[klodolph]

It's not paying by the hour that was the problem, it was the huge capex and million dollar service contracts that made people want freedom. In that sense, cloud is the opposite of mainframe: instead of, "Here, spend a million dollars and get locked into a service contract," it's, "Here, spend $0 up front and just pay for usage, then leave whenever you want."

[hapless]

To be fare, $0 up front and pay for usage used to be called "time sharing," in which the mainframe you buy time on is located on someone else's premises.

Only large and deep-pocketed users opted to lease a mainframe for their exclusive, local, use.

[ucaetano]

"Time sharing" is different from "pay for usage".

"Time sharing" is "pay X per month and use up to Y hours".

"Pay per usage" is "pay X per hour of usage, no minimum requirements".

In a time-share it can be very hard to break out of the contract.

[0xCMP]

So in a sense "reserved instances" are more like time sharing then.

[ucaetano]

Yes, far more flexible, but in some sense yes.

The key difference between cloud and the traditional mainframe model is the decoupling between usage and the assets.

Time sharing is buying a share of an asset. Reserved instances is pre-commiting to computing utilization.

[IncRnd]

> It's not paying by the hour that was the problem, it was the huge capex and million dollar service contracts that made people want freedom. In that sense, cloud is the opposite of mainframe:

Actually, it was identical according to you description. Today, there is the decision of on-prem vs of remote computing, which was the same decision then.

> instead of, "Here, spend a million dollars and get locked into a service contract," it's, "Here, spend $0 up front and just pay for usage, then leave whenever you want."

The huge capex and million dollar service contracts still exist today, for example. There have been articles posted here on HN about companies that moved to the cloud for savings, grew their business, and eventually left their cloud provider due to high costs.

[klodolph]

> Actually, it was identical according to you description. Today, there is the decision of on-prem vs of remote computing, which was the same decision then.

No, it wasn't the same decision. With cloud I can use as much or as little cloud resources as I'd like, and I only pay for what I use. Back in the day, remote computing was not like that.

> The huge capex and million dollar service contracts still exist today, for example.

Right, that's exactly what I was saying. Cloud offers an alternative to huge capex, which is the biggest drawback of mainframes, not counting the fact mainframes are difficult to second-source.

[mikestew]

There have been articles posted here on HN about companies that moved to the cloud for savings, grew their business, and eventually left their cloud provider due to high costs.

I've never been in a position to find out the hard way, but that's how "the cloud" always struck me. "Have access to the computing power of a multimillion dollar mainframe w/o buying the mainframe!" But if/when you actually need and can afford a multimillion dollar mainframe (or equivalent), cloud pricing might not be much savings.