The cloud is over-engineered and overpriced | Hacker News Reader

The cloud is over-engineered and overpriced

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28 pointspsnehanshu15 comments

Right on both counts, but the pricing part is kind of how my MacBook is overpriced; they can afford to overcharge me because I have nowhere else to go that gives me the same returns for investment. i.e. It's both overpriced and worth what they're charging.

Yes I can do everything I'm doing in AWS cheaper and with less complexity, but I certainly don't _want_ to. Especially after you've gathered enough re-usable IaC in the bag, the complexity and price don't deter you.

Recently I tried hosting a static website on AWS with a catch: it should only be reachable from certain countries but remain reachable for the Google crawler. The original solution was working and simple and consisted of a python script that built a list ip adresses and a deny all statement in an .htaccess file.

Same setup on AWS: Identity center, AWS Organizations, SCPs, cloudtrail, cloudwatch, cloudfront and s3 with half a dozen Policies. The only tool available with fine grained IP Access restrictions is WAF which costs alone almost 10x what one would pay with the hoster.

This is common knowledge by now. There are use cases where the "cloud" definitely makes sense, but it is nowhere near the current state of adoption.

It was sold as being cheaper. Then as capex vs opex. Now as convenient.

If you don't think about things like cost and complexity, yes it is easy to build complex solutions that are costly.

If you are conscious about designing a simple solution, which can help cost, and then review the cost at scale, then it can be very worthwhile to use cloud services.

Editing to say that solutions recommended by cloud vendors may not always be the simplest, nor more cost effective.

My deployment for the hobbies project:

    DOCKER_HOST=ssh://mydomain docker-compose up -d

How does it download yhr image, do you provision the server upfront with some private image hosting key?

What image hosting service do you use?

There is no upload/download of images. It works the same way as when you run it locally; the difference is that your source code will be sent over SSH to build the image directly on the server.

Thanks to investing into k8s I was able to migrate a non trivial production with minimal downtime between cloud providers 3 times now, who offered us free credits, without too much friction.

At a past job I spent a lot of political capital, and time and effort trying to convince directors that to actualise their emergency plan of "move to another cloud in 30 days or less" in case of regulations changing (finance industry) we should invest in k8s. It is a large-ish company (some 5-6k employees when I worked there) and completely able to invest in rolling out k8s, even more when a couple of years after my first pitch managed k8s started to be deployed by cloud providers.

I lost the battle, they hired some AWS Sales Engineer who eventually climbed into a director position and implemented a complete lock-in into AWS offerings without rolling out k8s. As far as I heard from former colleagues after 5 years out of there their AWS bill has increased substantially and there's no way out.

Can't hear this nonsense anymore...

The matter expert of AWS will click a few vms and a managed database in a few minutes enabled snapshots and is done (and not really an expert)

The matter experts in a self hosting company will setup something. They might know how to do it right but probably not.

And just because I can do it myself very good, a lot of people can't.

The DB experts in my experience were to 80% people barely even getting databases right and the last 20% were the real experts keeping the shit running

And even in big companies I have seen shitty infra teams. Old software versions of the management tool, missing features, exorbitant cross charging, not enough hardware etc.

Is self hosting cheaper? Yes.

Should you do it?

Yes if you can afford good people and take it serious.

Don't blame cloud. You are not on cloud if you would be smart enough and capable enough of doing so anyway.

Kind of agree with both. Cloud is complicated and over-priced.

Yet this video could almost be satire? It proposes to show how easy self hosting is, then goes on to use a dozen tools with complex configuration that no normal joe-blow user would understand. It almost makes the case for cloud, because by the time I was half way through video, I was already ready to just give up and say use the Cloud.

Like: "It's Easy", then proceeds to show complex solution.

Both true but then again the opportunity cost of managing all on your own is not worth it most of the time.

There is also a cost of learning all the complexities of AWS. This cost can easily be higher than managing a Linux VM which runs the DB and backend server.

Many of us paid that cost over the last couple decades. I also have spent years paying a cost for learning AWS, effectively giving rent extracting oligarchs free space in my head, and learning skills I will never use in my own endeavors.

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