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Why we are not leaving the cloud
101–110 of 216 posts
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#102So 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…
> [Netflix's] edge is in software alone, nothing that causes a huge barrier to entry like custom hardware. Actually, they are a media company. Their "edge" is in content creation and licencing deals. They might have been first-to-market for mass-scale streaming, but streaming video technology is a commodity, and they know that they will live or die by the desirability of their media catalog. > Netflix for example, is…
This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong.
The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model in addition to really good user experience across a wide variety of platforms. I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was still an iPhone user) while riding a train in 2011'ish. It was miles ahead of any other competitor in providing solid, usable clients on multiple platforms combined with reliable streaming in most cases and networks. This was as much a triumph of technology and product design as it was of the content available. If it was only about the content, it would be Hulu (at least in US) instead of Netflix who would be in pole position today.
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then the cloud might be cheaper again.
It isn't, and it's not even close. Unless you're running at less than 40% efficiency the cloud is more expensive for infrastructure running 24/7. If you're a shop with 1 server and no IT guy? Sure, probably makes sense to use the cloud - although I'd argue you'd be better off with managed hosting so you actually have a number to call if something breaks. An organization of even medium size? Not a chance.
> Unless you're running at less than 40% efficiency the cloud is more expensive for infrastructure running 24/7.
Sure, paying extra for a dynamically scalable service is inefficient if your resource needs are flat 24/7/365, but is that realistically the case?
(OTOH, one must not forget that there is a cost to engineer systems to take advantage of dynamic scaling to minimize costs while meeting requirements.)
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#104It's interesting that the first half of the explanation is largely quotes from a prior HN post's responses. Does anyone else feel a bit weird seeing off hand comments getting quoted in the explanation for a business decision? I guess we should all get more accustomed to our public input carrying weight in the zeitgeist. Gitlab's "develop in the open" nature really shows through here. I am not saying that's bad, it's…
Well... Here is something very interesting. Myself and others were "cautioning" very heavily against moving to self-hosted gear. It wasn't until their CTO talked to somebody in person he had respect for that they flipped over to staying in the cloud.
This to me calls into question the entire idea of crowd-sourcing decisions and plans like this. It was a single person who moved the needle, and now there is retroactive agreement(and quoting) with the people who were against it from the start. If it went the other way there would be plenty of quotes to pull from of people supporting the move to dedicated.
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not including the time costs of operating that server. Also, most businesses don't have demand that steady. Nor is it advisable in a cloud architecture to rely on a single large server.
Yeah, but I'm just trying to ballpark it. I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones. Most of it does need to remain online at all times including several large databases. Just running my logstash server alone eats 8 GB of RAM and 200+ GB of disk. In bandwidth and storage alone I'm past the cost of the server - so even if I could split this up and keep it mostly offline it still wouldn'…
> I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones.
Nope, you pay more for a single large machine than multiple small ones.
If your service is truly so stable that you only need to spend 10 hours a year maintaining it (and demand isn't growing), then maybe the cloud isn't right for you. But that's not true for most companies.
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#106Earlier 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...
Also can be very expensive. If another IT devops type costs 100k per year. How much will that buy in cloud services and time saved?
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#107Earlier 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.
Okay, help me out here. Here's my math: I move about 10 TB of bandwidth a month, I currently am in a DC that offers me 30TB on gigabit for $90/mo for my 1U box that hosts my small business and a few development systems - my server cost me a total of $1500 with 72GB of RAM and 4x3TB drives in RAID10, so I have 6TB of disk that's about at 50% capacity. To go to Amazon EC2 let's see... 64 GB of RAM for $0.862 should do…
What about the personnel costs? Also, what about the instantaneous bandwidth. If you have huge demand spikes where you need a lot of bandwidth at one time, can your system handle it?
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#108Earlier 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…
> The cloud isn't a money-saving tactic. If it requires no or a smaller ops team then it seems like it might be.
Generally you're hitting the cheap part of your ops team. The rack and stack, and dc technicians. You start seeing the real savings when you move up to using higher services like managed databases, and analytics engines.
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [Netflix's] edge is in software alone, nothing that causes a huge barrier to entry like custom hardware. Actually, they are a media company. Their "edge" is in content creation and licencing deals. They might have been first-to-market for mass-scale streaming, but streaming video technology is a commodity, and they know that they will live or die by the desirability of their media catalog. > Netflix for example, is…
This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong. The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model in addition to really good user experience across a wide variety of platforms. I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was…
> The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model
Actually, the original success involved putting DVDs in mailboxes.
> I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was still an iPhone user) while riding a train in 2011'ish.
Right, but you're going to be equally astonished in 2017 if you don't get the same level of service from Prime Video, Hulu, HBO GO, YouTube Red, et. al. And in 2019 a YC company will offer a one-click media publishing company that will allow any random joe on the planet to publish a DRM-protected movie available through a world-wide CDN with a pay-per-view payment system.
In 2011 tech was a major differentiator, today not so much. Netflix is moving with the times, that's why they are offering original content instead of being content to provide a good platform to stream other people's IP.
> This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong.
https://qz.com/607378/were-live-charting-googles-first-alpha... (tl;dr: the overwhelming majority of google's revenue comes from ads)
Re: Why we are not leaving the cloud
#110I love all the comments trying to explain that managing your own hardware, storage, network and backup cannot take that much of your time.
Not only it does take a huge amount of time, but it takes so much time that it require multiple dedicated highly-skilled people.
Last but not least, the last article about Gitlab was about a major outage where they had as much as 6 out of 6 backups unusable! The fact that they still exist today is to the sheer luck that there was an unexpected copy made manually before the disaster.
That speaks at length on how that 100 people company is struggling to have the resources and the qualifications it needs to execute (what startup isn't?). Let's not send them on a suicide mission to manage their own hardware on top of everything they already have to achieve. ;)