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

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

#41

Post by flukus »

jedberg wrote: post #39
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…

What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

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

#42

Post by ExoticPearTree »

asah wrote: post #19

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

> this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers?

As long as you know your predicted growth yes. Cloud providers are operating "efficiently" because they do oversubscription on a lot of services. You don't really think that those 8 vCPUs are dedicated to your VM only, do you?

Also, the thing with cloud are the managed services that make it easy for developers to process/exchange data, like Amazon SQS or cloud functions and things like this.

Like the first comment says, if you know what you are doing, it is quite easy actually to host your infrastructure on-prem.

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

#43

Post by nonrandomstring »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #25

Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well…

> "You’re crazy if you don't start in the cloud; you're crazy if you stay on it"

Spot on. Gonna have to steal that for my next meeting.

Although, given the potential Cavium-Marvell TPM issue viz ECC and that we're not really there with homomorphic compute, I might make a caveat for developers working on very sensitive new ideas; Keep it on-prem until you have a good enough security segmentation to push out what you're happy with on untrusted cloud infra.

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

#44

Post by xur17 »

flukus wrote: post #41
jedberg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

Agreed - 1gbps is a surprising amount of bandwidth, you could easily host a fairly popular mobile app, saas, etc with plenty of breathing room. And in a lot of cases, you can just move your static file hosting behind Cloudflare, or onto something like s3, and give yourself even more room to grow.

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

#45

Post by macNchz »

jedberg wrote: post #39
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…

What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.

Additionally, if the company starts to grow you can hire other people who are familiar with the cloud provider (and it has extensive documentation). The last company I worked at that had stuff running on a rack in the office just had a "Keep Calm and Sudo On" printout taped to the cage and the guy who'd set it all up had quit.

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

#46

Post by tight-ship »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #25

Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well…

> Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale".

And by scale, I think companies should be at least in the double digit millions spent in cloud infrastructure before they start building out their own. Everybody is used to the cloud APIs and going back to the old days of managing things in a static datacenter are not coming back for these companies.

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

#48

Post by jeffbee »

Glyptodon wrote: post #6

I've always thought the mysterious bit was that cloud doesn't seem like it ever gets cheaper while the cost difference between cloud and own infra and profit associated with AWS suggest it could be. Is there something structurally wrong with competition in cloud?

That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy Bridge vCPU cost $71/month, in 2014 dollars, or $90 today. But today you can get a machine of the same size class, with a dramatically faster CPU, at $30/month.

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

#49

Post by VirusNewbie »

Dropbox has the pay, clout, and pipeline to have zero problems with recruiting talent.

Can the same be said of all F500 companies that may want to basically engineer their own cloud? Because the dev team is almost certainly used to all the convenience of the cloud, so you'll need a good infra team.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

flukus wrote: post #41
jedberg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off? That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.

Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.

[deleted]
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