[Nextgrid]

I always find it funny when people brag about cost savings on cloud services while overlooking the insane premium they're paying by using the "cloud" to begin with.

It's kinda like a construction firm using a supercar to haul materials and then bragging about their efforts to make cosmetic repairs cost-effective... maybe you could just not use an overpriced car to begin with and then damage won't be an issue?

[harpratap]

Am I missing something? Isn't a $3 VM referring to a VM service in a cloud somewhere? If you try to do the same thing without cloud you'll have to end up renting space in a datacenter, install your own servers, connect to an ISP, power bills, etc etc. Cloud definitely seems cheaper in comparison

[progval]

GP and you aren't using the same definition of cloud. By cloud, they mean infrastuctures like AWS/GCP/Azure, not simple VM hosting (called VPS outside "clouds", and compute nodes in "clouds")

[harpratap]

What's the definition of "cloud" then which excludes VPS from the umbrella of services offered in cloud? Not really sure how a VPS is any different from a Google Compute Engine

[XCSme]

I think the main difference is the pricing structure. Usually "cloud" refers to the auto-scaling servers with the pay-as-you go pricing, while VPSs are usually manually instantiated and have a fixed monthly cost. Also, sometimes with VPSs you get more control over the server's settings than with "cloud" services.

So "cloud" is like renting a dynamically changing number of VPSs each month and which are usually more costly if your consumption is not spiky (eg. when a cheap VPS rented 24/7 is enough).

[dmortin]

The main advantage of the cloud for me that it provides PaaS services. You don't have to administer a VM, etc, you just use the services and it's someone else's job to install security updates and stuff.

[chillfox]

Installing updates and stuff is easy to automate.

[dmortin]

And sometimes automatic updates break and then the site may be down until you find the problem which may require much reading and therefore a longer time if you don't deal with sysadmin stuff often.

With PaaS it's someone else's job who does this every day.

[joosters]

...so someone else can install the updates that break the server? Check your SLA, no cloud provider is going to pay you much compensation when the service goes down

[chillfox]

If you stick to LTS releases and stay away from Oracle/Java then you are highly likely to never have OS updates break the application.