41–50 of 202 posts
- In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running.
- On prem, your company is essentially dead.
If you want to deploy to another region:
- In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template.
- On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.
Cloud was always more expensive (in the short term) than self-managed/collocated servers. How is this news? In cloud, you pay for availability, for ad-hoc instances without waiting for a month to install new servers and more. You only need to hire “software” DevOps, rather than people who neatly lay your cables, journey to DC to replace disks, etc, etc, etc. Pick a good, cheap cloud. It is a commodity product. Just b…
What is a "good, cheap cloud?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, cloud is usually more expensive, so is developer time. If your team is wrangling more with the quirks of your own setup instead of the standardized workflow of a paas provider, your calculation won't work in your favour anymore.
I have seen vast amounts of developer effort go into “programming the cloud instead of the application”. It’s complete fiction that somehow developers are freed for all except application coding if the use the cloud.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/908/
My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…
You also need devops resources to manage a cloud setup - most of my jobs in recent years have involved exactly that, and it's not appreciably cheaper than managing "raw" hardware resources these days (ever since IPMI etc. became the norm); for some time I did consulting and provided devops services on retainer. The amount of time spent managing actual hardware was a rounding error of the overall devops cost for those of my clients relying on colo's or managed servers.
Since many colo providers also provide managed servers and cloud services, the flexibility is also not really an issue - you can start with cloud services, rent managed servers as you know what your base load is like, and can tie them into the same setup, and do the same with colo services if/when it's cheaper (the tradeoff between managed and colo is trickier than with cloud - the cost differential there is often dominated by realestate costs where the relevant data centres are; if you're somewhere expensive, managed servers elsewhere will often be cheaper than colo near you)
Why don't companies just use hosting services such as Hetzner? way cheaper expecially for bandwidth, you don't have to pay the hardware costs, and you can scale
In the event of a fire: - In the Cloud, you restore a backup on another AZ and you're up and running. - On prem, your company is essentially dead. If you want to deploy to another region: - In the Cloud, one more line in a CDK template. - On prem, millions of dollars of investment and months of work.
My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…
>and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware But you pay for a team to manage the cloud instances and services. Usually more than the hardware guys.
My goodness is it Monday already and time for yet another of these articles? At a given scale and software maturity, it is cheaper to buy your own hardware and pay for your own team to operate it. Generally, this is when you start thinking of your hardware needs in terms of fractions of an entire data center, but in simple cases may be smaller. This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value fr…
It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it.
For some mid-sized companies with relative fixed resource utilization sometimes renting rack space or renting bar metal (in a server center, with service for parts replacement) can be a good cost saving measure.
In the end while AWS is flexible and convenient with a lot of services easily accessible it is also expensive (at least when it comes to compute power) so the question is most times how much money do the flexible, convenience and services save. For many companies this is a lot. For some companies (of any size) this is not enough.
I mean this is why there are such funny things as being able to buy a "GPU compute min server center in a container" (through that's outside of the price range of an small company, but smaller versions similar to this exist, too).