Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> moving to cloud isn’t an endeavor that’s going to save you any money

I'm old enough to remember setting up data centers... actually running your own internet-connected data center is insanely expensive. It was insanely expensive in the 90's, it's almost certainly even more insanely expensive now, even taking inflation into account. If "moving to the cloud" just means renting EC2 instances from AWS or whatever GCP calls EC2 instances or even bare metal servers on Rackspace then yes, it's going to save you incredible amounts of money over standing up your own (internet-connected) datacenter. OTOH, the cost/benefit of Amazon's "value-add" services like lambdas and DynamoDB are a lot fuzzier, especially when you consider just how hard the vendor lock-in is.

I feel like this whole thing is widely misunderstood as a dichotomy; there is a spectrum of services, it’s not “pay a hyperscaler or own your racks, your land, building, run your own BGP, run generators, HVAC”.

What I personally think is we should see a return to the middle ground, more Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, maybe more providers that rent space in existing datacenters. You know, some business that doesn’t charge 4x revenue for your bandwidth as a SMB.

This is actually one of the reasons I founded our company [1]. I had talked to a lot of companies about doing exactly this and the feedback was, "yeah, but we don't want to hire for that". So the idea was to provide bare-metal servers with DevOps included, and thankfully it is going rather well!

The thing that really gets me is that one of the reasons it is hard to hire non-cloud engineers is the pressure applied by the cloud companies. Either because they hire those engineers, or because they do their upmost to ensure everyone reaches for AWS Lambda instead of systemd (which, in many cases, would do the job just fine).

Anyway, I could bellyache about this for hours (and, of course, the cloud does have its place), suffice to say I agree.

[1]: https://lithus.eu

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