Comment by hollander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hollander | Hacker News Reader

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On Amazon AWS you can fire up an expensive server for half an hour or even ten minutes, to do some calculations that would otherwise take days. You can even fire up 100 of those servers for 1/100th of the time if you can do that calculation in parallel.

This all can be scripted, and that makes it very powerful.

Another use case is Streisand, the VPN service that you can install on your laptop. You need an AWS account, keys etc, and then you can start up one small server as vpn for one or two hours, or for twenty minutes, each time with a different IP, from data centers all over the world. Need a server in Asia? In the EU or the US? It can set this up within the minute, if you have it configured properly.

So there are use cases for these services with price per minute. The problem with Scaleway is that they don't have the really expensive servers, and they don't have the scripting if I'm correct. I do have a server running there, cheap and not in the US, and it does its job properly.

I'm not sure the above commenter is unaware of cloud services priced by the hour. The question is more about bare metal hosts being priced in this way, which is somewhat unusual.

For what you're discussing, then a VPS/shared/dedicated VM host is more than appropriate. But generally, when companies are going bare metal, they are not doing so for hours at a time.

So the question still remains, what is the use case for an hourly billed bare metal server?

Howdy - Zac here from Packet.

The clients of ours that leverage the by-the-hour model generally use the same devops tools (Terraform, Docker Machine, Ansible, etc) against our API to provision and orchestrate bare metal that they would against AWS or DO to do the same with VM's.

The use case drivers for those who choose bare metal often seem to be price/performance ratios, network, bring your own hypervisor or not use one, etc.

But generally, when companies are going bare metal, they are not doing so for hours at a time.

But why was that? I'd say it was a problem with the supply rather than with the demand - bare metal providers didn't offer programmable, on-demand machines, and so the type of customers self-selected against those who were looking for those features.

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