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Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

Just about everyone and their mom hopped onto the cloud bandwagon there for good time, but with this steady onslaught of praise for bare-metal hosting, maybe this will reverse a little.

It seems like the only thing cloud really provides best is for:

    1) Short lived instances or "now" instances.
    2) and... what?

I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.

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There's different versions of "the cloud". See my article here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computing-services

In short, "cloud" services (aka Software as a Service in the cloud) are brilliantly useful. No one will seriously question the usefulness of Dropbox, for example.

Platform-as-a-Service is also obviously useful. Google App Engine is qualitatively different from running your own hardware.

Infrastructure as a Service is useful too, if you know how to use it, but in a more limited set of circumstances. The circumstances where it's useful include things like: having an event-based site (e.g. a site related to a sport event) which will need a lot of hardware for a short time and not much afterwards; an app where, due to your solid marketing channels, you expect fairly rapid and unpredictable growth of the usage and you will need to provision new servers quickly; an app where the load varies significantly throughout the day or the week (e.g. something that does batch processing of a lot of data on a regular basis, but is idle the rest of the time).

The recent High Scalability article outlining the Stackoverflow and Stackexchange network is worth a read.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/10/24/stackexchange-arc...

Joel makes some good points on why they stayed with physical hardware.

I think the cloud is also good for getting an MVP out the door. The cloud makes sense for startup that has few employees and wants to focus on the product rather than managing bare metal. Of course if/when they become successful it makes sense to move onto their own infrastructure.

This how I always thought it went, so stories of growing companies moving off the cloud don't seem like a big deal - just a natural progression.

> I'm trying to think of other situations where cloud beats bare metal, but I am coming up short.

smaller businesses where economies of scale don't kick in, and/or smaller businesses that want to hedge their bets on growth.

Except of course when that small business relays to much on the cloud. I know a local gym that decided to "host" their cash register. I told the owner it was a mistake. He basically said I was suck in the past.

Until his Comcast went/slowed down.

Or a local non-profit who's board came up with a great way to save money - host their phone system in the cloud. A local carrier was happy to sign them to a 3 year contact. Even supplied the 42 phones. Now, they lucky if they can make calls mid day. It's so bad, that if 10 phones are in use, the next call will sound like you calling from a wind tunnel. And forget about calling at peak times. What does the carrier suggest? Upgrading to a T1. Of course that carrier never mentioned this when selling the service in the first place. And personally, with 42 phone plus 50+ computers and other devices I'm suggesting T3 (cost down here about 500 - 600 a month).

My point is, our infrastructure (at least in South Florida) isn't there yet. Sure the cloud is a great idea. But if you can't reach it, it's useless. But that doesn't stop the marketing. Or the complaints.

those are examples of people making (or being sold on) poor choices and/or not having all information necessary to make an informed choice.

the cloud is not for everyone. physical servers aren't for everyone, either. stories like these don't automatically imply that using the cloud is a bad idea for everyone.

"informed choice"

No, no. It's about price.

Most small business buying subscribing to these services aren't tech. In the phone market (as an example), carriers are selling hosted "solutions" for less then $75 a month. Comcast is too. I like Comcast. But you can't run an office with 25 phones and pc's and other devices on Comcast. At least not in Florida.

The other problem, is most IT firms down here are pushing they own "hosted solutions". Everything from email to accounting services. For cheap.

Now let me be clear some services I think make perfect sense in the cloud. Even with unreliable connectivity. Like email, storage, messaging, But your core business, services you must have to run your business need to remain under your control. Period.

And the last thing; many small business don't really understand just how important IT is to their business.

if it was purely about price, then these people would've purchased these options regardless of the shortcomings if they had known about them beforehand. and if this is the case, they went in with eyes wide open and the cloud is right for them.

I doubt that. Trust when I tell you this, the carriers (and I'm including Comcast) sales people do not tell the customer the downsides and limitations.

If you don't believe me. Try it. Call the business sales units of the carreirs.

Now I believe in buyer beware. But that's the problem... most small business are suffering cash flow problems. When something cheaper comes along there is no "buyer beware". They think about lowering their monthly bills. An of course, in the end they get bit in the ass.

It's just mind-blogging to me how many business owners are so ignorant about the tech that runs their business.

> It's just mind-blogging to me how many business owners are so ignorant about the tech that runs their business.

in my mind, this is the very definition of "uninformed choice". you don't have to be uninformed on purpose, you could also be kept in the dark intentionally by salespeople. you're still making a choice based on an incomplete picture.

Even Dropbox, a cloud company, uses Amazon S3.

Like the blog says, CPU is fairly cheap on the cloud. Memory is fairly expensive and normally good disk IO cannot be purchased (Bytemark's BigV looks different in this regard). We have a service (http://www.mynaweb.com/) that has a bunch of mostly CPU bound services and a few IO bound ones. We also want the CPU bound services to be near to customers. It makes sense for us to acquire cheap cloud instances around the world for the CPU bound services and keep the IO bound stuff on dedicated hosts.

Just a question.

Who in the US provides cloud with disks comparable to dedicated servers? (or otherwise 'good')?

I say this because I run a cloud company called orion in Australia, we produce cloud VMs with faster then dedicated disk performance. When we were last in SV pitching, nobody knew of anybody in a similar sort of space.

I'm just asking because you seemed to emphasise 'normally' and 'good'.

I think it depends what you mean by 'beats'. In term of performance bare metal will always win, and in a stable situation it can even work out economically.

Where the cloud comes in useful is when you're just starting out and have no idea what kind of demand you should be planning for. Are you going to get swamped? If so, no big deal- spin up a few more machines. If not, you're sitting pretty. Making those kinds of changes with a bare metal setup takes time.

All this said, I am surprised by the number of successful, profitable companies that still use the cloud. Once you know your numbers and have a reasonable outlook for the future you should at least investigate getting some hosting of your own.

Amazon S3 is awesome and different from intrastructure in the cloud. If you choose to use S3 and a lot of your servers rely on fast access to it, then using EC2 too can often make sense.

Rackspace offers a good compromise where they have cloud services like Cloud Files and Cloud Servers, but you can also have dedicated servers with fast access to your cloud stuff.

As others have mentioned, it’s a lot easier to achieve geographical diversity with a cloud provider like AWS.

Another thing to keep in mind with the AWS cloud: if you have a huge setup, you can always start the largest instances, and you will almost certainly have the physical server all for yourself. And for a fee of $10 per hour per region, across _all_ your instances, you can have totally dedicated instances where you’re guaranteed that none of your instances will be on shared hardware.

($7,200 per region per month sounds like a lot, but it is a fixed fee and a drop in the bucket for people with huge EC2 deployments.)

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