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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

Yes of course. If we could have run our own custom data centers, our software could have been simpler.

What you’re not factoring in WRT the cloud is how complex maintaining an air conditioning unit is, or servicing diesel generators. (List continues for several hundreds of man hours a week of work).

Your company has saved tremendous complexity. Your software has eaten some of that complexity.

Yes, keep it simple when you can. No, major applications that serve millions of users globally can’t run on your laptop “because SQLite is fast!”.

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Hosting providers have been managing uninterrupted power and airconditioning for decades at reasonable costs. There's options for every budget, from the cheapest (Hetzner, OVH) to more expensive (Equinix Metal, Deft, etc).

I'm not sure why this trope keeps getting peddled again and again. Is it obtuse career-driven thinking (someone's salary depends on pretending not to understand?), or am I really getting that old that there's an entire new generation of engineers not aware how hosting was done before 1000%-markup "cloud" providers entered the industry?

I mean, I don’t believe my resume should be required to backup my point, but I literally maintained AC units and refueled diesel generators in datacenter as a kid. Obviously there’s more to it than A/C: and yes Equinix does a lot, but it’s the same trade off: slightly more complex software to eliminate non-company-specific specialities. Yes it’s worth it, my evidence is that infrastructure engineers I’ve met aren’t stupid.

I don't understand what in your mind makes overpriced cloud good while non-overpriced cloud (or "hosting" as we used to call it) bad?

Both manage air conditioning, power, fire suppression, etc and ultimately live and die by their uptime, so they have an incentive to do it right.

That wasn't the comparison. It was cloud or no cloud. Running your own hosting infrastructure from the ground up is a considerable complexity. AWS is not valuable because people are too stupid or lazy to run their own systems.

There's a lot of nuance in cloud or no cloud. You jumped right to AC and diesel.

You can have a pretty sizable server capability on modern hardware before you need to touch that.

I can serve what... 1M users? perhaps 10M users? before my server equipment needs it's own AC unit. Depending on the system needs, architecture, complexity, and perhaps language. I can get 100Mb-1Gb of egress bandwidth pretty easily at most residences, let alone business locations.

I can buy battery backup capacity for cheaper than ever, can probably skip the generator. If you go multi region maybe even skip the deep backup power, for just enough to get clean shutdown, and just fall back early.

It's never been easier to do hosting than it is now. If you get your head out of the clouds anyway.

All of this. None of the physical or network stuff requires aws. Not even close.

Still, if your software is data-center scale, it's better to build your own data center and hire the needed expertise. You have more control of what happens there (desired and undesired), and it's probably going to be cheaper, because you still need most of that expertise to herd your numerous cloud instances.

Even Cloudflare isn't building their own datacenters

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