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Comment by bashy | Hacker News Reader

The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine. They tend to have many more drives than you’d get with a bare metal server.

I have many OVH and Hetzner servers (cloud and dedicated) but not sure I’d find a use for this.

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> The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine.

That's what you pay public cloud service providers for, but private clouds are considered to be a thing as well. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/private-cloud/

But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud.

Essentially, private cloud is for deep pocket organizations (some Fortune 500, governments, militaries, etc). No one is running a private cloud for a small startup. The closest you'd get to a "private cloud" is a bunch of servers running a kubernetes (or swarm) cluster.

If I can open an app, spin up some VMs, pipeline a deployment to them and extend my operational footprint in 10 minutes, I'm not sure I care whether you want to call that cloud or not. I've seen that in some pretty small environments.

Yeah honestly some ipmi, cloudinit and (insert config management flavor of the week here) has been spinning up “private clouds” for decades with ease in large shops and in single server shops. We’ve had private clouds since the first person ran ssh commands against someone else’s dedicated metal in some dc.

The cloud is just “someone else’s computer”, not “someone else’s commercially available aws compatible api suite of service offerings that is operating against someone else’s computer”

> But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud.

Not really. "Far more" would be extremely dependent on each specific scenario. Managing your own hardware, if you have the skills and upfront capital for it, can be drastically cheaper, especially if you need lots of storage/compute/networking/GPUs.

Isn’t that the case now because setting up a private cloud is complicated and expensive?

If setting up a private cloud was as easy as running a couple of scripts making it easily accessible to a small business without a large dedicated IT dept why wouldn’t small businesses not want to save money with that private cloud?

If you’d be interested in cutting down on upkeep I’m actually running a service thats fully managed services on clouds like Hetzner[0].

Full disclosure the management plane is not open source but I've already got support for a couple services and am working on some more.

Mind if I reach out? I'd love to get you to kick the tires.

[0]: https://nimbusws.com

We mainly run game servers - not sure how helpful that would be.

Ahh I thought there might be some auxiliary services you need to run — do you run anything like prometheus instances or analytics or anything like that?

Link to the full services list is broken.

Ah thanks for pointing this out!

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