[rodgerd]

> There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing:

I wish it were true, but plenty of companies are gripped by cloud fever. I've seen quite a few going down the route of charging into the cloud not because they've run the numbers and found it stacks up, but because they want to be in the cloud, and Amazon have some great marketing people.

[ChuckMcM]

It is interesting coming at it from the other side, I get hit up all the time to move my infrastructure to the cloud, I give them the specs and what I pay per month, tell them that if they can beat it I'll switch. The closest anyone has come has been about 4x the cost I'm currently paying.

But I note that I have a unique case that isn't covered by the cloud "architecture" (crawling the web and indexing it). Explaining that it is "ok" if I am in the 10% not covered by your 90% solution. But sales folks never like to hear that.

[jzawodn]

Yeah, it's always fun when I tell someone at we're 100% self-hosted too. They never stop to think that traffic, load, and usage patterns on craigslist are pretty well understood at this point. Plus it's certainly cheaper than paying someone else to run all your hardware. You get to pick your peers, pick your hardware, and allocate as you see fit.

[AndyNemmity]

It's cheaper if you have a good team, which it sounds like you do.

A ton of places don't have a good team, and the cost numbers end up being a lot closer.

A great team will destroy Cloud margins. An Average-Bad team will fall in line, plus you don't have to run the team anymore.

[rdeboo]

Your comment makes sense, but it implies Netflix does not have a great team, or that it has other considerations than pure financial ones?

[jamiesonbecker]

I've had many clients on AWS rack up six-figure monthly bills unnecessarily simply because they didn't realize how to design for cost.. it's not a silver bullet. Those penny fractions add up fast. There are a lot of tricks to save money.

[brongondwana]

We run into this at FastMail all the time as well. For the one customer who needed "their own gear" we built out on SoftLayer for much the same reasons as the article - real hardware where you need it.

But our operations costs are so much lower than renting that we could replace all our hardware every year and still break even.

(yeah, we could get SoftLayer to refresh our hardware every year as well, but we don't need it refreshed that fast, and at the end we still own the hardware)

[AndyNemmity]

Often times companies move because their organization doesn't deliver, and the hope is a cloud company will do a better job of it.

If you have a great team, I firmly believe hosting yourself is far, far, far less expensive.

If you have a terrible team, then cloud (hosting) is less expensive. Even if it was exactly the same cost, you're gaining by not having to have a staff to run it, and the costs of managing them, etc etc.

Most places don't have great teams. Insert random corporation here likely has a team that is a mess for whatever reasons happen in large companies.

In that case, the Cloud makes a ton of sense for them. They've already screwed up their own organization in some way, and this is a large reset button on the whole thing.

That's worth a ton in itself.

[emodendroket]

If you're a small org with relatively small volume self-hosting doesn't make sense.

[toong]

Can you elaborate why not ?

You can get some cheap dedicated hosting (ex: [1]) for a fraction of the price.

It's so cheap compared to AWS you can order a few spare ones and still come out cheaper than your one beefy AWS instance ?

The only way it doesn't make sense is, if you need to scale up and down very fast ?

[1] 60 euro/month: Quad-Core Haswell, 32 GB (non-ECC) RAM, 240Gb SSD @ https://www.hetzner.de

[berkay]

The cost of the systems is almost irrelevant. The time of qualified people is far more expensive. Sot it's not just the elasticity. You have to look everything from the time perspective as well. What additional knowledge will I need? Will I need to learn load balancers, how to make them highly available? will I have to learn about SSL certificates and termination? Will I need to learn how to implement and operate a secure and highly available DNS service? How much is your time worth? Our hosting costs are a fraction of a single worker's salary. Whether AWS is more expensive is essentially irrelevant. OP argues that it was not doing the job for them which is an entirely different issue.

[emodendroket]

Don't forget the quality of the work. Frankly, if I'm administering servers I'm not going to do as good a job of it as someone whose whole job is that and I'm not going to do as good a job as Azure or AWS or whoever else either. Platform as a service is the way to go.

[voltagex_]

Hetzner is fantastic but if you're not in Europe, what's your latency like?

[geoka9]

There's OVH that has a big data center in Montreal.

[emodendroket]

Because if your sysadmins are all moonlighting developers having them not develop stuff to do subpar system work is more expensive than just paying the cloud premium.

[dmourati]

Reset button is worth a ton in itself. This is a really nice way of looking at it.

[yeukhon]

From personal experience this is absolutely true. The initial cost to migrate and learn the cloud practice is unbelievable, but once you have the process in place running on Amazon CAN save some cost down the road, including the hours you need to replace hardware. You will build tools or use existing tools to create your infrastructure and operation process. A generous estimation to reach a level of maturity is 1.5 year. For ever-growing business this cloud fever is acceptable.

You can definitely save cost by subscribing to reserved instances, but the downside is you have to put down money upfront, which is very hard for many small players out there.

But watch out if you run data pipeline jobs - sometimes your so-called big data is really not that big. A few GBs daily report doesn't need to run on c3.xlarge instances. They can do just fine with a 24/7 m3.large instance. There was an article on HN a while ago about how one could run a custom report with shell commands on a commodity hardware, and get 100x times performance compare to running on EMR. You can also consider running most of your jobs on premise. Ihe network banwidth in/out is probably going to be cheaper than running all of your jobs on EMR. Direct connect is a great choice to boost the connectivity stability and security. Go for it.

Cloud is great for HA, because on Amazon you are encourage to build in multi-AZ and even multi-region. S3 is absolutely the de-facto today IMO for object storage. It's cheap and reliable. The learning curve for proper Amazon (or just about any cloud provider) is really deep. You can either end up like running Black Friday sales, or running like Netflix with monkey enjoying tea.

Running on cloud is no different than running on-premise, just you have to start all over again, because now you have to re-consider network, security, monitoring, and practice.

[nnx]

"You can definitely save cost by subscribing to reserved instances, but the downside is you have to put down money upfront (...)"

This isn't required anymore. AWS introduced new Reserved Instances options few months ago, including a "no upfront" option which still gets you ~40% discount over on-demand prices.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved-instanc...

[discodave]

But if the alternative to reserved instances is buying servers then the paying upfront thing isn't so much of an issue.

[nasalgoat]

My old company moved, after I left, from a dedicated system I built that provided less than 1s response times to a cloud system that averaged 8s response times, because the company focus changed from maximizing performance to maximizing sizzle buzzwords.

I'm glad I left.

[digi_owl]

Sounds akin to the outsourcing binge that went on a decade (?!) or so back.

Back then it seemed most companies did it not because they had done the numbers, but because a few big names had done it and so the others did it to apparently piggy back on the stock markets attention.

[bnolsen]

in fact it is related to outsourcing. in the past outsourcing processing involved shipping drives of data overseas. The risk and schedule hit were big, the offshore companies had crap hardware that usually cost a lot more than it cost in the US. That quieted down for a while. The new cloud stuff got these people interested again in processing outsourcing, only now the data is shipped to google.amazon/whoever and the outsource employees use the cloud vms to run the processing. I wonder how long before this mini trend starts slowing down when they finally figure out that management overhead and poor communication is in most cases the main problem with outsourcing.

[merb]

That's cause you need to use the feature of your cloud. Run lots of servers and shoot them, when you dont need them. That's why the cloud is better than anything else. But most people just rent their xl3.large instance.