The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

Post by plonk » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #38

bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting 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…

After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with media folks about the real cost and advantages of "cloud". One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite a good thing, and what's lovely about "cloud" - as in the ability to quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for months can be imag…

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

jdoss wrote: post #69

sokoloff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Don't get me wrong, I love using them too. They are great for getting something setup quickly when you are getting started. I use some cloud services that support my single datacenter rack I have today. For my expensive workloads, I run them off three beefy bare metal servers in my rack. I'd argue you have less visibility on what is going on at a cloud provider than you did in the past with your Ops team. Support tic…

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #18

> A billion dollar private software company told us that their public cloud spend amounted to 81% of COR, and that “cloud spend ranging from 75 to 80% of cost of revenue was common among software companies” I find that quite hard to believe. I mean, I can see that if you were selling cloud backup services and stored customer data on S3, I can understand S3 costs being a big part of your budget. But for the vast major…

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 10:02 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #62

flukus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

Any business that you can run from a home server with a residential business line is not the kind of business we are talking about here. Yes, you can potentially serve a lot of customers with that setup, but your reliability story is terrible so you better have very forgiving customers. What if your internet goes out? Even with a business line, I've had to wait five days for them to replace a fiber line that a squirr…

    Any business that you can run from a home server 
    with a residential business line is not the kind 
    of business we are talking about here.

Post by jdoss » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 10:03 PM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57

bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting 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…