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by sundache 222 days ago
> If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

I keep seeing this take on here and it just shows most people don't actually know what you can do off the cloud. Hertzner allows you to rent servers by the hour, so you can just do that and only pay for the 2-3 days you need them.
1 comments
zelphirkalt 222 days ago
Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if one is willing to spend that much.

More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios and the server will be ready to handle that with lower hardware specs.

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8fingerlouie 222 days ago
There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the middle of the month, as in factor 10+.

People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier.

Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million customers or more, the load is not really insignificant. Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual consistency.

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sundache 222 days ago
But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an argument why you have to use the cloud.
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8fingerlouie 222 days ago
The actual hardware (or virtual these days) is not the problem, but getting the 5000-10000 services properly connected with auditing, credentials and more is more trouble than most people expect.

Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so there’s a LOT of compliance that needs to happen, like segregation of duty, traceability, accountability, and other ilities.

Yes, it would probably cost less to run on Hetzner (provided their ISO audits are approved by financial authorities), but dynamically spinning up and down servers would cost more.

You also need fallback plans (regulated industry, critical infrastructure, etc).

It has literally taken years to get AWS and Azure approved in EU.

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zelphirkalt 222 days ago
Anything that wants to adhere to GDPR should still be very careful, if not outright avoid, AWS and Azure. At most one could use an EU-isolated offspring of them, otherwise one runs into the insanity of US laws. The fact that many businesses don't care doesn't make it right.
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