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Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

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Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#171

Post by inkyoto »

nottorp wrote: post #146
RateMyPE wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. Once you start exploring all the things they have to offer you understand why so many large companies use hyperscalers. Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use…

> Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. I think it was mentioned in the article what AWS offers. Lock-in.

> Lock-in.

So do DO, OVH, Hetzner, Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM etc. Every cloud platform comes with a hard lock-in.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#172

Post by inkyoto »

mbreese wrote: post #141
RateMyPE wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. Once you start exploring all the things they have to offer you understand why so many large companies use hyperscalers. Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use…

> Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers But I think the argument is - do they need to be? How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers? For companies that need hyperscaling services, I get it. There are definite benefits to the cloud when operating at extremes (auto scaling up and down). But for the majority of workloads, I think you…

> How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers?

Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of mature cloud platforms: the customers get substantial freedom to choose from services they can instantly start using, or roll (and maintain) their own albeir at a higher cost.

I.e. if the customer wants a queue, they get a queue, and nothing else. The cloud platform abstracts away and takes care of the underlying platform that «runs» the queue and eliminates the operational overhead that comes with having to look after the message broker that provides the said queue. There are other many examples.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#173

Post by theamk »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #160
theamk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many blogposts about AWS egress being crazy expensive. Here is one: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison . Their example "image hosting" has ~$7K for AWS, vs $36 on R2, mostly due to egress costs. Yeah, maybe "AWS partner" can give a discount but I bet it'd be 10% for most, or maybe 30% tops. This won't turn $7K into $36.

AWS offers Cloudfront as an alternative to Cloudflare. Serving traffic straight from your S3 bucket is wrong. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and they really mean it - it's a low level object storage service intended for programatic usage that does exactly what you tell it without any caching or anything else, not a web hosting. Add Cloudfront and your costs will instantly lower multiple times. AWS tells you thi…

Are you sure you are AWS partner? Cloudfront is not going to "instantly lower multiple times" - it's still $0.060/GB (for US, other countries are even more expensive), so that would be at least $6K monthly bill. Its only few tens of percents reduction.

And sure, Cloudflare does not have all the breath of Amazon services, but I find it hard to justify $60 vs $6000 price difference. Amazon egress is simply incredibly overpriced, and any price-sensitive company should avoid using it.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#174

Post by thrw42A8N »

theamk wrote: post #173
thrw42A8N wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS offers Cloudfront as an alternative to Cloudflare. Serving traffic straight from your S3 bucket is wrong. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and they really mean it - it's a low level object storage service intended for programatic usage that does exactly what you tell it without any caching or anything else, not a web hosting. Add Cloudfront and your costs will instantly lower multiple times. AWS tells you thi…

Are you sure you are AWS partner? Cloudfront is not going to "instantly lower multiple times" - it's still $0.060/GB (for US, other countries are even more expensive), so that would be at least $6K monthly bill. Its only few tens of percents reduction. And sure, Cloudflare does not have all the breath of Amazon services, but I find it hard to justify $60 vs $6000 price difference. Amazon egress is simply incredibly o…

It is not overpriced, it's simply not fit for your purpose - that's all I'm saying. That's fine, use the best tool for the job - I use Cloudflare too, it's great. But there are times when the capabilities offered by AWS networking are necessary and the price is well justified for what it offers.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#175

Post by jiggawatts »

darkwater wrote: post #109
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #84

GEICO is moving away from the cloud because their IT is a joke. They had a horrible on-prem infrastructure, so they moved to the cloud not knowing how, and they made the same mistakes in the cloud as on-prem, plus the usual mistakes every cloud migration runs into. They are moving away from the cloud because their new VP's entire career is focused on running her own hardware. What we know about their new setup is abs…

> Almost every argument against the cloud - cost inefficiency, fear of vendor lock-in, etc - has easy solutions that make the whole thing extremely cost competitive, if not a way better value, than trying to become your own cloud hosting provider. It's very hard to estimate the real world costs, both known and unknown, of DIY hosting (specifically the expertise, or lack of it, and the impacts from doing it wrong, whi…

The co-location costs are relatively minor. The bulk of the cost of self-hosting comes from quantization: needing to buy 2x (for HA) of things and then not being able to use the full capacity. Things like tape libraries, Internet routers, hardware firewalls, etc...

The multi-vendor aspect can be expensive as well. There's a lot of different end-of-life issues to track, firmware to update, specialist skills to hire, and so on.

Just backup alone can be shockingly expensive, especially if it has a decently short RTO/RPO and is geo-redundant. In Azure and AWS this is a checkbox.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#176

Post by efitz »

cyberax wrote: post #82
efitz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Multitenant instances on AWS statically partition the hardware (CPU, RAM, network), so tenants don't really share all that much. You are missing several points: First, density. Cloud providers have huge machines that can run lots of VMs, and AWS in particular uses hardware (”Nitro”) for hypervisor functionality so they have very low overhead. Cloud providers also don’t do “hardware” partitioning for many instance t…

> Cloud providers can also over-provision But they don't. AWS overprovisions only on T-type instances (T3,T4,T5). The rest of the instance types don't share cores or memory between tenants. I know, I worked with the actual AWS hardware at Amazon :) AWS engineers have always been pretty paranoid about security, so they limit the hardware sharing between tenants as much as possible. For example, AWS had been strictly l…

Also former AWS :-D

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#177

Post by packetlost »

m1keil wrote: post #69
merb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 3 people it’s basically impossible to build a ha storage solution that can scale to a certain amount - it’s also impossible to keep that maintained.

Can you give a ballpark figure of what scale you have in mind?

Some distributed databases and file systems are notoriously finicky to operate; Ceph comes to mind in particular. Choice of technology and architecture matters here a lot. Content addressed storage using something like Minio with erasure codes should scale pretty easily and could be maintained by a small ops team. I personally know a couple of people that were effectively solo operations for 100PB Elasticsearch clusters, but I'd say they're more than a bit above average skill level and they actively despised Elasticsearch (and Java) coming out of it.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#178

Post by tommica »

inkyoto wrote: post #171
nottorp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep, Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers. I think it was mentioned in the article what AWS offers. Lock-in.

> Lock-in. So do DO, OVH, Hetzner, Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM etc. Every cloud platform comes with a hard lock-in.

Pretty sure those lockins are not comparable

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#179

Post by tommica »

roncesvalles wrote: post #163
ksec wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. So while it definitely isn't a major enterprise. It is also a lot more than a a few dozen servers. I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS.…

My opinion from analyzing the 37signals cloud offboard case is that it shouldn't have been done. They didn't save a whole lot of money from it (they aren't spending a whole lot on it anyway), and now their business ever so slightly loses focus. Not to mention, as you said, the quality aspects. Cloud gives you many things "for free" (like local disk RAID, network and power redundancy, datacenter compliance, in-transit…

Umm, millions saved in the future seems like a decent amount of money? Yeah, they paid for the hardware in year 0 that equals to their AWS bill, but the subsequent years that money is not spent on aws or new servers

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#180

Post by Agingcoder »

tg180 wrote: post #162
Agingcoder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I work for a very large org, and cloud benefits are not obvious to me ( ie we’re large enough to absorb the cost of a team managing k8s for everyone, another team managing our own data centers around the world etc ). I view cloud as mutualizing costs and expertise with other people ( engineers and infra), but adding a very hefty margin on top of it, along with vendor lockin. If you’re big enough to mutualize…

Yes, the profit margin for cloud providers is very real—and quite costly. I think one point that’s often overlooked is the knowledge gap between the engineers at cloud providers (such as systems, platform, or site reliability engineers) and those that an individual company, even a large one, is able to hire. This gap is a key reason why some companies are willing—or even forced—to pay the premium. If average or medio…

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer.

I agree with the gap, and I understand why people would like to pay for the premium.

Where I work currently, wherever we don’t have the right people ( and usually because we can’t find them ), our cloud-like on-premise offering doesn’t work which ends up causing significant extra costs further down the chain.

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