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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)

#131

Post by znpy »

aftbit wrote: post #72
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.

I do some homelabbing at home and i do work for some "big tech". The difference, essentially, is reliability and high availability.

Most homelab posts i see are one decent (not even large) disaster away from losing everything.

I do something in that space at home, mostly around data backup and replication, but i am well aware that in case of decent disaster I'd probably be at least a couple of days offline (potentially up to one or two weeks).

Most people underestimate facet of the discussion.

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

#132

Post by znpy »

Aeolun wrote: post #92
jedberg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.

> Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.

there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away.

you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).

Frankly, i think that the time when your startup is taking off might be the right time to start thinking about moving to the cloud (or to a proper datacenter).

If anything, if your startup is taking off then you're starting to get a real sense of what kind of compute and storage you actually need, and can maybe negotiate accordingly (eg: long-term committment for resources in some clouds give you very relevant discounts).

EDIT: regarding the internet connection... on a consumer connection, most contracts include a minimal guaranteed bandwidth that's usually way lower than the advertised peak bandwidth. i wouldn't be surprised to discover people getting throttled at those speeds if they start getting serious traffic...

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

#133

Post by throwaway2037 »

mr_toad wrote: post #99
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'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever, because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if something is going to fly or not. And that's where the advantage ends. Too many businesses aren’t even properly utilising that key advantage. They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development…

    They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem.
For many non-tech corps, the purpose of moving to cloud is to downsize IT admin staff. It works well.

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

#134

Post by throwaway2037 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #122
calvinmorrison wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think on-prem has more uptime than commercial cloud? For non-tech companies, no even close. Commercial cloud is adding nines to uptime and saving money by removing in-house IT admin staff.

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

#135

Post by Unroasted6154 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #122
calvinmorrison wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use it correctly, with multiple availability zones and even multi regions you can reach very high reliability. They surely don't offer five 9s for a single zone. I am not aware of many multi regions outages. And they are also getting better over time, spending a lot more engineering hours on reliability that most companies. And if they fail to deliver on SLA they might give you money (depending on your contract I guess).

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

#136

Post by graemep »

ilyt wrote: post #89
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.

There is a time cost, but most of it is a one off, and not that difficult, and there are tools to make it easier.

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

#137

Post by graemep »

dzonga wrote: post #121
klabb3 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bad regulation. Ofcom is allowing Openreach to keep asymmetric pricing for FTTP. Unjustified market segmentation.

The govt has a focus on download speeds (which are useful for high quality video) and does not care about upload or latency which filters down.

On reflection, even the the terms "upload" and "download" are based on the assumption connections are for consuming media.

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

#138

Post by nine_k »

Macha wrote: post #33
AIorNot wrote: post #8

So now the trend is away from cloud ? What about a good way to to judge the cost of the cloud - pricing has always been overly complex and arcane and full of gaps in understanding the overhead involved

Honestly the relative clarity of what cloud costs has been one of the advantages that companies want to pay a premium for, compared to the quagmire of capex, depreciation, attribution of datacenter costs, and interdepartmental chargebacks that on prem usually means. I suspect fewer cloud migrations would occur if companies could map their onprem costs to specific products much more easily rather than going "Oh it mig…

Now you can operate your own local cloud (Dokku, Rancher, Proxmox, VMWare, MinIO, k8s, you name it). This gives you all the simplicity of deployment and accountability, and some elasticity.

It adds a bit of ops complexity at the start though. But running your own rack starts to make sense when your AWS bill is at least the same order of magnitude as an SRE salary; at that point, you already have needs that are varied enough.

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

#139

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jjn2009 wrote: post #106
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #104

I’m leading engineering at a new start up and I’m doing absolutely everything I can to avoid touching the cloud at pretty much any cost. We’re going to be running all of our own dev/test GPU servers with only inference hosted outside our cluster.

The need for GPUs is a solid reason to stay away.

Yeah it’s the main reason because the data transfer costs alone would be insane

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

#140

Post by BlueTemplar »

znpy wrote: post #132
Aeolun wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.

> Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs. there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away. you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering). Frankly, i think that the time when you…

Upgrade to a professional connection ?
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