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by jupp0r 842 days ago
It's a spectrum:

On top is AWS lambda or something where you are completely removed from the actual hardware that's running your code.

At the bottom is a free acre of land where you start construction and talk to utilities to get electricity and water there. You build your own data center, hire people to run and extend it, etc.

There is tons of space in between where compromises are made by either paying a provider to do something for you or doing it yourself. Is somebody from the datacenter where you rented a rack or two going in and pressing a reset button after you called them a form of cloud automation? How about you renting a root VM at Hetzner? Is that VM on prem? People who paint these tradeoffs in a black and white matter and don't acknowledge that there are different choices for different companies and scenarios are not doing the discussion a service.

On the other hand, somebody who built their business on AppEngine or CloudFlare workes could look at that other company who is renting a pet pool of EC2 instances and ask if they are even in the cloud or if they are just simulating on-prem.

2 comments

I think the question people are really interested in is usually "What percentage over my costs would I pay to outsource X?" (where X is some component of the complexity stack)

Which, first order approximated, is a function of (1) how big a company you are (aka "Can you even afford to hire two people to just do X?") and (2) how competitive the market is for X.

Colo and dedicated VMs are so reasonably priced because it's a standardized, highly-competive market.

Similarly, certain managed cloud services are ridiculously expensive because they have a locked-in customer base.

Which would suggest outsourcing components that have maximum vendor competition and standardization, as they're going to be offered at the lowest margin.

There's also a good point here (at least at the top of the stack) about reliability: the top of the spectrum goes down relatively frequently due to its dependencies, but even plain old boring EC2 has much better reliability than services like Lambda.