You might be surprised. The performance equivalent of $100k monthly in EC2 spend fits into a 16m2 cage with 52HU racks.
We don't use AWS, because our use cases don't require that level of reliability and we simply cannot afford it, but if I needed a company to depend on IT that generates enough revenue... I probably wouldn't argue about the AWS bill. So long, prepaid at hetzner + in-house works good enough, but I know what I cannot offer with the click of a button to my user!
I run two critical apps, one on-prem and one cloud. There is no difference in people cost, and the cloud service costs about 20% more on the infrastructure side. We went cloud because customer uptake was unknown and making capital investments didn’t make sense.
I’ve had a few scenarios where we’ve moved workloads from cloud to on-prem and reverse. These things are tools and it doesn’t pay to be dogmatic.
I wish I would hear this line more often.
So many things today are (pseudo-) religious now. The right frsmework/language, cloud or on prem, x vs not x.
Especially bad imho when somebody tries to tell you how you could do better with 'not x' instead of x you are currently using without even trying to understand the context this decision resides in.
[Edit] typo
Might have always been that way? We just have so many more tools to argue over now.
But my point wasn't about how precisely the hardware is managed. My point was that with a large cloud, a mid-sized company has effectively NO SUPPORT. So anything that gives you more control is an improvement.
umm, what happens when one fails?
With large cloud my startup had excellent support. We negotiated a contract. That's how it works.
- A large ZFS pool of SSDs is much faster than any cloud storage.
- Cloud storage failed much more often than the SSDs in our pool.
- "Noisy neighbor" is an issue on the cloud
That redundancy, and the performance that scales due to it, place cloud services in an entirely different class from on prem servers.