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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

If cloud is only expensive when done poorly and it's not easy to do properly, then that's actually a problem with cloud.

If managing cloud is skill-intensive and you need a hire a person/team with specific skills in it, then you're no different from on-prem from a personnel perspective.

And those are growing pains. In 5 years time, maybe the proper controls/cost containment will be easier because we've seen how easy it is to fuck it up.

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What's easier - managing cloud costs or managing a datacenter or co-located physical hardware and setting up and maintaining all the functionality you need to do proper CI / deployments / monitor uptime / data analytics?

With modern hardware the two are in practice not very different. You set up a server for your hardware to boot for to install the OS, tie it into your orchestrator of choice, and your users see the same thing. If a server fails you treat in instance failing, diagnose via IPMI, and either take the server off or reboot/power cycle (remotely, via IPMI), or tell your hosting provider to swap in new drives. If you spend more than a single digit percentage of your devops effort managing hardware in a co-located setup vs. doing the same higher level things you would in a cloud environment, you're doing something wrong.

All I'm saying is that most people are used to doing one and one is relatively new.

We're comparing an ideal version of cloud to practical versions of on-prem. When the ideal version becomes practical, it might be a no-brainer. But for now, companies are going to have to do what's best for them today.

I think the solution is midway: rent dedicated servers from hosting companies that handle the co-location, hardware failure and all hosting-specific issues.

So you run your own services on their hardware (as opposed to using cloud SaaS, where you rent both the hardware AND the service).

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