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

Post by dekhn » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

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

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:10 PM UTC

blibble wrote: post #87

jedberg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by mr_toad » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

Ographer wrote: post #40

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…

A chart on the article said that Slack spends an estimated 41% of revenue on cloud costs, calculated using their financials by this author who claims they were being conservative but I don't know how to estimate such a thing myself.

Post by bamazizi » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #39

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…

What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

sltkr wrote: post #102

jeffbee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy Bridge vCPU cost $71/month, in 2014 dollars, or $90 today. But today you can get a machine of the same size class, with a dramatically faster CPU, at $30/month.

The metric we are interested in is cost relative to self-hosting on similar hardware. So you can't factor in things like inflation and hardware performance, which equally made self-hosted solutions cheaper.