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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#21

Post by Atreiden »

1dom wrote: post #13
fcpk wrote: post #5

yet another obsessive take on "cloud is bad and expensive" eh? I think they vastly forget the value of some SaaS offerings in terms of time saving for small companies. running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. sure if the setup is simple and only requires a few classic components, this is way cheaper and for a 99.9%…

Not agreeing/disagreeing with your core point, but this doesn't seem right: > running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. That's a medium to large homelab worth of stuff, which means it can be run by a single nerd in their spare time.

Homelab =/= Production systems

The gulf between these two insofar as what approach, technologies, and due-diligences are necessary is vast.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#23

Post by shooker435 »

The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern.

This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.

Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.

Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#25

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #17
mnw21cam wrote: post #14

I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for. However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then…

Yeah, but in 800 months you'd come out ahead with a dedicated server in your closet.

I run a tiny local dedicated server 24/7 that consumes around 10W on average, which is about $2/mo in electricity costs where I live.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#27

Post by selectively »

ranger_danger wrote: post #7
birdman3131 wrote: post #4

As a note hetzner has a lot of auction servers and I believe they lack the setup fee

They have also threatened to cancel my account more than once because I typed "ipfs daemon". https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/issues/10327 https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/moved-ipfs-node-result-netscan-d... >This happens with Hetzner all the time because they have no VLANs and all customers are on a single LAN and IPFS tries to discover other nodes in the same LAN by default.

Hetzner is also sinkholed by lots of EDR products because they host a ton of malicious garbage. They are a bad actor.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#28

Post by pfix »

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs.

On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.

Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away from data getting out the old school way.

When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...

But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#30

Post by winddude »

Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai
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