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Comment by ak39 | Hacker News Reader

This is so exciting. Is this type of "movement" (trend) likely to see data centers coming back on premises for enteprise markets? (ie. back from cloud)

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Cloud vs. datacenter is entirely about administration, rather than hardware.

I would say it's more about elasticity and the ability to scale horizontally if you take the minimum amount of precautions when designing your app.

This is what an engineer would say and that's important but, behind the scenes it's all about operating costs (e.g. administration). I worked with Cisco on a contract, they had about 22 folks managing the day to day operation for a specific on premise integration. Imagine if Cisco didn't have to pay 22 folks to manage the day to day? Let's say we cut that need in half but the licensing price remained the same or you could repurpose good engineers to deliver value elsewhere?

All of the elastic and horizontal stuff is great, but that's covered under SLA.

I don't think this will have (or is meant to have) any effect on professional applications. This is just for the educational and cool factor.

Right now, yeah. But if this tech trend (miniature, low power, cheap, commodity) continues and we can run our apps on them ... it might be a game changer. No?

Hu no. "Low power" , "cheap" and "commodity" already describes retail computers since almost 30 years.

Why do so many people want to see a higher purpose in any fun experiment? Can't it just be that, a fun and cool hobby project?

Just for a different perspective, I grew up in a very low income household, and the Pi was the only computer I was able to convince my mum to get me as an early teenager. "Cheap" is relative, and I disagree that the Pi wasn't a big step forward in terms of price on the very low-end.

Depending what you are doing. For use cases like Dropbox cloud was never an option, other use cases can realize 30% year over year saving just by moving to the cloud. I think where RPIs make the most sense is soho, office building use cases, onsite backups, NAS, hosting infra services (DNS server for example) where you can use many nodes without much power and with a good amount of redundancy.

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