Cloud is a utility and therefore needs to be used like a utility. What this means is you need to turn things off when they are not being used. Something like 50% of workloads in public cloud have 'the potential' to be turned off as they are non-production. The public cloud providers provided the easy button to spin things up but turning things off is more tricky. This is why we built www.parkmycloud.com Others have rolled their own scripts to achieve the same goal or use other methods to achieve the same goal albeit not as good as our solution ;)). Based on our analysis if you use Reserved Instances for Prod and schedule Non-Prod to be turned off when not being used, you will get a better overall ROI than on prem.
Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
71–73 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
The "commodity" distinction feel very significant here. Parent mentioned training videos, so probably very much not commodity. If you're selling something at $10/unit, it doesn't matter if your bandwidth costs are ¢0.05 or ¢2.5/unit. You're technically leaving money on the table, yes, but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.
Some businesses don't have IT staff or technical individuals, so cloud ends up being this nebulous resource that just works. Dedicated server means you are comfortable setting up your own servers to some extent. I agree with the comments thus far, you just need to be one of the technical people to appreciate the difference between cloud vs dedicated.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't you using a public cloud?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "commodity" distinction feel very significant here. Parent mentioned training videos, so probably very much not commodity. If you're selling something at $10/unit, it doesn't matter if your bandwidth costs are ¢0.05 or ¢2.5/unit. You're technically leaving money on the table, yes, but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.
Some businesses don't have IT staff or technical individuals, so cloud ends up being this nebulous resource that just works. Dedicated server means you are comfortable setting up your own servers to some extent. I agree with the comments thus far, you just need to be one of the technical people to appreciate the difference between cloud vs dedicated.
If it's one thing cloud services does not do, it is "just work". Companies lacking IT staff is a bonanza for devops consultants.
The difference is minimal these days, but usually my experience is that people spend more on devops for AWS. If you want to spin up a dedicated host at e.g. Hetzner or OVH or Softlayer or wherever, it generally take no more or less effort or technical skills than spinning up an instance at AWS. Many of the hosting providers have API's, just like AWS, only they expose their bare metal instead of hypervisor interfaces.
You don't typically need to know any more about the hardware on those systems than you need to know about the virtualized hardware on AWS.