[KronisLV]

Vouching for this, because if it's indeed a bad take, I’d like someone to explain why.

For the most part, it seems like a reasonable buy vs rent argument, except that if you try to build your own internal self-service cloud platform for the dev teams (or just have ops teams that are in charge of provisioning and running things), you also have a lot of complexity and employee time spent there, with it often being hard to get right.

I don’t thing orgs necessarily care that much about overpaying for some EC2 instances or load balancers when that lets them iterate reasonably quickly and have fewer compliance headaches and good SLAs.

[znpy]

I’m don’t 100% agree on this: this isn’t 2014 anymore, many solutions (“on prem $service”) have already been developed, are fairly known and have backing companies ready to sell you support and solutions rather than just asking you to pay rent. Example: cloudian or minio for s3-compatible storage.

[KronisLV]

There's also SeaweedFS (https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/wiki/Amazon-S3-API) and Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) that are promising, in addition to MinIO. There was also Zenko, but that one seems to be in a bit of an awkward place: https://github.com/scality/cloudserver/issues/5469

I'm all for using on-prem self hosted options when available, personally I run my own mail server (though a pre packaged version), Nextcloud, Gitea and many other services. However, that's mostly for my own personal needs and to explore the software out there.

In many of the orgs out there, especially the larger ones, telling people that they should provision their own hardware because I want to run a self hosted piece of software instead of pressing a few buttons in a web UI somewhere (or having a few scripts written and run) to provision things would be a tough sell. Even if they could get me a dedicated box somewhere, I'd still have to be responsible for managing said software, instead of just taking on the SaaS approach and not having my career be on the line for not doing everything correctly.

In practice, of course, that basically means SaaSS: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

[znpy]

in any decent organization you don't run any of the services yourself except for the software you write, an infrastructure and platform teams do that for you.

going back to on-prem doesn't mean developers need to manage their own mysql database or stuff like that.

[everforward]

The power company is almost entirely different; everywhere in the US I’m aware of caps utility profits so the “getting gouged” risk is literally illegal.

Commercial real estate leases are often for a long duration, also nullifying a lot of the gouging risk.

The downside of using S3 is that their billing model tends to create complexity around trying to use it as little as possible. Many projects will need to spend significant time on “how do we minimize S3 costs?”.

I would wager most consumers of S3 are not in the “has a high enough scale of data to have genuinely complex problems” crowd and would be basically fine with MinIO or any of the various on-premise storage vendors offering an S3 API.