You're comparing a home desktop (or a single data center) to a battle tested globally accessible infrastructure. With experts running it.
Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".
Yes that's a loaded statement but so is comparing "the cloud" to "a desktop".
I've had degraded instances screw my customers websites many many times in AWS. On our VMware cluster I never have any such issues because I make sure not to touch anything running production sites
Except that most cloud providers offer replication and load balancing, integrated directly into their other products already. They spent a lot of time making sure that it works so you don't have to.
Yes, shit happens. But shit happens everywhere, and it is far more likely to happen when you run your own bare metal if you don't pump sufficient time and resources into it, than at the company that has hired thousands of engineers and ops people specifically to provide these services.
They have stuff that will allow you to make your stuff redundant if you know how to architect, configure, and deploy it, but you don't get these benefits just by becoming an AWS customer. You have to know how to set up an ELB just the same as you have to know how to set up haproxy on bare metal.
Is it easier to configure an ELB than a haproxy instance? Probably, but it's not that much harder, and configuration is mostly a one-time cost. Pay someone on staff to spend a couple of hours testing and configuring haproxy or pay 3x more than you should every month to rent VMs on Amazon? Which one is cheaper over "the long term"?
All you're doing is renting some space in a server. The configuration is still mostly up to the user. Hardware requires maintenance, yes, but people are really hamming up both the frequency and difficulty of hardware maintenance.
Have you ever used EC2 with traditional apps hoisted onto the cloud? Just because you can click a button for ELB doesn't mean anything when the system wasn't horizontally scalable to begin with. EC2 is just VMs, it doesn't provide any high availability at the VM level.
With local solutions (e.g. vmware/kvm/openstack), you can live migrate these annoying (but critical) pets around as you phase out hardware with very limited traffic interruption. With EC2, the thing eventually just shits the bed and you get a notice saying the instance will be retired even though it's already in a worthless state.
Glad to hear the vmware cluster is working out for you. Anecdotal but I've seen people having issues without touching vmware too. One personal experience doesn't diminish the cloud. Maybe different business needs? One sysadmin maintaining customer websites vs multi-person team managing a web app?
I'm not against running your own servers. Bare metal is fun, interesting, and possible. I'm just against blanket statements that "it's bare metal or nothing!".