The free market can sort something like this out, but it requires some things to work. There need to be competitors offering similar products, people need to have the ability to switch to using those competitors, and they need to be able to get information about the strengths and weaknesses of the different offerings (so they can know their current vendor has a problem and that another vendor doesn't have that problem). The free market isn't magic, but neither are business regulations. Both have failure modes you have to guard against.
This is a non sequitur. I know how to self host my infra, but I’ve been using cloud services for the last 15 years because it means I don’t have to deal with self hosting my infra. It runs completely by itself (mostly managed services, including k8s) and the only time I need to deal with it is when I want to change something.
BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)
For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.
I have found Claude Code is a great help to me. Yes, I can and have tinkered a lot over the decades, but I am perfectly happy letting Claude drive the system administration, and advise on best practices. Certainly for prototype configurations. I can install CC on all VPSes and local machines. NixOS sounds great, but the learning curve is not fun. I installed the CC package from the NixOS unstable channel and I don't have to learn the funky NixOS packaging language. I do have to intervene sometimes as the commands go by, as I know how to drive, so maybe not a solution for true newbies. I can spend a few hours learning how to click around in one of the cloud consoles, or I can let CC install the command line interfaces and do it for me. The $20/mo plan is plenty for system administration and if I pick the haiku model, then CC runs twice as fast on trivial stuff like system administration.
Let's take an example: a managed database, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, vs. a self-hosted one. If you need reasonable uptime, you need at least one read replica. But replication breaks sometimes, or something goes wrong on the master DB, particularly over a period of years.
Are you really going to trust Claude Code to recover in that situation? Do you think it will? I've had DB primaries fail on managed DBs like AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, and recovery is generally automatic within minutes. You don't have to lift a finger.
Same goes for something like a managed k8s cluster, like EKS or GKE. There's a big difference between using a fully-managed service and trying to replicate a fully managed system on your own with the help of an LLM.
Of course it does boil down to what you need. But if you need reliability and don't want to have to deal with admin, managed services can make life much simpler. There's a whole class of problems I simply never have to think about.
Cloud is not great for GPU workloads. I run a nightly workload that takes 6-8 hours to run and requires a Nvidia GPU, along with high RAM and CPU requirements. It can't be interrupted. It has a 100GB output and stores 6 nightly versions of that. That's easily $600+ a month in AWS just for that one task. By self-hosting it I have access to the GPU all the time for a fixed up front relatively low cost and can also use the HW for other things (I do). That said, these are all backend / development type resources, self hosting customer facing or critical things yourself is a different prospect, and I do use cloud for those types of workloads. RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting. My point is that "literally anything else" is extreme, as always, it is "right tool for the job".
It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error? If youre not working at faang your employer likely cares too. Especially if its your own business you would care. You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?
> It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error?
This is such an imaginary problem. The examples like this you hear about are inevitably the outliers who didn't pay any attention to this issue until they were forced to.
For most services, it's incredibly easy to constrain your costs anyway. You do have to pay attention to the pricing model of the services you use, though - if a DDOS is going to generate a big cost for you, you probably made a bad choice somewhere.
> You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?
Only if it's something you're interested in doing, or if you're so big you can hire a team to deal with that. Otherwise, why would you waste time on it?
> For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense.
... or for a big company. I've worked at companies with thousands of developers, and it's all been 'self hosted'. In DCs, so not rinky dink, but yes, and there's a lot of advantages to doing it this way. If you set it up right, it can be much easier for developers to use than AWS.
"I'd like to spend the next sprint on S3 endpoints by default"
"What will that cost"
"A bunch of unnecessary resources when it's not used"
"Will there be extra revenue?"
"Nah, in fact it'll reduce our revenue from people who meant to use it and forgot before"
"Let's circle back on this in a few years"