SANs that they…

Conversely, I’ve seen executives fired out the door when the public cloud costs were much higher than on prem costs, and the savings didn’t materialize (either the execs had drank the cloud koolaid, or the business changed direction).

Edit: There is no silver bullet. Model your needs, make sure your model is accurate. You might still be wrong if your model doesn’t match reality due to unanticipated deviations.

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

#47

Post by vidarh »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #10

Do you Uber to work everyday? I don't. I use it occasionally but most of the time I drive my car to work. Cloud is best for handling spike workloads, not day to day.

This is the key. And worth pointing out that the moment you're set up to use cloud services for spikes, the cost of using dedicated services for your base load drops:

You can afford to let the servers handling your base load get much closer to capacity when you know you can scale up near instantly instead of having to provision new servers.

This is the biggest reason for me to run services that are prepared to run on public clouds, though it's very rare I've ever needed to make use of it - the kind of spikes that are severe enough and long lasting enough to be worth provisioning cloud instances for tends to be very rare for most people.

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

#48

Post by repsilat »

nvivo wrote: post #26
ChicagoDave wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have the numbers here, but I'm pretty sure the same idea applies for serverless. If you have a predictable load, you can always find a much cheaper alternative once you pass a certain threshold. The cloud is never about cost, it's about flexibility.

Predictable or flat/consistent? If my load is negligible in US weekends and outside of business hours, that's a factor of 2 or 3 you can theoretically save over baseline=peak with some "cloud on demand" service.

It's not an order of magnitude, but it's something. Probably not worth the effort, for most, though, and I have no idea if "dedicated box" services can approximate something similar.

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

#49

Post by salmo »

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?

Some of these they have "solved", but their solutions have not been tested or audited yet, or at least not in a way that's visible. There are a few big financial players going all-in now, and I think everyone else is watching and waiting and letting them take the risk. A lot of these regulations were written assuming on-premise control and there's a lot of fuzzy area and issues with interpretation. Sometimes there's a lot more than technology in play.

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

#50

Post by vidarh »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #14

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…

I see more FUD the other way, about high devops costs etc. As someone who has spent years consulting both on on prem systems, dedicated hosting and AWS, I typically ended up billing more ops time to the AWS clients - they still have 90% of the same ops needs and then in addition they need to manage the AWS specific bits.

In terms of actual hosting costs, I've more than once been prepared to offer clients to move them off AWS and guarantee my fee will simply be a percentage of the savings - I've seen clients cut hosting cost between 50% and 90% on moving from AWS to dedicated hosting, and cut their devops costs at the same time.

For someone doing admin/devops who wants to maximize billable hours, recommending AWS would be better than recommending on-prem - it's all remote, no annoying travel etc., and you're likely to make more money, and at the same time you ironically gets less pressure from managers who have been told cloud will cut their costs.

> Doing a lift and shift can be cost-effective, but decomposing these applications and rebuilding them in serverless would probably provide significant savings.

Even if you rebuild them as "serverless" you'd probably end up saving far more by deploying said "serverless" apps on dedicated hosting providers for the base load.

Post reply on HN