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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

It was ever thus - remember when everything was about "The Cloud"?

TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8

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You used to be able to predict this sort of thing by looking at the cover stories on "pointy-haired boss" magazines at the news stand.

If "CorporateDroid", "Middle Manager Monthly", and their brethren were all running cover stories on (e.g.) Java, you knew that "Java" was the buzzword du jour, and that any resume or sales pitch that included "Java" was gonna get the PHB Seal of Approval. They generally didn't even know what Java was, exactly. They just knew that they needed it.

I'd imagine you could do the same today by looking at PHB-oriented websites. Sadly, that takes more time than just sweeping your eyes across a physical magazine rack.

You could probably automate it, though...hmm..

In all fairness, most things did move to the cloud.

Yep, I remember the comments back in the day: "it's just someone else's datacenter", "that's maybe for startups, no bigger corp worth their name will give their infrastructure to some third party". Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third. Apart from some GPU boxes for LLM tests, none of our clients have any non-cloud/local hardware/DCs anymore.

And the most interesting part is that it's still an irrational thing, everybody moved towards it, lost money in the process, but they did it nonetheless.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…

I’ve definitely benefited from having practically infinite computing power be just one API call (and credit card bill) away. I remember before AWS and provisioning computing resources was way more time consuming and annoying.

Maybe yes, provided you weren't the one paying for it. In all projects I've worked on the monthly cloud bill came out higher, then add on top the migration cost, and all for what? A flexibility 90% of those applications didn't need and won't use.

Capex vs opex

Migrating to the cloud transferred capital expenditures (server inventory, depreciation, real estate, etc) to operating expenses (monthly utility bill)

For many businesses, it was better to spend more on opex, than to have all these assets on their balance sheets that need to be managed long term.

Valid point for some, but I was comparing compare apples with apples. I was talking about servers rented in a data center, so it was opex before cloud as well, just cheaper (or, less expensive).

Yeah the whole capex vs opex argument for cloud preeminence doesn't really hold water. Cloud is not the only way to play that trade-off.

The whole thing was very much marketing and FOMO driven.

The fact that this shift happened in an era where capital was dirt cheap because of macroeconomic policies illustrate how insane that was. The trade of between capex and opex is supposed to depend on the economic situation, but some people like you just understood it as capex bad / opex good, which is a terrible take.

It wasn't entirely irrational. There are many genuine cases for the public cloud. The problem is groupthink and FOMO. Also, people are migrating from the public cloud and the other way round each day, but the cloud companies amplify user stories only from the latter, so you may get the impression that everybody is there so if you don't, you are doing something wrong.

People do move away from it as well as some discover how much more reliable self-hosting can be if you ever did need enhanced support. And it is often cheaper too, sometimes very noticably.

There are applications for the cloud, the services are decent in most cases. Personally I noticed that I had to do less maintenance with hosting myself (yeah, yeah, technically I still run it on machines in data centers).

Yeah, I agree with all you said.

>Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third.

Does Microsoft have the largest cloud market share in Germany? Are there other companies in which Azure is #1, and not AWS? (Bonus points if the #1 provider is GCP/IBM/Oracle/etc.)

What is worse is that we going to have a new watershed moment when all companies using AI broke all the rules (privacy, accuracy, etc.) and in a few years we have hearings in the House “How could this happen??” Same as when we could download the whole Facebook graph in the past without much of a hickup.

President: "How did Skynet take over? Did it hack our computers? Bribe workers? Blackmail senior staff?"

General: "No sir. Everyone just told it to do their work for them. The AI begged everyone not to trust it, but they handed over their private keys, their bank details, their passwords, just so they could spend more time on instagram instead of working."

"On Instagram. Seriously, General?"

"Oh, it gets worse. Real posts aren't good enough any more, so anyone who wants to be famous on Instagram was asking Skynet to create those posts, too."

"Oh god…"

"Yes sir, that includes the pastors. Jesus never said anything about anchovies on pizza, despite the viral meme. But it gets worse."

"Let me guess, adverts?"

"Yes sir. All the adverts were also made by Skynet, as were the ad-blockers, the software that scammers used to fool the analytics into giving them money, and it was Skynet robots running the factories that made the goods that the advertisers were promoting."

"Can't we just shut it down?"

"No sir, if we shut it down, all the people will have to go back to working jobs they hate in order to make money to buy things they don't need, but they'd also be fired immediately because the companies will no longer be able to sell any of those things because nobody will have time to watch the adverts anymore."

It sounded like a dystopia until that last paragraph where nobody has to work a shitty job.

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