Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for:

* An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large if you are a big company) * How many staff at $50-100K per year to look after it * How to deal with internet reliability - do we need multiple high bandwidth broadband links at $1000+/month? * Ongoing op-ex costs for failed components. * Cap-ex replacement of hardware after 2-3 years

The point of the cloud is that these costs are wrapped up in your rental cost so of course it looks high.

If you have the people/skills and need control over exactly how your hardware is provisioned, go on-prem and good luck but plenty of us would rather concentrate on what we are good at and are happy to pay 50-100K per year to a cloud provider to do it for us.

The complaints about the complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often deliberately ignore that there is a spectrum of options between "cloud" and "on-prem". This is not a binary choice between these two extremes.

Your air-conditioned room plus networking can easily be rented from a multitude of providers, for example, in different variants from "el cheapo" to "ultra-high-professional with lots of fancy certificates". You can then place your own hardware in rented racks, you can buy your own racks and place them in rented space, or you can rent everything including the hardware.

Our colo even offers managed Kubernetes on top of the rented hardware.

> If you have the people/skills and need control over exactly how your hardware is provisioned, go on-prem and good luck but plenty of us would rather concentrate on what we are good at and are happy to pay 50-100K per year to a cloud provider to do it for us.

This is the only thing that matters when you talk about AWS. All your other points are not mutual exclusive.

I love the "good luck". As if it's some magic that we do to get applications run on the internet. It's not as hard as you think. Even scaling. These are solved problems and just abstracted away by AWS behind a paywall.

> I love the "good luck". As if it's some magic that we do to get applications run on the internet.

For those of us that haven't gone through the internet of the late 1990s or early 2000s as a software developer, where it was the norm for everyone to self-host their hobbyist or semi-professionally-operated online services on rented or bought linux boxes, it actually often is some kind of black magic.

for a single box the extra cost is roughly as much as you need for your personal computer.

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