Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

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You feel like it's new, I don't. I've evaluated migrating from full blown servers to cloud at various scales for various usages: OTA server for 1M active devices, stat server for 1M active devices, build server for Android (both pure Android that parallelizes and checks out super nearly and vendor Android where they broke all of that). In all those cases the cost of cloud was like an order of magnitude costlier. You're mentioning SSD, the various clouds I tried (I couldn't remember which I tried sorry...) had bad storage performance (it was especially bad when building Android). Also not all those servers were maintained by my employer, when we pay top end 100Gbps server we can pay someone to maintain it for us as well for much lower money than the "cloud tax".

I have no doubt there are great use case for cloud, and that at the proper scale you can negotiate, and I understand that startups might be faster moving with the cloud. But I feel like the highest value cloud provides is 1. replacing capex with opex, and 2. making scaling easier with the direction: cloud is pay first, get questions from direction later. "on-prem" is negotiate with the direction until the service degrades and then scramble to integrate the new server under the pressure.

> In all those cases the cost of cloud was like an order of magnitude costlier.

Don't discount the value-add of your skills. Giving any of my family members a stack of bare metal servers would serve no end-purpose or web requests. Approximately zero of said servers would even end up plugged in at all, much less operationalized. My family all works in tech or similarly demanding fields. That is, the cost of "the ops team / guy" can be significant for small and medium enterprises.

Despite this, the AWS pricing margins have grown to the point of excess, and are no longer competitive, even against other major cloud players. This is strange to me because the tooling is all interoperable (e.g., Terraform/Vaggi-form), with no fatal friction or lock-in. It is a rare use-case that the latest CPU is worth paying a penny extra for compared to a 3 or 4 generation old chip. The only winner is the cloud provider because it improves their COGS ratio.

TL;DR: the top tier clouds are priced on the order of luxury goods, on par with a Bugatti or G6 jet. That is, unless you ruthlessly track and prune each expense, which costs you time and attention which could have been spent growing the business or at least non-overhead tasks. The eventuality of managing your own DIY fleet of machines is a total headache, as any given computer may work flawlessly for the next ten years or only the next 10 minutes. When it goes south, you're back to being a monkey plugging in cables and scratching your head. This sad activity is only a few people's cup of tea.

Obligatory reference to Warren G's Regulators:

"You've gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean."

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hms5vmekId4

Edit: Sorry for the rambling comment, I suppose it is a more complex topic than I realized prior to crafting the words above.

> When it goes south, you're back to being a monkey plugging in cables and scratching your head.

That is if you rent rack space. If you rent bare metal and the bare metal has a failing disk, you file a request to replace said disk, and the data center engineer will be plugging cables, not you.

That means you have to worry about hardware failures, but you don't have the inconvenience of having to be physically present.

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