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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#131

Post by CodesInChaos »

presentation wrote: post #127
sofixa wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. But you still pay $550/TB for traffic, right? That's 5-10x the cost of AWS, which is already very expensive.

2. What advantages does Vercel offer?

Re: The cost of cloud

#132

Post by llampx »

sherifnada wrote: post #66

If you run your own datacenter, there is also the opportunity cost of slowing down R&D and new development work. Let's say the year is 2012 and Redshift is introduced, completely changing how organizations can generate insights from their data. Running your own datacenter? good luck waiting for the ops team to install something similar! It might take you a couple of quarters assuming they are already competent at it.…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Redshift's value proposition was not that it was the first DWH system, but that it was the first one that could scale up and down and be charged by the minute.

Re: The cost of cloud

#133

Post by Rastonbury »

cgio wrote: post #99
Rastonbury wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For business perspective, it's large irreversible upfront investment on capex vs ongoing opex. Sizing and building a data center is risky, execs not wanting to attach their names to $xxM data center project. Cost wise Capex are depreciated, this gives less visibility on month on month costs compared with opex which goes onto income statement. Developer work as capex is intangible asset, which has a bit more 'flexibil…

Depreciation of assets also goes on P&L so no difference on periodic visibility. Also, while not capex, prepayments/reservations for cloud services are in fact assets/liabilities so yes opex vs capex is a good high level distinction but not 100% the essence.

As the other commentor has mentioned, much easier for management to manage costs and assign to cost centers or buckets. It's a big difference to track consumption monthly based on actual instead of straight line depre, eg. depreciation hits even if everything turned off

Re: The cost of cloud

#134

Post by presentation »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #131
presentation wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. But you still pay $550/TB for traffic, right? That's 5-10x the cost of AWS, which is already very expensive. 2. What advantages does Vercel offer?

1. My workload is an early stage enterprise SaaS where traffic is not the limiting factor for our growth. If you’re planning to push a lot of bandwidth you probably want to use something else.

2. Like I said, it’s that I don’t have to spend even a minute thinking about how I’m going to deploy my app. It just listens on our git repo and runs the NPM standard build and start commands to run the app, so I don’t need to do any vendor specific configuration. We use NextJS as our web framework, so we just write pure web frontend/backend code and automatically everything’s hooked up so that it’s served with serverless infra (so I don’t have to care about scaling or machine resources ever), with a global CDN that caches the API responses we return by just attaching a Cache-Control header, which is very transparent. On top of that Vercel instruments deploys for all of our git branches so that I can see what my teammates do directly in their PRs, once again with no configuration. And if the pricing becomes an issue, all our code is just following web standards and next to no vendor-specific code exists in the app, so I can move off it any time, but really I don’t see that happening even if our SaaS 100x’d in size (which is the aim).

I really have trouble seeing how we can do less work on nor get less locked into a specific infra this way. I’m sure for resource intensive workloads it’s not ideal, but for ours, optimizing for resource efficiency by running our own stack of servers is a case of YAGNI; the simplicity of the DX is totally in our team’s favor.

Not really sure why this argument wouldn’t make sense by now, Heroku has always been expensive and yet it always has been popular since it’s so much simpler than dealing with the choice paralysis and complexity of either using the full AWS system and of running your own servers.

Re: The cost of cloud

#135

Post by presentation »

izacus wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.

And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired). So what's the balance?

I pay my engineers six figures, and my cloud bills don’t top $1000/mo. Optimizing for cloud bills is stupid in my case.

Re: The cost of cloud

#136

Post by pas »

dilyevsky wrote: post #128
pas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But at the same time "established SV companies" are already paying so much for labor costs that probably they don't want to hire anyone to run a DC for them.

(Maybe they'll really start hiring remotely. Maybe not.)

Re: The cost of cloud

#137

Post by dilyevsky »

pas wrote: post #136
dilyevsky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But at the same time "established SV companies" are already paying so much for labor costs that probably they don't want to hire anyone to run a DC for them. (Maybe they'll really start hiring remotely. Maybe not.)

Just task their existing staff to “run the dc”. Way easier to figure this out than grinding leetcodes if you ask me. Also you can rent pretty much everything in that chain these days so your existing “infra engs” can manage soft layer while you outsource all the management of hardware and below.
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