$60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent • Hacker News Board

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#11

Post by stefan420 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

idk123456 wrote: post #5

the part about “predictable heavy workloads” should be bolded in neon. 90% of startups THINK they have predictable workloads. they do not. these guys actually do.

i would argue 90% of startups think they are going to need autoscaling, invest in that, and then never reach the scale up point, while having spent the investment money already.

besides the point of the article, tho. even if at the end of the day the numbers don't perfectly add up, i don't believe they are WAY OFF. we are paying for cables and HDDs man. "ancient" tech.

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#12

Post by automaticlemon » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

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Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#13

Post by mihaivinaga » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

radu26 wrote: post #9

not sure i buy the “$2M/mo on cloud” number. did they actually run it or just plug public on-demand pricing into a spreadsheet? nobody pays sticker price at that scale.

That's a fair point, the scale discounts certainly matter. That said: We did in fact run our prototype on AWS, and early on they flagged our account because our VMs were under heavy CPU load (we were told we'd need to cut below ~50 % or risk suspension). When you switch to dedicated hardware, you're no longer paying for "noisy neighbours" or hypervisor over-provisioning, so the effective per-unit cost often cleaner fully justifies the shift.

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#14

Post by Growther0506 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

and1-1 wrote: post #2

so… they built a 4PB cluster, 14k cores, 50 GPUs, and it costs them less than my prod Kubernetes cluster on GCP. feels bad.

dont worry, their real cost was their sanity

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#15

Post by automaticlemon » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

Growther0506 wrote: post #14

and1-1 wrote: post #2

so… they built a 4PB cluster, 14k cores, 50 GPUs, and it costs them less than my prod Kubernetes cluster on GCP. feels bad.

dont worry, their real cost was their sanity

[dead]

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#16

Post by as3413 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

ngl the cloud evangelists aren’t gonna like this one. this is basically “we did the math and cloud wasn’t worth it

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#17

Post by mihaivinaga » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

DaveEliot wrote: post #6

idk man, running your own hardware sounds awesome until you have to replace a dead RAID controller at 3am. article doesn’t really mention that part.

Well, we do have some servers that we have in the office(the gpus servers, those have been a pain in the... mostly because intel cpus suck). But other then these the entire hardware part is managed by hetzner (thank you hetzner for being awesome)

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#18

Post by martis2018 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

not saying they’re wrong but $2m → $60k is like… a 97% cost drop. that is either cloud pricing insanity or some very optimistic bare-metal accounting.

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#19

Post by cs0min » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:32 PM UTC

can’t tell if they’re geniuses or just suffering a massive case of “we built a data center so now everything looks like a hardware nail."

Re: $60K Data Infrastructure vs. $2M Cloud Equivalent

#20

Post by general1465 » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

martis2018 wrote: post #18

not saying they’re wrong but $2m → $60k is like… a 97% cost drop. that is either cloud pricing insanity or some very optimistic bare-metal accounting.

If they are going from AWS, that would be the cloud pricing insanity.