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Why we are not leaving the cloud

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#81

Post by amorphid »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

I don't know that I'd say Netflix is completely at the mercy of Amazon. Sure, if AWS goes down, Netflix goes down. But that would be true enough for they ran all of their own stuff, too... "Netflix is completely at the mercy of their ops team".

One of the big points of the cloud is that is gives one the ability to do things that one would trouble doing without the cloud. A small business with a single part-time developer can deploy an app to Heroku, and not need an ops person. That sure beats the heck out of the small business not being able to deploy software at all. As a former small biz owner, I did not want to have to manage a bare metal server in a colocation rack with a not-cheap data pipe. I just wanted a CRUD app with a minimal feature set.

When Heroku went down, I sat around wishing it would come back up, and eventually it did. That was way better than having to service a physical box when it failed.

Heroku cost me a few hundred a month, and freed me up to earn much more than that. In my eyes, it paid for itself many times over.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#82

Post by tetha »

neurostimulant wrote: post #71
mbesto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly misguided. > The cloud as a money saving venture is and always has been a damn lie. I personally have conducted migration savings assessments for companies going from data centers (owned/lease hardware) to cloud services. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the savings are there and have seen financial proof of the savings. It's either that, or I'm a liar.

Care to share more details? On paper, the cost differences between renting/colocating traditional dedicated servers and using cloud service with similar performance/capacity is huge, so it's pretty unusual to actually save money by migrating to cloud. I'd love to hear where the savings actually come from.

My company has done some research on that, in the webscale bubble. It is wrong to think of the divide as "Cloud" vs "Bare Metal" in a VM for server thing. Disregarding up-front investment, you're comparing rented VMs in the cloud with bare metal boxes, datacenter costs, and most important, manpower.

At a small scale, you're paying the cloud less than 2 or 3 competent admins with datacenter and networking experience cost for salary. In that situation, you're saving money, because you're saving the hardware ops team. You're paying more dollars per iop, core and GB of ram, but the alternate method of obtaining these resources has more surrounding costs than "ze cloud".

On the other hand, once you're shoveling several hundred kilo-dollars per month to a cloud provider, it makes sense to throw a million or 10 at dell and hire those operators, because it will save money within a year or two. This only makes sense if you need the resources, but if you need those resources, it helps being more efficient.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#83

Post by tw04 »

deegles wrote: post #52
dsr_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. It enables you to test demand for a service for a very low absolute cost. Spin up a tiny machine for $60/year? And you can pay for it by the month, or the hour? That's great. You can find out if anybody is going to buy your thing at all. You can probably get to ramen-profitable. As soon as you can confidently predict sufficient demand, the economically rational decision is to hi…

> Hire a good ops team I feel this is one of those "easier said than done" statements...

I'd argue that's only easier said than done if you insist on doing a roll-your-own open-source science project. If you default to established enterprise vendors, finding ops people isn't THAT difficult.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#84

Post by badloginagain »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

The article has some really good points why being in the cloud is a good idea. GitLabs core competencies are in software, not hardware- similar to many startups. Sure, they could hire up an infrastructure team, but that's at an opportunity cost of their software team.

The cloud offers convenience that all the `original internet companies` wish they had when they were starting out. There may be value in switching when you hit a certain scale, companies like Netflix will have already done cost-benefit analysis to that degree. But it's a massive undertaking that introduces substantial risk for long periods of time. Many companies are just not in a position to do that.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#85

Post by emodendroket »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

The thing is that at the small to medium scale running your own servers just isn't cost-effective. It's the same principle that leads smaller companies to outsource services like IT.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#86

Post by mynameisvlad »

keepper wrote: post #68
morgante wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running on rented hardware is the equivalent of a traditional product company renting all of their factories. Correct. Traditional product companies very rarely own all their own factories. Do you honestly think Netflix management is incompetent? They've run the numbers on this countless times. They have way more insight into their spend and operations than a random anonymous internet commentator.

Netflix runs their most expensive part (pushing those terrabits of traffic ), with their own hardware and network. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ so, you were saying? Or do you think facebook,google,aol,tripadvisor and pretty much anyone beside HotNewStartup are incompetent?

More than likely so that the video feed is as close to you as possible, rather than only because of cost efficiency.

The video is the most important part of their product, so keeping it at your ISP or a local exchange not only lowers latency, but most likely also gives better throughput since it only has to travel through your ISP's network or local exchange links without having to go through the rest of the internet backbone.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#87

Post by user5994461 »

bdamm wrote: post #44
tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing hard about running hardware. The current VM trend gives you bare metal access. the only difference is you have to plug in your machines, and you get to look at them every once in a while. Really, what software dev hasn't put together a desktop PC and plugged in some Ethernet jacks? That's all you need to Colocate. Your response echos what cloud providers want everyone to think. Hardware is too hard f…

As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy. Plugging in 150 machines is significantly more challenging. Providing disaster response, backups, stable power, and VLANs to secure services, quickly ratchets up the cost. And nobody wants to pay one engineer per machine to babysit one machine, x 150. That wouldn't even be a good idea, because engineers get…

> As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy.

Till you're the guy in your 20 people startup who has to do it and crawl around the racks with 100kg of equipment to assemble, cable and power up everything.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#88

Post by RaleyField »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #34

So everyone says the cloud is the future. I get it. But is this the truth, or what all the tech giants want people to believe? Don your foil hats for a moment and listen to me. All the original internet companies run their own hardware. They rent out excess production capacity to us peons in the form of cloud services. These companies that all run their own hardware exclusively are telling everyone that it's stupid t…

It's a conspiracy, got you.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#89

Post by dsr_ »

morgante wrote: post #72
dsr_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you stop calling me a liar if I correct that from "the costs" to "your costs"? I am assuming that you are growing, and I think there's a provable assumption that for high levels of service, hiring someone else to do it is more expensive than in-house.

That's an entirely different statement than your original one. Saying "the costs of cloud service are zooming up" disingenuously makes it sound like the price of cloud services are going up.

Thanks for the charitable interpretation of my words.

Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud

#90

Post by tobltobs »

tw04 wrote: post #83
deegles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hire a good ops team I feel this is one of those "easier said than done" statements...

I'd argue that's only easier said than done if you insist on doing a roll-your-own open-source science project. If you default to established enterprise vendors, finding ops people isn't THAT difficult.

But then the cloud might be cheaper again.
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