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Comment by mabynogy | Hacker News Reader

I share the opinions you've expressed. For the cloud, I say "it's expensive" (10x more than a bardebone server).

I don't try to be people-pleasing. I tell my truth. I'm never aggressive but people often understand something that is not is my words (something they believe).

I believe it's also a good strategy to create meaningful relationships. If you show the others who your are everytime, they can count on what they know about you. You become more trustful for them.

I wanna improve OSS. I wanna change the current meaning (keep the freedom for the users but add money for the programers). If I'm successful, the content of the Wikipedia page about FOSS should changed.

Feel free to reach me to talk about that.

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> For the cloud, I say "it's expensive" (10x more than a bardebone server).

As do I, although there seems to be some kind of mass delusion in effect that causes disbelief of this.

I'm careful not to quote a single multiplier, though I do point out that it's a multiplier, not just merely a percentage (below 100%) premium. I've found that it can vary between 2x-10x, depending on ones specific performance needs and how much one is paying for colo "space" (power).

Part of what I've been realizing is feeding the misconception (if not mass delusion) is that the knowledge on how to price/negotiate commodity servers without getting, shall we say, fleeced, is quite rare. Getting a good deal on the base server and CPU doesn't matter if the bulk of the order is RAM and storage and you're grossly over-paying on those.

I quote that number because I saw a study about that. The worst was AWS (x10) and the cheapest was Google (x2).

If you still have a reference to that study, I'd be interested to have it, since all of my own cost comparisons have been done for employers, which means I haven't been able to release the details.

I'm also curious as to how Google came in 5 times cheaper than AWS. I knew intuitively (and through an occasional pricing spot-check) that GCP and Azure could be price competitive enough for certain workloads to be worth considering (assuming a spikey/elastic enough load that cloud makes sense in the first place), but I never saw that extreme a difference.

Sadly no. I tried to find it.

There is a tool to build around that.

Someone has started, at least for AWS, as this was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551796

Interestingly, many of the comments are asking for support for GCP, although the response seems to be that Google's tools might be better (enough) than Amazon's that it's not as urgent.

Interesting. The mockup on their homepage give some prices. With their 1610$ example, one could rent a whole datacenter (1000 i3 with 4Gb and 4Tb HDD at 1.6$ per day - 50$ per month).

I sent you a mail yesterday. Maybe it went to the spam folder.

That example corresponds to $49k monthly, which, among "Silicon Valley" tech companies is, apparently, not a huge amount.

To be fair, the machines you specify are pretty tiny and would easily fit into a half-U enclosure. Even assuming only 36U usable (after network, power, etc) per rack, those thousand would fit in 14 racks, a very small fraction of a whole datacenter.

(I did see the e-mail.. I think I have HN emails explicitly bypass spam. I'll check out your site and reply privately later today)

Thanks for the response. I didn't mean to imply that the trends I listed as examples weren't worth considering. I just get concerned when companies adopt trends 'because everyone else is doing it so it must be the right choice.'

They do that do minimize the risk. They just minimize the risk for some of their employees to be wrong. Who will blame a CTO who has chosen the cloud or SAP even if it's expensive?

Possibly the CFO, CEO, or board, if it's so expensive that the company goes under.

Typically, this is only an issue at startups, where "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" doesn't apply, especially if one extends "fired" to include losing a job due to the company ceasing to exist.

Currently, there seems to be a general exception to expense-blame when it comes to cloud, at least partly provided by VCs (who sit on boards).

I remember a campaign few years ago telling startupers to use a cloud provider because hosting is a commodity and they won't earn money with it.

People like Elon Musk don't do that. When he needs a factory, he hires architects and builds the factory himself.

> I remember a campaign few years ago telling startupers to use a cloud provider because hosting is a commodity and they won't earn money with it.

That was the gist. IIRC, the essence of the argument was that, because running hardware in a colo isn't the startup's core competency, it's best to outsource it.

The push to outsource (especially by VCs and other outsiders and/or "business" interests) is hardly new, nor is it new to do so while ignoring potential future costs or even ignoring how closely intertwined to the core competency something actually is (witness the tech offshoring fad in the US).

What's particularly interesting to me is that cloud outsourcing not only has such huge potential future costs but can start costing right away. Hardware has up-front purchase costs, but those can often be smoothed out with a lease, if cash flow is that much of a concern.

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