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

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

#81

Post by andrewprock »

Any discussion of cloud vs. data center vs. on premises that does not discuss employee costs, documentation, and training is not complete.

One of the main reasons for using cloud infrastructure is that many people know how to use it, internal documentation requirements are dramatically lessened, and you don't need to higher infrastructure IT employees to maintain and monitor it.

If cloud only costs double internal IT, it's almost certainly cheaper until you reach a billion dollar valuation - or more depending on what your infra needs are.

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

#82

Post by kccqzy »

sokoloff wrote: post #60
runlaszlorun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my case Xfinity kept the same IP for me for two years, then an outage happened where everyone in the neighborhood lost connectivity. When connectivity was restored I got a different IP.

I feel like the biggest difference is the fact that there's no guarantee that the dynamic IP won't change, so all systems need to be prepared for that, or you need to be mentally prepared for that day.

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

#83

Post by icedchai »

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…

I've worked at a few SaaS startups that did not price their service correctly and did not want to pay up front for reserved instances. The cloud costs were very high. 80% of revenue was about right.

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

#84

Post by seydor »

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…

this is the most undersung hero. Internet speeds are reaching the equivalent of a datacenter. This will open up so many possibities, that it makes it seem like the 2000s again. And finally we might actually need ipv6

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

#85

Post by klabb3 »

seydor wrote: post #84
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…

this is the most undersung hero. Internet speeds are reaching the equivalent of a datacenter. This will open up so many possibities, that it makes it seem like the 2000s again. And finally we might actually need ipv6

I just moved out of the consumer internet dystopia that is California (or most of US I guess) to Spain and am just about to get 10 Gbit symmetric for €25/mo. Even if I get half of that I’m ecstatic. This kind of infrastructure is so conducive to all kinds of interesting and “decentralized” innovations.

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

#86

Post by anyoneamous »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #80
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #25

Martin 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…

> "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" This doesn't help much. It doesn't talk about hybrid. What about AI. Do I go buy a bunch of H100s at peak price when something better/cheaper might be out in 3 years. What if my load is spikey. It should be perhaps "You're crazy if you are not strategic with cloud vs. on premise spending"

3 years ain't what it used to be - A100s were launched over 3 years ago and lots of people are still happy when they can get hold of some on AWS. People buying H100s now will very likely still be getting good value out of them in 2027.

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

#87

Post by blibble »

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…

over the last 15 years my residential internet and power supply have been considerably more reliable than us-east-1

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

#88

Post by calvinmorrison »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #59
p1necone wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I was an ops engineer at Fastmail. We ran our own hardware. A mix of Debian on one stack and SmartOS (Illumos from Joyent) and there were plenty of physical problems and costs. Now putting petabytes of data with replication and syncing and all that would have been a cluster F on the cloud, we missed out on a lot of the awesome newer deployment other tooling because we had written our own. Before I left we swapped out a good chunk of these snowflake software but it was impressive actually how well it worked. Good multi data center multi master mysql support in 2008? Killer feature. Maintaining that in 2020? Horrible.

Also there were plenty of upstream routing issues where solving that became a headache. The #1 thing we wanted was uptime and the #1 outage was our upstream providers having trouble routing to other upstream providers.

The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it

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

#89

Post by ilyt »

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…

Renting dedicated server off company like OVH, or even co-locating your own is also far cheaper than cloud, few times over, without fuss of turning your house into datacenter.

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

#90

Post by ilyt »

p1necone wrote: post #20
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…

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.

It's insane between actually renting servers, or even classical "bare" VPS providers and cloud too.
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