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The cost of cloud
121–130 of 137 posts
Re: The cost of cloud
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I maintained a datacenter with approx 1000 hypervisors with a very small team and took few weeks to start having production workloads. The effort to maintain hardware was quite little and it was hugely cheaper than any cloud service. Having said that, your requirement is pretty absurd. Billions of people choose to own and maintain houses and cars and cook their own food because it's cheaper than the alternatives. Nob…
> Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks. To be fair, there’s also nobody that would listen to them over a professional mechanic or cook.
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Re: The cost of cloud
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks. To be fair, there’s also nobody that would listen to them over a professional mechanic or cook.
And they wouldn't open a commercial restaurant on top of their DIY "home food infrastructure".
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Re: The cost of cloud
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I choose to host on Vercel because I can spin up a production-ready, globally distributed web app in about 5 minutes with marginal, predictable costs without hiring a single other person, procuring any hardware nor learning anything beyond what’s necessary for coding my application. Pair it with analogous services like Upstash and Fly.io for persistence, and you can achieve incredible scale with minimal operational b…
At a glance, Vercel's pricing looks unbelievably expensive. $550/TB traffic, and $60k/yr for a 128MB function running at 100% utilization. What's the point of scalability, if you can't afford it to scale above the size of a small vserver? I'd have nightmares about a small DDoS attack costing me millions running on infrastructure like that. What does it offer compared to other serverless offerings (aws lambda, google…
I think you're misunderstanding Vercel.
You host static, or slightly dynamic (calling APIs from the front-end) websites. Serverless functions are a bonus to use occasionally. If you're using a serverless function at 100%, you're doing something terribly wrong.
As for DDoSes, such providers are genuinely okay with waiving bills from serious mistakes or DDoSes (besides also having anti-DDoS services for "free" and transparently, so must DDoSes won't even show up on your bill).
Re: The cost of cloud
#125Hiring 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…
What you call "sometimes it's not just cost", actually are costs. Only it's indirect costs that are hard to measure, but these costs definitely exist and definitely have to be taken into account somehow. A large part of hidden costs in corporates is the things you are not doing to save costs because the infrastructure is not flexible enough. I think everyone will recognize this, but it's really hard to put a number on it though.
Re: The cost of cloud
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few things we want to do on-premise any more. The main problem of on-premise, and benefit of cloud, is that we can add new capacity at a moments notice. You never have to wonder if you’ll need to add more capacity (with two month lead times) to provision a database. Now you could say that infra teams that do not anticipate such a need are less than ideal, and I’d agree with you, but I haven’t been part of t…
There are certainly companies like yours that are perhaps Web product driven and need flexible scalability, but there are many out there that have little requirements for such scaling, at least unexpectedly, which will run perfectly fine with on-premises virtualisation. The poster above is right, both have their purpose, but those sold on cloud as the complete solution are kidding themselves in most cases, Happy to a…
You are actually right. Thinking back to other companies I’ve worked for, only the last two had any need for cloud, the others had a more or less stable workload that was ideal for on-premise. Also all between 5-200 employees, I wonder if that matters.
Re: The cost of cloud
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a glance, Vercel's pricing looks unbelievably expensive. $550/TB traffic, and $60k/yr for a 128MB function running at 100% utilization. What's the point of scalability, if you can't afford it to scale above the size of a small vserver? I'd have nightmares about a small DDoS attack costing me millions running on infrastructure like that. What does it offer compared to other serverless offerings (aws lambda, google…
I think you're misunderstanding Vercel. You host static, or slightly dynamic (calling APIs from the front-end) websites. Serverless functions are a bonus to use occasionally. If you're using a serverless function at 100%, you're doing something terribly wrong. As for DDoSes, such providers are genuinely okay with waiving bills from serious mistakes or DDoSes (besides also having anti-DDoS services for "free" and tran…
Exactly, you’re incentivized to make your website as static as possible, and I attach standard http cache headers to most of the server rendered stuff so that their responses get cached in Vercel’s CDN, and once again not invoked super often.
Re: The cost of cloud
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think i can beat that argument pretty easy, 5 freebsd hosts with each 100 running jails...it's cheaper, uptime is something to discuss, but the data is not on someone elses computer. The real cost of cloud is that nearly anyone think it's impossible to setup a infra for yourself....loosing systemadmin as a role in companys probably the biggest loss.
Not "anyone", but probably most newcomers to the industry. Since they are simply not exposed to the non-cloud ways of setting up infra. On ever AWS/cloud post here the first comment is usually rent dedicated boxes from Hetzner (or whomever) and you can cut your costs. (And especially now with k8s it is really really easy to have something sane on bare-ish metal.) But at the same time what "cloud" gives to people is 2…
What’s interesting is in the past 5-10y the technology to run your own smaller dc (on the order of few dozens of racks) had become extremely commoditized. You can buy 100G switches for pennies now and every piece of software has a high quality open source version down to bmc level. I believe we’ll see a reverse trend for established SV companies in the next 10 years
Re: The cost of cloud
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic we…
> most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting I think those businesses should definitely go to the Cloud - but not IaaS. Use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for the email needs and a Website-as-a-service vendor, whether that’s wordpress.com or Webflow.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but why do you call that the cloud again? Mutualized hosting is what we've been doing since "forever".
The part where i disagree: don't go with Microsoft or Google, they're the worst. They've got less-than-stellar service, abysmal support, and they're capitalist assholes. Go with a local tech coop or non-profit (or even just a local tech artisan for-profit company) with friendly support.
I think it's been said in many other threads, but it's always worth repeating: by using Microsoft/Google email services, you make it impossible for others to use a solution of their choice because they will be blocked despite having perfect server configuration.
Re: The cost of cloud
#130Hiring 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…
When people talk about the cost of cloud, there’s some assumptions we need to state: A. Does your workload fully utilize 100% of the capacity of the resource? If not, then cloud would be cheaper. Just like if you only need office space for a few people, it’s not cost effective to buy an entire office building. If you only need server with a few gigs of RAM, it’s not cost effective to buy (own) an entire physical serv…
McDonald's is a pretty good example. For one, cheap burger they can provide it to you for cheaper. As soon as you start asking for quantity or quality though, you quickly realize you can make it yourself for cheaper, not counting your time.
At that point, the question becomes how much is your time worth, or in this analogy, are you ready to hire a professional chef to get better quality food?