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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#31

Post by alberth »

bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring 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 server.

B. If you are going to fully utilize a resource and don’t want to purchase/own it - then a service provider needs to provide that asset to you around cost and make margin from the efficiency from scale they have. Example, it’s actually more expensive for me to buy all of the ingredients to make a hamburger than to simply buy a fully prepared hamburger for McDonalds. McDonald’s is able to provide this due to their scale.

What I’ve seen is that when you’re in Group B, many people are finding that AWS/etc is way more expensive. Essentially, their scale in efficiency is not being passed down to the customer in cost savings. And the sizable cost premium is not worth the value received in return.

I’ll give a good example of where this does make sense, and that’s Hetzner or OVH. Their scale allows them to procure & host dedicated servers at a price I’d be difficult to match doing it myself. Or even if I could beat their price, it would be minimally. But folks are finding that with AWS/etc, that premium is extreme and that’s where the equation is unbalanced for folks.

Re: The cost of cloud

#32

Post by ocdtrekkie »

awill wrote: post #29
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.

when looking at these things, you always need to look over the long term. Sure, December wasn't great, but how was all of 2021 overall? It's also not just cost/availability, but flexibility and scalability. Most high-growth startups would have not been able to scale quickly enough pre-cloud. Facebook is literally the unicorn.

My datacenter has better uptime than AWS across all of 2021. Pretty sure in December alone, Amazon did worse than I've done in the past couple years combined. I have also enjoyed not being affected by various Azure or Microsoft 365-related outages throughout the year.

Scalability is a niche perk of the cloud, absolutely. I work somewhere that has a customer base that does not meaningfully scale, so it's not a concern for me. But then: Once an organization has established and has a relatively predictable scale rate, they should exit the public cloud if they can.

An established company with a stable capacity need shouldn't ever be moving to a cloud provider with a generous big tech profit margin. But that also poses a risk for the scalability of the cloud: If you don't have people overpaying for stable capacity usage, can the cloud provider afford tons of extra capacity for flexible needs?

Re: The cost of cloud

#33

Post by matdehaast »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #26
awill wrote: post #25

These types of posts rarely measure operational cost. Anybody can buy infrastructure and stick it behind an API. But can you make it fault tolerant with high availability and low latency. Can you do all of that and _still_ beat AWS's costs? For the vast majority of customers the answer is no. I used to work at a medium sized company, and they saved millions by moving to the cloud, and gained much better availability/…

My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.

AWS/Cloud have seemed to create this fallacy that dedicated hardware/on-prem fails far more than actual reality.

Re: The cost of cloud

#34

Post by initplus »

bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring 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…

I'm not even sure it's cheaper. At a previous employer we had approximately 150k of cloud expenses per annum. Bringing that in house would have eclipsed the cloud expenses on additional staffing costs alone.

Re: The cost of cloud

#35

Post by 0xB31B1B »

Clubber wrote: post #2

I'm sure people will disagree, but I've always viewed the main benefit of cloud is a company with no talent or time to do networking / infrastructure early on, so they use the cloud, which requires less expertise. Once they grow and can afford network / infrastructure talent, the switching costs are hard to justify, even with the 3x markup (according to the article). I can see why it's compelling, but for me running…

The issue is that the 3x cost doesn’t include the cost to staff the team that runs your in-house platform software on your colo setup, and the mixed incentives you get when a sizable part of your team is not shipping product but instead shipping say, Kafka queues. My previous employer has one of the largest colo deployments of the f500 companies and it was a mess technically and organizationally. At the end a few hundred infra devs were laid off and projects scrapped after ~24 months of no visible progress on platform stability and support.

Re: The cost of cloud

#36

Post by AnthonyMouse »

taspeotis wrote: post #16
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? Yes. > How hard is it to configure and maintain? Very few things are harder to configure or maintain than they are on a cloud service, because if they were, someone (e.g. you) would get frustrated and make them easier, and then they wouldn't be for anyone else. > Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? Ah yes, S3 can handle serving that many reque…

I believe both Azure and AWS (probably GCP too) have built in DDOS mitigations for free. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-s... You might be on the hook for bandwidth costs from a more sophisticated attack though.

That isn't very specific about how it works ("defends against the most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks" whatever that means), but it sounds like they're going to drop weird looking packets.

The problem is, one of the more common types of DDoS is that the attacker has a botnet with a million machines in it and has them all make legitimate requests to your service all day, thereby overloading it. This looks just like a large volume of legitimate requests, because it is. S3 or similar isn't going to get overloaded, but then what stops you from getting a bill the size of the moon?

To do otherwise they'd either have to be able to distinguish these from legitimate requests (how?) or give you free traffic when you claim you were under a DDoS that they can't distinguish from a large volume of legitimate traffic (unlikely).

Re: The cost of cloud

#37

Post by lixtra »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32
awill wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when looking at these things, you always need to look over the long term. Sure, December wasn't great, but how was all of 2021 overall? It's also not just cost/availability, but flexibility and scalability. Most high-growth startups would have not been able to scale quickly enough pre-cloud. Facebook is literally the unicorn.

My datacenter has better uptime than AWS across all of 2021. Pretty sure in December alone, Amazon did worse than I've done in the past couple years combined. I have also enjoyed not being affected by various Azure or Microsoft 365-related outages throughout the year. Scalability is a niche perk of the cloud, absolutely. I work somewhere that has a customer base that does not meaningfully scale, so it's not a concern…

> An established company with a stable capacity need shouldn't ever be moving to a cloud provider with a generous big tech profit margin.

I’m not a fan of the cloud. But if you’re too small to have your own data center and support team, the cloud is absolutely a good option.

Re: The cost of cloud

#38

Post by ddorian43 »

awill wrote: post #25

These types of posts rarely measure operational cost. Anybody can buy infrastructure and stick it behind an API. But can you make it fault tolerant with high availability and low latency. Can you do all of that and _still_ beat AWS's costs? For the vast majority of customers the answer is no. I used to work at a medium sized company, and they saved millions by moving to the cloud, and gained much better availability/…

But can they make bandwidth 1000x more expensive?

Re: The cost of cloud

#39

Post by benjaminwootton »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #23
savant_penguin wrote: post #19

"My rough estimate is that the unit cost of provisioning a service on AWS is about 3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house." The word competent here is doing a lot of weight lifting. I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds

> I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds If those companies ever migrated to AWS it would probably still take months to get a small EC2 instance allocated to them. Likely the problem is bureaucracy, not competence.

Hacking away at that beuracracy is one of the main advantages of moving to cloud. Maybe it all comes back in the end, but for a while it is definetly a source of speed and agility.

Re: The cost of cloud

#40

Post by trabant00 »

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of listenting to people who can't do it explain that what I do every day can't or should not be done.
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