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Comment by shimon_e | Hacker News Reader

I think people confuse cloud computing with giving money to cloud provider. You can give all your money to a cloud provider without having any benefits of cloud computing.

I find developing my app for cloud providers and learning their APIs, submitting bug reports when stuff doesn't work as expected, etc to be more work than opening an account with a data centre and renting hardware as needed. Each to their own.

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Can you be more specific? I don't see it that way at all. I've "rented hardware" and provisioned AWS machines, and the broad experience is basically identical. There are "APIs" on both sides that do pretty much the same thing (though with the smaller hosting providers that API is often "call them on the phone" -- not an advantage, IMHO).

The differences are in scale (how many can you get and how fast -- cloud wins huge here), price (cloud hosting is more expensive over the long term) and granularity (bill by the hour vs. by the month).

OVH has proper API for provisioning hardware. They have many machines ready to go only waiting for automatic OS install.

You can provision a server on EC2 exactly the way you do a rented server. However, on EC2 you can image it after you have it provisioned so if you need to setup a new one, it's as simple as "make a new server with this image".

I see no way to say that it's more work on EC2. It may have worse performance, or cost more, but that is an entirely different argument.

He seems to be arguing that if you don't know how to use cloud technology, you won't use it well. I have to say I agree, though I don't know how much that observation contributes.

I realized that. My argument is that you can use EC2 exactly the same as you do a rented physical server, and you gain added benefits like the ability to image it and create more servers from that image.

OVH also offer this feature but I use puppet so it is really a moot point for me.

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