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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree; but I think the cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) have sort of shielded people from how cheap/powerful the underlying hardware has became.

For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.

Unless your stack is horrendously badly optimised you can serve SO MUCH traffic off that - definitely billions of postgres records without breaking a sweat.

So the scale argument somewhat disappears - if anything, people end up adding much more complexity to the product to get round the high hardware costs of the cloud (complex caching systems for example, instead of just throwing loads of hardware at the problem).

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> I don't disagree; but I think the cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) have sort of shielded people from how cheap/powerful the underlying hardware has became.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I do find myself often surprised to realize that for a younger generation of developers they have never experienced hosting on bare metal. So they have not been exposed to costs & benefits vs. the cloud approach and feel that no local machine could ever be as fast as AWS. Even though in reality even a pedestrian server is immensely faster and cheaper than any AWS offering.

Now, sure, there are tradeoffs in ease of scaling up and other considerations, but it's good to keep and eye on the actualy tradeoffs you're making and how much it's costing.

As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it. In-house servers might be cheap, but in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware.

Not only can you end up spending $10k of engineering time to optimize and test a random, non-core-competency bit of code instead of an extra $1k/year on hardware, you also have to maintain the optimized code instead of the simpler code.

Maybe I just worked at companies that did a poor job of managing servers, or had a dysfunctional relationship between software engineering and operations, but at least that's no longer something I have to worry about in a cloud environment. If spending a little extra on hardware is the best solution to the problem, process/planning/politics won't get in the way.

> in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware.

That's true with owning your hardware, but what about renting from Hetzner/OVH/etc? You get servers set up in minutes unless you have a very specific request (the only time I've had lead time with these providers is when I had a very custom request, a machine with 300+ TB of storage - yes that is not a typo). Everything else has been delivered pretty much instantly.

But even if let's say you have a very specific use-case such as needing a 300TB server that would typically require lead-time, well in that case the prices are so cheap that you can just keep it around all the time sitting mostly unused and still come out ahead compared to cloud pricing.

> As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it.

Yes, that's the beauty of it and sometimes you need it.

OTOH, how often do you need to grow capacity without any lead time like that? If you are in a hyper-growth stage in a startup you absolutely need it and it is a lifesaver.

But, most companies never see a hyper-growth stage. Even those which do, it's a relatively short timeframe (you can't grow exponentially very long).

All the rest of the time it's a fairly large premium to pay just in case another hyper-growth period happens. Sometimes it's totally worth it. But good to review the likelyhood and cost tradeoffs every now and then.

To give you an example - we run quite a lot of workloads on Azure app service, which isn't the same as bare metal, but does allow serious scaling if required.

We run most workloads on a 3.5GB/2 "vCPU" box. This costs around $70/month per instance. We actually haven't scaled this out past 8 instances, at a cost of $560/month (and that has been extremely rare).

On bare metal we could have ran it on a $100/month 16core/128GB box and always had that capacity in reserve. While app service gives a lot of benefits, the scalability argument is somewhat moot as basically you can provision all the capacity you would scale to 24/7 and still the same/less than cloud.

Maybe it's just the projects I've worked on, but I haven't really ever seen people require 100x or 1000x the capacity in a very short period of time (which obviously bare metal could not do). I've seen traffic grow that much - but generally over weeks, months or years.

> the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it

It stopped to be the case in pandemic times at most cloud operators due to general hardware and capacity shortage.

AWS seems to have some pretty decent Xeons (hard to tell because Intel makes special SKUs for Amazon, I think). I guess it depends on what you consider 'a pedestrian server' -- 128 threads/512GB of memory isn't cheap, although maybe in the enterprise universe maybe it is, I'm more of an academic. So, it is nicer than the 10 year old cluster I tinker around on, not as nice as the system I send real runs to...

> For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.

What option is that? The closest I see is the CCX41, but that is 40% more expensive, 140 Eur/month, half the RAM (64 GB) and ~4% of the disk space (360 GB)

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

All I can see is maybe the AX101? It matches all the specs they put down, although the SSD is RAID 1 @ 4TB total.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101

Yes, 8TB total but in RAID. Also keep in mind Hertnzer quotes prices VAT inclusive, whereas most clouds add VAT on top. For US customers you can take ~20% off those prices.

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