Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The cost of cloud

ptribble.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 137 posts

Re: The cost of cloud

#11

Post by lumost »

greatgib wrote: post #6
CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

Any decent IT team will backup, replicate, shard, to different locations, and not rely on a single datacenter. As said in the blog post, with the cloud you will get the same thing that you can pay your inhouse IT for 3 times the price. For example, lots of people are thinking that by just using 'the cloud', your data is safe / replicated to multiple geographically separated areas. But no, it is not automatic, it need…

How likely is it that you have a competent IT team? If they are competent, are they also fast? I may not care about having a scalable, redundant deployment if it takes 3 years to get done.

It’s tough to recruit a tech team and keep it running. Worst case scenario the team leaves and your stuck with folks who don’t know how anything works.

Re: The cost of cloud

#12

Post by bushbaba »

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm.

Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm.

Building your own office is cheaper than renting one.

Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax.

Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo.

I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just cost. The biggest two values you get with AWS is 1) reducing time spent outside your business’s core competencies and 2) a vast ecosystem - 3rd party offerings, readily available devs, consulting services, and compliance services.

I’d add that for those having compliance needs. It’s not always as simple as rack and stacking infra. You have to use services that meet the compliance auditors needs.

Re: The cost of cloud

#13

Post by AnthonyMouse »

moltar wrote: post #10

I think the mistake is often made by comparing primitives. E.g. running my own RAID vs S3. Colo traffic vs AWS traffic. But what about comparing the whole ecosystem? Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? How hard is it to configure and maintain? Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? When you run your own services, you have to reinvent so much it doesn’t seem to be worth it.

> Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID?

Yes.

> How hard is it to configure and maintain?

Very few things are harder to configure or maintain than they are on a cloud service, because if they were, someone (e.g. you) would get frustrated and make them easier, and then they wouldn't be for anyone else.

> Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack?

Ah yes, S3 can handle serving that many requests and keep everything online. But then don't you get a bill for $72 billion dollars?

Re: The cost of cloud

#14

Post by nine_k »

bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…

It's still about cost.

(1) opportunity cost: doing your own systems administration instead of growing your business (features, marketing, etc).

(2) switching cost: once you have a working system that outgrows the free / cheap AWS tiers, and might be cheaper to run outside cloud, switching away from the cloud becomes expensive, and does not look like a good investment to many, see (1).

Re: The cost of cloud

#15

Post by mac-chaffee »

> In particular, traditional legacy IT infrastructures are ridiculously overpriced. (If you're using commercial virtualization platforms and/or SAN storage, then you're overpaying by as much as a factor of 10, and getting an inferior product into the bargain

Could someone elaborate? Is this saying something free like OpenStack would be better than something paid like VMware? Is that really common knowledge?

Re: The cost of cloud

#16

Post by taspeotis »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #13
moltar wrote: post #10

I think the mistake is often made by comparing primitives. E.g. running my own RAID vs S3. Colo traffic vs AWS traffic. But what about comparing the whole ecosystem? Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? How hard is it to configure and maintain? Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? When you run your own services, you have to reinvent so much it doesn’t seem to be worth it.

> Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? Yes. > How hard is it to configure and maintain? Very few things are harder to configure or maintain than they are on a cloud service, because if they were, someone (e.g. you) would get frustrated and make them easier, and then they wouldn't be for anyone else. > Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? Ah yes, S3 can handle serving that many reque…

I believe both Azure and AWS (probably GCP too) have built in DDOS mitigations for free.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-s...

You might be on the hook for bandwidth costs from a more sophisticated attack though.

Re: The cost of cloud

#19

Post by savant_penguin »

"My rough estimate is that the unit cost of provisioning a service on AWS is about 3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house."

The word competent here is doing a lot of weight lifting.

I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds

Re: The cost of cloud

#20

Post by curious_cat_163 »

Just curious: if you are an enterprise, what do you think (besides cost) is a compelling argument in 2022 for not going to a public cloud? This is probably a Ask HN, so please do point me to it if you know an existing one.
Post reply on HN