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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)

#121

Post by dzonga »

klabb3 wrote: post #85
seydor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish I could get that in london :(.

uk internet infra is backwards.

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

#122

Post by TacticalCoder »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #88
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Uptime? There have been quite a few catastrophic cloud failures. And some lasted hours.

Five nine is something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. The clouds aren't anywhere near that.

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

#124

Post by rakkhi »

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 basically wrote the same thing a few months ago. TL;DR for most systems public cloud is not cost effective not secure. Another interesting Apple exploit using Spector on Safari on the front page today. Most systems better off self hosted with cloud tools to manage: https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/why-you-should-move-b...

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

#125

Post by xethos »

sokoloff wrote: post #58
jdoss wrote: post #52

Back 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).

> negotiating with (and waiting for) an Ops team

> I don't mind paying more for that

I mean, it sounds like this is all through work. So regarding your second point about being okay paying more: are you the one cutting the cheques?

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

#126

Post by bauruine »

xur17 wrote: post #44
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.

Agreed - 1gbps is a surprising amount of bandwidth, you could easily host a fairly popular mobile app, saas, etc with plenty of breathing room. And in a lot of cases, you can just move your static file hosting behind Cloudflare, or onto something like s3, and give yourself even more room to grow.

And even if you only use 500Mbit/s it's more than 3k$ in cloud egress fees saved.

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

#127

Post by lionkor »

klabb3 wrote: post #85
seydor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Germany you pay 60+€/month for 100mbit down.

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

#128

Post by guiriduro »

acdha wrote: post #55
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…

> 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.

It does beg the question, but your point about orgs "incorrectly" thinking they could move some parts of their portfolio off-cloud begs several more. I would like to see it fleshed out a bit, into some high level rules of thumb, to guide, e.g. IaaS Cloud for: Flexibility; very spikey compute; modest to normal egress; low to moderate interruptible AI workloads (use spot); modest to normal storage, large if properly tiered and tradeoffs ok; lower effort HA; client reqs (but make them pay for it); security model (non-portable); Integrated turnkey DBaaS; Iff you have FinOps, careful scale-in policies for DevOps, or are stuck non-portable

Off-cloud (CDN, Hyperscale compute, *aaS, on-prem) Fit on a $5 VPS; Have simpler neat 12 factor PaaSy container workloads (Fly/Vercel); Well-defined heavy workloads; heavy egress (use CDN); heavy non-interruptible AI/specialist compute; large storage (CDN for objects) or compute-local with high IO (colo, onprem); HA with more effort; Specialist DB or boutique DBaaS (Supabase); Portable security (k8s) Iff you have invested in portability (containers, k8s, FaaS frameworks, interruptible workloads, high level APIs), HA testing and appopriate security

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

#129

Post by namibj »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #115
aftbit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud. If I really wanted to…

I'm posting this just to compare power rates not to win an internet fight. My power bill is tiered, and at the lowest tier I'm paying double your rates ($0.28 / kWh.) Once I add a rack like that on I'd probably be bumping up to the next tier which will increase my power to something like 2.5-3x that rate. Because of the tiered system even my non-server load will be metered at a higher cost. It's really not worth it h…

Meanwhile in Germany, the tiers are the other way around: base fees and meter costs increase effective rate at the low-consumption end, while you end up with only (even discounted, somewhat, usually!) per-kWh rates dominating at high consumption. Industrial loads also get assessed for peak power sustained for like a few minutes at least once a year, to reflect capex/depreciation of sufficiently-overprovisioned distribution transformers and other related last-mile power-handling capacity. This is relatively negligible if you average over 10% of your peak draw, though. And even beyond, recent energy prices Matt have shifted the balance spot to even more-peaky consumption.

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

#130

Post by sam_lowry_ »

ilyt wrote: post #95
nonrandomstring wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like a lot of that shifted now. You can just have on-premise k8s and keep most of the velocity gained from developers being able to "just run stuff" instead of anything having to go thru sysadmins. You can just rent few servers off OVH to start and not have to worry about actual hardware, while still being few times cheaper than cloud. Yeah you won't have access to the slew of cloud services and will have to d…

> You can just have on-premise k8s

You can deploy bare k8s, but then you'd figure that you need a lot more, starting with a load balancer (luckily there is MetalLB).

It's all possible, but not simple.

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