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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

blog.comma.ai

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Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#361

Post by cheema33 »

bluGill wrote: post #237
bix6 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it. But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.

Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)

> AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action..

The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#362

Post by rcpt »

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%…

5. On-premise and engineers touch the wires every few days.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#363

Post by parentheses »

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…

Fully agree to this. I find the cost of cloud providers is mostly driven by architecture. If you're cost conscious, cloud architectures need to be up-front designed with this in mind.

Microservices is a killer with cost. For each microservices pod - you're often running a bunch of side cars - datadog, auth, ingress - you pay massive workload separation overhead with orchestration, management, monitoring and ofc complexity

I am just flabbergasted that this is how we operate as a norm in our industry.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#364

Post by bluGill »

cheema33 wrote: post #361
bluGill wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)

> AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action.. The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.

All the hardware and network issues are on them. I agree that you still need your own people to support you applications, but that is only part of the problem.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#365

Post by seg_lol »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #331
seg_lol wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers don't line up, if you are spending 5k in cloud costs, and on prem is 1/3 of cloud. At 48 month replacement cycle, 1/3 of 5k * 48 months is 80k. So it is 80k vs 5k a month for 48 months. I think the primary reason that people over fixate on the cloud is that they can't do math. So renting is a hedge.

It’s not really about the numbers though. Even spending 10k recurring can be easier administratively that spending 10k on a one time purchase that depreciates over a 3 year cycle in some organisations because you don’t have to go into meetings to debate whether it’s actually a 2 or 4 year depreciation or discuss opportunity costs of locking up capital for 3 years etc. Getting things done is mostly a matter of getting…

> It’s not really about the numbers though.

Of course not.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#366

Post by infecto »

unethical_ban wrote: post #343
infecto wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it was not. 15 years ago Heroku was the rage. Even the places that had bare metal usually had someone running something similar to devops and at least core infrar was not being touched. I am sure places existed but 15 years while far away was already pretty far along from what you describe. At least in SV.

SV and financial services are quite different. It's 2026 and banks are still running their mainframe, running windows VMs on VMware and building their enterprise software with Java. The big boys still have their own datacenters they own. Sure, they try dabbling with cloud services, and maybe they've pushed their edge out there, and some minor services they can afford to experiment with.

If you are working at a bank you are most likely not standing up your own Postgres and related services. Even 15 years ago. I am not saying it never happened, I am saying that even 15 years ago even large orgs with data enters often had in place sys and devops that helped with providing resources. Obviously not the rule but also not an exception.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#367

Post by omoikane »

dagi3d wrote: post #130

> San Diego power cost is over 40c/kWh, ~3x the global average. It’s a ripoff, and overpriced simply due to political dysfunction. Mind anyone elaborate? Always thought this is was a direct cause of the free market. Not sure if by dysfunction the op means lack of intervention.

Electricity cost in California is generally more expensive than most other US states, except Hawaii. Not sure why.

Perhaps Comma needed the datacenter to be in San Diego for latency or other reasons, but if they need it mostly for compute, it would have been cheaper to operate their datacenter elsewhere... but if we keep going down that path, maybe it actually becomes cheaper to rent a cloud after all.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#368

Post by acdha »

antonvs wrote: post #315
bojangleslover wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One of AWS's favorite situations I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic. I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them. The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the c…

> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers

This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#369

Post by cheema33 »

boplicity wrote: post #258
edge17 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what is the spec you pay $6000/year for? Where/what is the line between rent vs buy?

It's a server with: - 2x Intel Xeon 5218 - 128gb Ram - 2x960GB SSD - 30TB monthly bandwidth I pay around an extra $200/month for "premium" support and Acronis backups, both of which have come in handy, but are probably not necessary. (Automated backups to AWS are actually pretty cheap.) It definitely helps with peace of mind, though.

I have a similar system from Hetzner. I pay around $100 for it. No bandwidth cap.

I have setup encrypted backups to go to my backup server in the office. We have a gigabit service at the office. Critical data changes are backed up every hour and full backup once a day.

Re: Don't rent the cloud, own instead

#370

Post by megggan »

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%…

Getting rid of bureaucratic internal IT department is a game changer for productivity. That alone is worth 10x infra costs, especially for big companies where work can grind to a halt dealing with obstructionists through service now. Good leaders understand this.
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