The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#151

Post by epberry » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 6:54 PM UTC

red-iron-pine wrote: post #143

epberry wrote: post #15

This post, along with this Simon Wardley thread, https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1088780650860158978?s=20 , attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up. I started helping maintain https://ec2instances.info in my spare time and the code base is literally fu…

> attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up. absolutely. massive struggle at the orgs I've been / am at. processes for provisioning new resources haven't changed, and a lot of teams kind of push their own builds, or get reservations for X amount of space and…

Yeah. In an infrastructure as code setup there's some more rigor that can be applied, at least in terms of tagging what's going out. But I've generally seen the finops team come in and optimize ex post facto.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#152

Post by asah » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #66

tommek4077 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck negotiating data transfer costs with AWS.

What do you mean? I did the AWS negotiation for a small but rapidly growing startup and that was one of the negotiables, there was no real problem getting discounts.

+1 I've also negotiated transfer costs and in fact AWS has a semi-published discounting schedule for volume customers.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#153

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

plonk wrote: post #71

nonrandomstring wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with media folks about the real cost and advantages of "cloud". One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite a good thing, and what's lovely about "cloud" - as in the ability to quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for months can be imag…

What do you mean by asymmetry?

The cloud providers are so large that they don’t really need you. It’s all about churn management at the macro level. With hardware and software, there’s always an end of quarter leverage point.

I spent most of my career in large enterprises. The leverage you have against AWS or Microsoft is 0 compared to the old days. They are probably landing more infrastructure every month than my global company had in datacenters 15 years ago.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#154

Post by entropyie » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57

bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than…

Don't forget that if you live in a cooler climate, server heat can offset heating bills if you host at home.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#155

Post by senderista » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #91

nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS was basically built as an internal product to support the retail business, and then they realized that they can sell it.

There's been several articles posted here over the years from people that worked at Amazon at the time saying this is just a myth.

Yes, hence the "MAWS" (Move to AWS) initiative to actually make retail services run on AWS (took many years).

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#156

Post by calvinmorrison » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #134

TacticalCoder wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it Uptime? There have been quite a few catastrophic cloud failures. And some lasted hours. Five nine is something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. The clouds aren't anywhere near that.

Do you really think on-prem has more uptime than commercial cloud? For non-tech companies, no even close. Commercial cloud is adding nines to uptime and saving money by removing in-house IT admin staff.

the biggest miscalculation is really on expected uptime. People say they need 5 nines, yet take their car in for service twice a year for a tire rotation and oil change. How much uptime is _really_ required?