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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#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 my stuff on other people's servers in this day and age is concerning. Like many computing things, it really depends on the situation.

Re: The cost of cloud

#3
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…

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you?

Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

Re: The cost of cloud

#4
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…

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

That's a good point. Redundancy requires more cost and more expertise, but as a counter argument, AWS has had its share of outages lately as well.

Re: The cost of cloud

#5
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…

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

+1. On top of this if you need to provide slos on availability, diaster recovery, respect regionalized requirements, even with a technical playbook just acquiring physical space gets hard and expensive real quick!

Re: The cost of cloud

#6
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…

Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?

Any decent IT team will backup, replicate, shard, to different locations, and not rely on a single datacenter.

As said in the blog post, with the cloud you will get the same thing that you can pay your inhouse IT for 3 times the price.

For example, lots of people are thinking that by just using 'the cloud', your data is safe / replicated to multiple geographically separated areas. But no, it is not automatic, it needs to be configured like that with the associated costs. If you lose an ec2 instance, it will be lost in the same way as a node in your personal data center.

Re: The cost of cloud

#8
These 3x calculations for cloud almost always ignore a real TCO calculation for a real organization and real app deployment and rarely compare capability, flexibility and recovery which have real value, but have tough calculations.

Re: The cost of cloud

#10
I think the mistake is often made by comparing primitives. E.g. running my own RAID vs S3. Colo traffic vs AWS traffic.

But what about comparing the whole ecosystem?

Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? How hard is it to configure and maintain?

Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack?

When you run your own services, you have to reinvent so much it doesn’t seem to be worth it.

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