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Comment by blaisio | Hacker News Reader

The hardware and bandwidth costs are only small parts of the full cost of running your own infrastructure. There are so many other benefits:

- you don't have to support your own low level services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Spanner, etc.

- you don't have to worry as much about things like HIPAA compliance

- developers don't have to wait for you to allocate more hardware, greatly slowing down the software development process

- it's much easier to test your applications, since you can spin up a full copy using rented infrastructure, and then throw it all away once your tests are complete

- many other benefits that I'm forgetting

And of course if you buy enough from them, you do get additional discounts.

For many (most? I don't have data) companies, the actual cost of the infrastructure and bandwidth itself is tiny compared to all the other "hidden costs".

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So having experienced Ops in both cloud and non cloud companies. A few rebuttals:

- Bandwidth is VERY expensive in AWS compared to what you can buy in Datacenters. A 1 GBPS connection is so "cheap" you can get it and a 42U rack at HE.net for $400/mo ( http://he.net/colocation.html ). That same 1GBPS is roughly 300TB/month. Assuming it's all outbound - that's roughly $21k in AWS.

So bandwidth is a small cost IF you're not moving large amounts of data out of AWS. If you stream media - it can be a HUGE portion of your bill.

- HIPAA Compliance - That and other compliance aspects assumes that you need those compliance frameworks. In enterprise world that might be the case (SOC2 and ISO27k1 are very common requirements for Enterprise SaaS clients). However in the B2C? Users don't care.

- Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare, typically. Developers can use that for their tests. You can also have your datacenter/operations group work with your developers during project planning so the code and HW can be ready at the same time.

That being said, I don't disagree there are advantages to the cloud. I'm AWS certified, I drink the coolaid. But saying that there are "so many other benefits" is ignoring the fact that there are "so many benefits" to on prem too. There are pro's and cons to both sides.

> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare

Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.

First of all, as the sibling comment mentioned, no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition. Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare. Spinning up a new instance in VMware is not harder (in fact easier) than in AWS and hardware costs are SO much cheaper than Amazon's margins.

Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.

I beg to differ, I am a systems engineer for a Fortune 500 retailer, and my team has been waiting weeks, and have been told it will be some time next year, for some vmware instances we need.

That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional.

I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.

I'm glad that I'm not alone in that experience (albeit from the development side). A two week turnaround for a development VM would be amazing; on average, we're closer to a month from request to logging in.

I've actually seen some customers span their openstack cluster across on prem & gcp. Giving them the ability to dynamically scale new hypervisor nodes on GCP.

This works great for gaming companies who can see 10x loads during the first few weeks/months of a new video game release.

I've had this experience as well at a Fortune 500.

Several of my family members and relatives who work in big corporations have waited months for a new server. It is more common than you think, and often it has nothing to do with physical capacity but rather bureaucracy and compliance overhead.

> no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition

I work for a Fortune 500 where we have to wait weeks for hardware. This is not unusual at non-tech companies.

I guess you've never worked for a large enterprise? The amount of beaurocracy and time wasting is staggering - where I work it takes days at a minimum to get a new VM up, but usually weeks.

> Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare.

I don't understand this argument. Startups usually do not have money to have physical servers sitting around just waiting to be utilized, not to mention the IT resources to stand up those servers just in case someone might need them later. You're saying that everyone has a ton of servers sitting in the rack just waiting to have containers deployed to them? Who?

It's about bin packing. Underutilized servers can have more VMs packed into them. Not physical servers sitting around unused, but additional capacity on in-use machines.

you can do `bin packing` with k8s as well. Allowing you to have a best of both worlds.

From k8s webpage (https://kubernetes.io/): "Automatically places containers based on their resource requirements and other constraints, while not sacrificing availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads in order to drive up utilization and save even more resources."

Bin packing is the actual academic term for this class of problems so the intended snark in using quotes is a bit misplaced.

Furthermore, running k8s to pack containers into AWS instances that are are themselves actually full blown VMs running on a hypervisor is of course one way to do computing. It is perhaps worth considering that there are others, more direct ways that can be achieved more economically.

You can use virtualization on prem; it’s trivial. No one is still racking hardware on demand. Don’t want to use Xen or KVM? Kubernetes is your solution if you’re a containers shop.

On prem delivery/provisioning is not slower when executed properly.

Could be wrong but I don't think virtualization or container technology is the blocker. It's the software that keeps track of who's allowed to use it and who's currently using it that's the problem. With AWS it's easy, because you pay money for the privilege. It's harder for large orgs, when divisions and teams don't directly pay to access servers. 3rd party clouds solve the issue when teams are given budgets to use them.

Yeah I definitely agree there are pros and cons on both sides. Every company is different, etc. What I wanted to point out is mainly that it's naive to think the costs of hardware and bandwidth are always most significant or even in the top 5 most significant factors behind whether or not a company should use the cloud. It's a frequent misunderstanding I see posted both on Reddit and hackernews.

GCP doesn't have a separate HIPAA cloud. GCP went through the trouble to certify the services themselves for HIPAA. That means you don't need to wait for us to update our `HIPAA` cloud. You are always getting the latest releases.

Here's a full list of our certifications. We're rapidly adding more. Feel free to email me at bookman@google.com if you have any questions: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance

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