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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#171

Post by mrweasel »

torginus wrote: post #151
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

Just this week a friend of mine was spinning up some AWS managed service, complaining about the complexity, and how any reconfiguration took 45 minutes to reload. It's a service you can just install with apt, the default configuration is fine. Not only is many service no longer cheaper in the cloud, the management overhead also exceed that of on-prem.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#173

Post by mrweasel »

Lucasoato wrote: post #95
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

> I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own

I see it from the other direction, when if something fails, I have complete access to everything, meaning that I have a chance of fixing it. That's down to hardware even. Things get abstracted away, hidden behind APIs and data lives beyond my reach, when I run stuff in the cloud.

Security and regular mistakes are much the same in the cloud, but I then have to layer whatever complications the cloud provide comes with on top. If cost has to be much much lower if I'm going to trust a cloud provider over running something in my own data center.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#174

Post by abc123abc123 »

Symbiote wrote: post #108
jillesvangurp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once they are up and running You should also calculate the cost of getting it up and running. With Google Cloud (I don't actually use AWS), I mainly worry about building docker containers in CI and deploying them to vms and triggering rolling restarts as those get replaced with new ones. I don't worry about booting them. I don't worry about provisioning operating systems or configuration to them. Or security update…

You are massively overcomplicating this. > I don't worry about booting them. I don't worry about provisioning operating systems or configuration to them. Or security updates. They come up with a lot of pre-provisioned monitoring and other stuff. No effort required on my side. These are not difficult problems. You can use the same/similar cloud install images. A 10 year old nerd can install Linux on a computer; if you…

Shush! The cloud companies want customers to think it is a complicated near death experience to run on their own hardware.

It is sad that the knowledge of how easy it really is, is getting extinct. The cloud and SaaS companies benefit greatly.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#175

Post by bojangleslover »

adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

Great comment. I agree it's a spectrum and those of us who are comfortable on (4) like yourself and probably us at Carolina Cloud [0] as well, (4) seems like a no brainer. But there's a long tail of semi-technical users who are more comfortable in 2-3 or even 1, which is what ultimately traps them into the ransomware-adjacent situation that is a lot of the modern public cloud. I would push back on "usage-based". Yes it is technically usage-based but the base fee also goes way up and there are also sometimes retainers on these services (ie minimum spend). So of course "usage-based" is not wrong but what it usually means is "more expensive and potentially far more expensive".

[0] https://carolinacloud.io, derek@

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#177

Post by mystifyingpoi »

mrweasel wrote: post #171
torginus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

Just this week a friend of mine was spinning up some AWS managed service, complaining about the complexity, and how any reconfiguration took 45 minutes to reload. It's a service you can just install with apt, the default configuration is fine. Not only is many service no longer cheaper in the cloud, the management overhead also exceed that of on-prem.

I'd gladly use (and maybe even pay for!) an open-source reimplementation of AWS RDS Aurora. All the bells and whistles with failover, clustering, volume-based snaps, cross-region replication, metrics etc.

As far as I know, nothing comes close to Aurora functionality. Even in vibecoding world. No, 'apt-get install postgres' is not enough.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#178

Post by Quarrel »

geocar wrote: post #123
weavie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the upper limit of Hertzner? Say you have an AWS bill in the $100s of millions, could Hertzner realistically take on that scale?

Who are you thinking of? Netflix might be spending as much as $120m (but probably a little less), and I thought they were probably Amazon's biggest customer. Does someone (single-buyer) spend more than that with AWS? Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer, and Netflix's shareholders would probably be worried about risk relyin…

> Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer

A little scare for both sides.

Unless we're misunderstanding something I think the $100Ms figure is hard to consider in a vacuum.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#179

Post by bojangleslover »

torginus wrote: post #151
adamcharnock wrote: post #74

This is an industry we're[0] in. Owning is at one end of the spectrum, with cloud at the other, and a broadly couple of options in-between: 1 - Cloud – This is minimising cap-ex, hiring, and risk, while largely maximising operational costs (its expensive) and cost variability (usage based). 2 - Managed Private Cloud - What we do. Still minimal-to-no cap-ex, hiring, risk, and medium-sized operational cost (around 50%…

I think the issue with this formulation is what drives the cost at cloud providers isn't necessarily that their hardware is too expensive (which it is), but that they push you towards overcomplicated and inefficient architectures that cost too much to run. A core at this are all the 'managed' services - if you have a server box, its in your financial interest to squeeze as much per out of it as possible. If you're us…

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is

1) Senior engineer starts on AWS

2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't)

3) New engineer comes in and panics

4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic

5) New engineer leaves

6) Second new engineer comes in and not only panics but outright needs help

7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" who claims to help "reduce cost" but who actually gets a kickback from the extra spend they induce (usually 10% if I'm not mistaken)

Calling it it ransomware is obviously hyperbolic but there are definitely some parallels one could draw

On top of it all, AWS pricing is about to massively go up due to the RAM price increase. There's no way it can't since AWS is over half of Amazon's profit while only around 15% of its revenue.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#180

Post by bovermyer »

I'm thinking about doing a research project at my university looking into distributed "data centers" hosted by communities instead of centralized cloud providers.

The trick is in how to create mostly self-maintaining deployable/swappable data centers at low cost...

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