The cost of cloud

I managed a deep learning team at Capital One during the period when they dropped their own data centers and moved completely to AWS. I am 100% sure that they made the right decision. My current company also uses AWS. With modern corporate infrastructure with micro services, and buying vs. building many 3rd party services, it can make sense to go all in on Cloud.

Personally, I miss the days of monolith web applications that were relatively easy to host on a leased server. I continue to be a big fan of Hetzner and their hosted servers as well as their VPSs are very reasonably priced. Another thing that I like about Hetzner, OVH, etc. is that their bandwidth costs are also very reasonable so moving databases and monolith web applications to a similar service does not have to be a big deal.

I think that each company’s needs have to be assessed separately.

So what you're saying is on premises you need competence to do things but in cloud incompetence is no problem!

These are arguments that wreak of developers who don't see the need to worry about things like 'cost,' 'reliability' and 'efficiency' because of the need to be 'innovative' and breaking stuff faster to win the market.

I'm sure it's fine so long as the developers are really competent.

Umm. why wouldn't you run Ceph yourself? It speaks S3. (It has an component called RGW - Rados gateway, completely stateless, scalable, implementats the S3 ACL Policy xml)

And yes, running it has a cost.

But it's also has the advantage that devs can run it locally in docker easily. CI can spin up endless test clusters.

And so on.

Obviously you are right that the right way to compare cloud vs non-cloud is to look at the full picture. And that also means we need the context.

Small/hobby project? Doesn't matter. You can run on your own toaster or on Oracle cloud or on AWS/GCP/Azure. Just do what you want, the costs are negligible.

Operating business with stable well predicted size? Again, do whatever you want. If IT is a big part and costs matter, optimize for cost and run it on a few dedicated boxes. If you are not cost sensitive and you want to be one of the cool kids run it in AWS or whatever. (We have a client that exists for 25+ years, reached its optimal size, does some innovations from time to time, but it is basically a new website or app. The underlying backend is the same, maybe they'll replace it eventually. Probably with a complete SaaS and then they'll only need to host a landing page.)

Large multinational company with more departments than sanity? Again do whatever you want, likely you have bigger problems than the cloud bill or the inability to run one more app in your DC.

"Unicorn" startup? Crunch the numbers, do what makes sense. Everyone knows that "Netflix went full AWS" but maybe not everyone knows that they went full on-prem CDN more with their hundreds/thousand (s) of local caches at ISPs / IXPs.

And so on.

Thank you for sharing this, it helps clear up the concern you had a lot.

I deal with some big German clients fairly frequently and one of the requirements is "[they] own the entire stack top to bottom, back to front." A lot of dark site operations I work on also share a similar requirement, so really it's why I'm far more open and comfortable with an all on premises situation since I see the scaling done without any public cloud.

From what I do work with on public cloud sure, I absolutely get why it is so easy to scale if you don't already have a good team to build and orchestrate a local set up. I also see some big name companies I contract with just throw money onto a fire fueled by Azure, and while the expenditure hurts sure, it's still considered acceptable.

I guess I probed because I see a lot of different sides of modern architecture and aside from a well documented and disciplined one, I'm not sure there's a right thing with modern architecture, just different comfort zones with different efficiencies.

Depreciation of assets also goes on P&L so no difference on periodic visibility. Also, while not capex, prepayments/reservations for cloud services are in fact assets/liabilities so yes opex vs capex is a good high level distinction but not 100% the essence.