| > what's weird though is how many mega-corps are going away from Custom Hardware in Custom Built DC towards Cloud. Why is it surprising? Building and maintaining custom data centers is a big, slow business initiative. It takes months to years of forecasting to get the data center buildout to match the business needs, as opposed to the extreme flexibility of using a cloud provider. > There's also something to be said for buying a VPS or a Colo machine, making sure it's backed up and dealing with the 9's that you get from that machine on it's own. I am routinely surprised by how far a single node machine will get you. For personal projects this is exactly what I do. It’s great until something goes wrong with that one machine or VPS. But it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime. Years ago I worked at a company that tried to self-host some of their collaboration tools on a VPS to save money over the cloud-hosted versions. When the server went down it stalled productivity for a day while the team restored a backup, with another week of confusion as we tried to find all of the things that were lost between the last backup and when the server went down. When someone did the rough estimations on how much it cost to pay everyone’s salaries for that day of lost productivity, the number was far higher than the trivial cost savings we got from self-hosting. We also had a constant background burden on someone internally to maintain and monitor the server, plus the burden of them being on call. Often, moving to cloud anything can be a huge load off the company’s back. |
I don't really buy this honestly.
What you buy with cloud providers is quality tooling, not flexibility.
If you're bin-packing with Kubernetes properly then capacity is capacity and it doesn't matter if the marketing department are using it or the developers are. You just buy a bunch of servers and when you see the load approaching 70% you buy more. It's a 2 person job.
Is it harder? Yes. Definitely.
Is it a panacea? No. Not at all.
Is it universally cheaper? Also no. Definitely not.
I feel like whenever I talk about the Cloud as an expensive thing that people get emotionally defensive.
I'm not here to take your toys away.
Services like cloud are just tools and tools always have pros and cons.
If you can't reasonably discuss the con's without resorting to "I need to hire more staff" or "its a lot better than $strawman" then we're just cargo culting.
> it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime.
Most business cases for computers can just eat the downtime honestly. Your URL redirector doesn't need 5 9's. There's a grading scale of complexity and uptime, on one side you have a single hosted server that has profoundly strong uptime (especially with the redundancies in normal servers); then you start adding complexity to get HA, and weirdly: the complexity lowers the reliability.
If you keep following the line of redundancies and HA complexity, eventually you can get to a point where the service is even more reliable than a single node. Which is what everyone assumes they will get straight away, but usually it's a lot of work to get there.
> the trivial cost savings
This will differ a lot.
I made two games, one was hybrid-cloud and one was bare metal only; the cost savings were not trivial. If we had 100% clouded the hybrid deployment we would easily have paid 10x in the hosting costs which would have been enough money to pay for 250 contractors at a premium rate.
That said: the toys were definitely shiny.