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Comment by Dah00n | Hacker News Reader

Again, The Cloud is just someone else's server. Most things in The Cloud doesn't belong there in my opinion but it is yet another trend everyone must follow and check off on their list from management. Let's all chant in unison and play out the rituals sent down from above.

Umbasa!

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> Again, The Cloud is just someone else's server.

Sure, but in a lot of cases, that "someone else" is an entire team of experts in their particular niche that can do a better job of the specific task at hand than I ever can hope to.

Is this always the case? No. Is it sometimes the case? Yes.

But this is primarily a CDN, with some edge copmpute, isn't it? What's the functional alternative here, "I'll go ahead and lease 2U of rack space and fly my ops people to every major city in which I have users"?

The sad reality is that if your app serves any real business value and you can't afford to hire a team that can quickly handle scaling attacks, simply running your own server isn't really a viable option anymore.

The internet's original distributed nature just isn't compatible with the sheer scale of billions of active users.

THIS version of the internet isn't.

I hold out hope that the next version won't be controlled by corporate entities.

Unless you are a very large company a CDN is not something you can realistically build and run in house.

If you are not a very large company, you might not need the full functionality of a very large CDN either.

Now, building the functionality you require can still be unrealistic to build yourself. One thing that springs to mind is DDoS protection.

When your site can expect visitors from all around the world you need a CDN that also has a world wide presence. Using a CDN can have a pretty big impact on the performance of your site, and it is well known that users avoid sites that are slow.

Colocation is cheap. But your correct with DDoS; that is the only thing I am not prepared for. I will forever go with colocation.

1Gbit is nothing nowadays and can be saturated in seconds; my purposes do not justify the cost of 10g transit. Even owning 4U when I only need a VPS is overkill. But I like owning a small dusty cube of internet. So there's that.

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