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The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using

The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. If it makes things difficult, you shouldn't be using it. It is overhyped and it sucks for most use case.

JohnMakin 3y ago
> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. economy of scale says hello
justin_oaks 3y ago
> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. This is a simplistic view that doesn't discuss any of the trade-offs inherent in the choice between running your own hardware and using a cloud service. Yes, it's a higher price, but it allows you to stop paying for it when you stop needing it. You can scale up rapidly. You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware. You can rent servers much the same once you at least have a bit of scale. It's never colocation or cloud. There are lots of in-betweens.
  - magikstm 3y ago
    Exactly. Cloud is often viewed as if these don't exist: - Dedicated servers - Managed hosting - VPS - etc. Most small to medium-sized enterprise could opt for such options instead of the cloud.
BozeWolf 3y ago
until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself. Or order purestorage appliances for 3 datacenters you have your hardware in. And then realize dc 1 does not physically have enough space to add more storage servers. But you need that third site. There is no convenient 4th “spare” site. Let alone 100 across the world. Or that your business has to replace a router on one of the dcs and then you have to do all the work to ensure nothing goes down yourself. You cant blame anyone if it goes bad. Then you realize how much work that is. The cloud is really convenient. Source: Always worked “in the cloud”. Current client is on premise(s) for solid reasons. A very unusual case though. Fun. Inconvenient. Makes you respect the big clouds even more.
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  > until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself Have you never heard of a colo? Rent 1-2 racks in one of those. And you probably won't need more than 1-2 racks because that's what Stack Overflow runs on.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself. And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack. I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps. When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled. When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers. Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server. Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it. > Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows! > I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server. Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad? > Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.
efitz 3y ago
With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view. Of course if you have the staff you could do all the things they do in the cloud, on-premises. If you had the staff. And the skills. And the money. And you wanted to spend your finite devops resources deploying and monitoring a data center. Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical. And backup generators for the HVAC. And the personnel to design and specify the racks and the hardware in them (all of the different configs you need). And to assemble and connect the equipment. And to maintain it when something breaks. And the network engineers to design your network and deploy and maintain it. And do it again in a different place for geographic redundancy. And, if you have any money and personnel left, then you can think about a virtualization infrastructure (because of course who would be stupid enough to buy VMware when you could build your own open source equivalent around HVM or whatever. And now you’ve got like a tiny fraction of what the cloud can offer. And I guarantee you that the TCO is way higher than you expected and that your uptime is a 9 or two short of what a cloud provider would give you. I’d you are running a single cloud-scale workload (Google Search or Dropbox or Outlook.com) then you probably can do better financially with your own optimized data center. But you almost certainly can’t beat cloud for heterogeneous workloads. And the biggest benefit of all is savings in opportunity cost as your tech people can focus on your own unique business problems and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to others.
- efitz 3y ago
  Downvoted? Really?
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    I dunno, I suspect hosting and cloud became one and the same thing some place in your post. From what I understand you need both a large or complex computational load and a lot of traffic before clouds should become the weapon of choice. But Im not entirely sure.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    I don’t think you deserve a downvote but I can give you my take having worked at a lot of places that did their own infra as well as cloud. You don’t need to physically rack servers, lots of systems integration vendors and remote hands will gladly put servers together for you. Most colos will gladly help you figure out connectivity. And there are lots of vendors, like Cisco, who will deliver a rack to your datacenter with virtualization software installed and everything, plug and play.. My point is there isn’t an either/or choice of using the cloud or building the universe from scratch, there are so many available options in-between. And while those options aren’t available conveniently behind an API and might require a few old school phone calls, you can save millions of dollars, get access to better performing hardware, have better control over data sovereignty, and 90%less lock-in if you choose to go down that road. It’s not for everyone but a /lot/ of workloads that people are running in the cloud can be done better elsewhere.
thegaulofthem 3y ago
I work in one of those pesky HIPPO companies. For us, all of our AWS infrastructure up to including nifty shit like Cognito is HITRUST certified. For us, we get to offload an ass of compliance headache which is worth our 2-4x multiple as the server overhead is far less than a team of compliance and security wonks.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
That's basically just the definition of the word "renting". If the owner is doing their job right, it's always more expensive than owning, but it still makes financial sense to rent in many scenarios.

JohnMakin 3y ago

> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. economy of scale says hello

justin_oaks 3y ago

> The cloud is renting someone else's computer at a way higher price than it would cost you to use your own. This is a simplistic view that doesn't discuss any of the trade-offs inherent in the choice between running your own hardware and using a cloud service. Yes, it's a higher price, but it allows you to stop paying for it when you stop needing it. You can scale up rapidly. You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware.

re-thc 3y ago
> You don't have to deal with buying, maintaining, or replacing hardware. You can rent servers much the same once you at least have a bit of scale. It's never colocation or cloud. There are lots of in-betweens.
- magikstm 3y ago
  Exactly. Cloud is often viewed as if these don't exist: - Dedicated servers - Managed hosting - VPS - etc. Most small to medium-sized enterprise could opt for such options instead of the cloud.

BozeWolf 3y ago

until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself. Or order purestorage appliances for 3 datacenters you have your hardware in. And then realize dc 1 does not physically have enough space to add more storage servers. But you need that third site. There is no convenient 4th “spare” site. Let alone 100 across the world. Or that your business has to replace a router on one of the dcs and then you have to do all the work to ensure nothing goes down yourself. You cant blame anyone if it goes bad. Then you realize how much work that is. The cloud is really convenient. Source: Always worked “in the cloud”. Current client is on premise(s) for solid reasons. A very unusual case though. Fun. Inconvenient. Makes you respect the big clouds even more.

TexanFeller 3y ago
> until you realize you have to build a datacenter yourself Have you never heard of a colo? Rent 1-2 racks in one of those. And you probably won't need more than 1-2 racks because that's what Stack Overflow runs on.
- scarface74 3y ago
  And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself. And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators. When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack. I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps. When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled. When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers. Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server. Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)? And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it. > Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself. Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows! > I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server. Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad? > Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

efitz 3y ago

With all due respect this is a trivial and misleading point of view. Of course if you have the staff you could do all the things they do in the cloud, on-premises. If you had the staff. And the skills. And the money. And you wanted to spend your finite devops resources deploying and monitoring a data center. Yes it’s possible to buy your own building, and your own DS3/OC3. And HVAC. And electrical. And backup generators for the HVAC. And the personnel to design and specify the racks and the hardware in them (all of the different configs you need). And to assemble and connect the equipment. And to maintain it when something breaks. And the network engineers to design your network and deploy and maintain it. And do it again in a different place for geographic redundancy. And, if you have any money and personnel left, then you can think about a virtualization infrastructure (because of course who would be stupid enough to buy VMware when you could build your own open source equivalent around HVM or whatever. And now you’ve got like a tiny fraction of what the cloud can offer. And I guarantee you that the TCO is way higher than you expected and that your uptime is a 9 or two short of what a cloud provider would give you. I’d you are running a single cloud-scale workload (Google Search or Dropbox or Outlook.com) then you probably can do better financially with your own optimized data center. But you almost certainly can’t beat cloud for heterogeneous workloads. And the biggest benefit of all is savings in opportunity cost as your tech people can focus on your own unique business problems and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to others.

efitz 3y ago
Downvoted? Really?
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  I dunno, I suspect hosting and cloud became one and the same thing some place in your post. From what I understand you need both a large or complex computational load and a lot of traffic before clouds should become the weapon of choice. But Im not entirely sure.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  I don’t think you deserve a downvote but I can give you my take having worked at a lot of places that did their own infra as well as cloud. You don’t need to physically rack servers, lots of systems integration vendors and remote hands will gladly put servers together for you. Most colos will gladly help you figure out connectivity. And there are lots of vendors, like Cisco, who will deliver a rack to your datacenter with virtualization software installed and everything, plug and play.. My point is there isn’t an either/or choice of using the cloud or building the universe from scratch, there are so many available options in-between. And while those options aren’t available conveniently behind an API and might require a few old school phone calls, you can save millions of dollars, get access to better performing hardware, have better control over data sovereignty, and 90%less lock-in if you choose to go down that road. It’s not for everyone but a /lot/ of workloads that people are running in the cloud can be done better elsewhere.

thegaulofthem 3y ago

I work in one of those pesky HIPPO companies. For us, all of our AWS infrastructure up to including nifty shit like Cognito is HITRUST certified. For us, we get to offload an ass of compliance headache which is worth our 2-4x multiple as the server overhead is far less than a team of compliance and security wonks.

TheCoelacanth 3y ago

That's basically just the definition of the word "renting". If the owner is doing their job right, it's always more expensive than owning, but it still makes financial sense to rent in many scenarios.