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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

There are a HUGE number of startups that would have had a massively harder time if they had to roll their own infra. Who cares if the companies eventually have to move off? (Though even Netflix seems ok with it overall for now). There are a ton of services that just wouldn't exist otherwise

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Renting a server and using standard commodity open source software and standard (outsourced) sysadmins is way cheaper and faster than learning and dealing with all the proprietary AWS and Azure junk.

(Probably also less reliable than "cloud", but who cares if you're a startup.)

I disagree, at early startup scale you don't need much, you just buy a better VPS when you need to scale up

Learning aws vs learning how to operate a vps are of comparable complexity

It took me less then a day to setup infra for my startup (more than 10 years ago)

Sorry not sure if I'm missing something obvious but isn't a VPS gonna be hosted by a cloud provider? How would that be an alternative to using the cloud?

If you're just running VPS on the big clouds, you're not going to get much advantage out of it, indeed.

But tell me what third tier cheap provider has managed scale-to-zero-or-infinity functions? Managed storage with S3-like API? Where can I get an API gateway cheaper than Amazon? What about managed databases? These tools allow me to develop insanely scalable software incredibly easily.

Agreed - all the big clouds are very expensive VPS hostings. Don't use it for that.

You get portability. Which the functions do not provide. Open source solutions have a longer career utility than proprietary offerings. I remember when NetWare certs were all the rage. Useless now. I remember msce. But if you learned open tools 35 years ago instead... You get the picture.

You can scale from 1 thread 512MB RAM, to 500 threads and 12TB of RAM (off the shelf). Which is good enough for almost everyone who isn't planet scale.

Auto scaling also comes with auto billing. Oops, your accidental infinite loop spawning functions has bankrupted your company. You don't have that risk starting with a VPS.

I agree completely, but the argument remains the same - there's not much utility in using the big clouds as VPS providers, and it's definitely costly to do so.

That part of true. Using EC2 at AWS now and it's much more expensive than vultr, Hetzner, or akamai cloud.

> Managed storage with S3-like API?

What's third tier here? Pretty much all of them offer S3 compatibility it's basically table stakes

It's not that hard. Particularly for simple deployments, which a startup should have or they are doing it wrong.

How would you do it for a simple webapp? Genuine question

Ingress that handles SSL. nginx, or caddy. Then stand up your app server behind that on the same VM. Database can be on the same or different VM.

I try to not use anything else if I can avoid it on a new project.

Ingress gives you the ability to load balance and is threaded and will scale with network transfer and cpu. Database should scale with a bump in VM specs as well, CPU and disk IOPS.

If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load.

Systemd can keep your app server running, it you docker it up and use that

> If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load.

This right here so many times over.

I'm not going to spend time worrying about scaling, I'm going spend time figuring out how to make stuff stateless.

Shove your state into the database. Done.

No that's all fine, I mean physically, where would I put a server and stuff if we didn't have cloud providers? I'd need to pay an isp for an IP address and maybe port forward and stuff like that right? I don't get why I wouldn't just do what you mentioned on a five dollar digital ocean droplet or an ec2 instance or whatever, the cloud still seems orders of magnitude easier to get off the ground.

If you rent a cloud vps as an ingress you can run an overlay network and your actual hosted services can literally be anywhere. See nebula, netbird, etc. You can also ssh forward, but that doesn't scale well past a handful of services and is a bit fragile.

For new small systems I suggest you start with a cloud VPS. If traffic is low, cost of downtime is low, and system requirements are high then a cheap mini PC ($150) at the home or office can keep your bill microscopic. If your app server and database are small then you can just throw them on the VPS too.

I run light traffic stuff at home in a closet so it doesn't occupy more costly cloud RAM. Production ready saas offerings I'm trying to sell right now are all in the cloud. Hosting all my stuff in the cloud would cost me hundreds per month. My home SLA is fine for the extras. I don't need colocation at this time, but I have spoken with data centers to understand my upgrade path.

You can run a live backup server at a second location and have pretty good redundancy should the primary lose power or connectivity.

When system requirements elevate (SLA, security, etc) you probably want to move into a data center for better physical security, reliable power and network. Bigger VPS is fine if it is big enough. Can also do a colocation if you don't want to rent, and you contract directly with a data center. I wouldn't look at colocation until your actual hosting needs exceed at least $100/mo and you're ready for a year long commitment.

But to the point of the original question that started this thread - the takeaway is still that cloud services made development massively easier right? The answer to the original question seems to still be "Yes cloud providers did lead to big wins for customers" since none of these other suggestions are able to get away from needing a cloud service provider without making starting something intensely difficult. And you wouldn't be able to get a vps for 5 bucks for ingress without all the other cloud competition in the market.

> Cloud infra may be a comparable market, since computation is a big share of AI costs. Did consumers win big from competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP? Not sure. I see an uptick in write ups saying “We switched off cloud and reduced costs by 2/3rds.” Not a scientific sample but may leave the question open.

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