Cloud Pricing is ridiculous ... made the comparison between a dedicated server and cloud offerings of microsoft, google, amazon ... rackspace (SO EXPENSIVE) and you pay 5 times in the cloud for the same.
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You're not paying for hardware. You're paying for hardware, expertise, services, and convenience.
On-prem or colocation may be a good choice. But limiting your comparison to raw computing power mischaracterizes the decision.
Plus, there's also a premium just for access to the ecosystem/APIs. You are often paying for the theoretical convenience of being able to spawn additional instances programmatically.
And you can use both at the same time (dynamically scale up through cloud, bare metal predictable workloads)
Turns out server admin is not my skillset, and it's caused problems, headaches and risks in the past.
I consider the additional cost going forwards in effect as our next hire and an important one. For small startups looking to save money DIY can be a good option, but moving onto the cloud at a later date can be a big burden.
If you're a small shop, this lets you concentrate on your core product instead of your systems. And by "small shop", I really mean "pretty big shop" - you're going to be a globally significant player before your Appengine charges get near a sysadmin's salary.
So far as I know, the guy who masterminded that has not been fired...
That's what kubernetes, etc. are for.
Want to build a 1TB DDR4 RAM beast with 40 cores? Yeah, you can do that with dedicated.
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...
1. Eight socket R1 (LGA 2011) supports Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4/v3 family (up to 24-Core)
2. Up to 24TB in 192 DDR4 DIMM slots
That's 192 cores / 384 threads with 24TB of DDR4 RAM
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The amount that you can vertically scale with physical servers is far above and beyond what is offered by cloud services. Although I'm impressed that Amazon is now at the 2TB DDR4 RAM level.
That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.
Why not both?
> That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.
I never claimed to build only one server. Only that dedicated scales vertically far more than cloud.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from buying multiple 4TB servers if I wanted to. The reason you go vertical is because Intel's QPI is ~25.6 GB/s (That's big-bytes: so over 200Gbit), far faster than any switch or router on the market. (10-gbit Ethernet, or maybe fiber at 40-gbit if you go really expensive)
You CANNOT scale processes faster than Intel's QPI. Vertical scaling gives you faster communications than even the most expensive switches on the market.
But nobody uses AWS 'cause it's "cheapest". That's completely missing the point.
What reasons push people to pay upfront and to commit to a solution whose main benefit is elasticity?
Because who cares about costs next year or the year after, I'm just on a 6 month contract here!
(Even more cynically, "because it's just like buying servers, but comes on the OpEx budget not the CapEx one, so _my_ KPIs look _awesome!_")
There is likely some optimal schedule where you start w cloud, order DIY replacements, and migrate, and repeat as you scale. Labour-intensive though.
No? They don't? Maybe that's because you're comparing fundamentally different things that are only superficially similar to each other.