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The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
51–60 of 156 posts
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#52Back in 2007ish the CEO of Parallels/SWSoft (the company behind Virtuozzo a very popular hypervisor used back in the day) stood on the stage of the keynote of HostingCon and said that the Cloud (AWS) was going to eat the WebHosting Industry's lunch. His entire keynote was very doom and gloom. Fast forward to 2015ish it totally it did. The days of VPS and Dedicated hosting being the only options for deploying your stuff for the Internet to consume were killed by the big three cloud providers.
In one hand I am very thankful that this caused a boom of innovation and tooling to make engineering operations easier and more accessible to our industry as a whole. If I had the tools I have now, managing 50+ racks in my old datacenter would have been so much easier.
But in the other hand, the promises the Cloud providers have shoved down our throats have been used against our Industry with raised prices, reduce freedoms on what providers you can choose, and consolidation of duties on Engineering staff. The average developer has to do more work, across many different domains to get paid well. The war waged to kill off Systems Administration as a core job responsibility and using the DevOps movement to kill FTE count for specialized work on bare metal or datacenter infra keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs. I think this really sucks.
I do think this article hits home on some points I have been seeing over the past few years. The costs are too high for the goods provided in comparison to getting a couple of racks in few datacenters and DIY which can for sure work for the right kinds of companies at the right stage of growth. I also think Hybrid deployments of Cloud + Bare Metal in a datacenter is so much more of a viable option for less mature companies. The pendulum is starting to slowly swing back to doing things on Bare Metal.
I am excited for the next 10 years of progress and I hope the Cloud still remains a powerful tool in our toolbox, but it isn't used for everything. The cost savings are too real as this article points out when you don't use the cloud and you'd be surprised how much easier it is these days to get some bare metal deployments going in your eng org.
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#53Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well…
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Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#54Previously: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401081 (June 4, 2021 — 7 points, 2 comments)
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832433 - Sept 2022 (15 comments)
The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32672553 - Sept 2022 (1 comment)
The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401081 - June 2021 (2 comments)
The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27306742 - May 2021 (207 comments)
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#55Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well…
> But for everything else, there's a well managed on-prem.
That’s begging a number of questions, however - the number of places who can approach a cloud service portfolio at all, much less with a cost savings or security parity, has to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of places who incorrectly thought they could.
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck getting the time of day from Oracle or Accenture if you are not already quite a large established company. Not that you want it anyway though.
Oracle was willing to talk to us and the max we would have paid them would have been $10 m / year.
Being able to pay 10 million per year to a software vendor is absolutely a sign of being a well established company.
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#57Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…
I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than I do at home. Of course I don't know how much of that is just that the folks that build expensive homelabs being attracted to beefy, power hog servers as opposed to an actual incentive to cut power costs.
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#58Back in 2007ish the CEO of Parallels/SWSoft (the company behind Virtuozzo a very popular hypervisor used back in the day) stood on the stage of the keynote of HostingCon and said that the Cloud (AWS) was going to eat the WebHosting Industry's lunch. His entire keynote was very doom and gloom. Fast forward to 2015ish it totally it did. The days of VPS and Dedicated hosting being the only options for deploying your stu…
> keep us locked into using Cloud APIs to do our jobs
I love that we can use Cloud APIs to do our jobs. That's piles better than negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team to provision you hardware or networking that you don't have much visibility into and then relying on them to troubleshoot.
I don't mind paying more for that (which you absolutely do on a per-unit of compute, network, or storage).
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#59Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…
Yeah the delta in cost/CPU/memory/storage between self hosting on second hand stuff and paying cloud services is insane . It's a no brainer if your use case needs beefier hardware than the typical $5/month VPS host and you don't have enterprise level liability/uptime expectations. With stuff like proxmox you get a pretty similar level of ease of use to managed VM services too.
I generally find these discussions unproductive on HN because of how binary they become, but definitely once you go off the beaten path it seems a lot cheaper (sans power though) to run your own infra. I've been thinking of doing some data ETL for something that generates 1 GB / day and has retention for 30 days and it's much cheaper to host a Postgres myself at that scale than run it in the cloud. I could store in something like S3, but then I need to deal with querying S3. I'd like to combine some of this with cloud infra but I suspect cloud bandwidth costs would kill me. Colo-ing 2-3 servers is probably the best bet here.
Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)
#60Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…
was the business line much more expensive than home rates? and were you given a static ipv4 IP?
Not GP, but related: I've had the same DHCP IP from Xfinity (residential internet service) for well over a decade (and I think for 16 years).
At what point does a dynamic-but-unchanging IP become functionally static?