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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

> Many a company was stuck with a datacenter unit that was unresponsive to the company's needs

I'd like to +1 here - it's an understated risk if you've got datacenter-scale workloads. But! You can host a lot of compute on a couple racks nowadays, so IMHO it's a problem only if you're too successful and get complacent. In the datacenter, creative destruction is a must and crucially finance must be made to understand this, or they'll give you budget targets which can only mean ossification.

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In orgs I have seen this it is usually a symptom of the data center unit being starved of resources. It’s like they have only been given the choice of on prem but ridiculous paperwork and long lead times or pay 20x for cloud.

Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery phase to keep things going while we are waiting on things to get sized or arrive?

> Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner

Or just use Hetzner for major performance at low cost... Their apis and stuff make it look like its your datacenter.

The problem is if you over-provision and buy 2x as many resources as you need, this looks bad from a utilization standpoint. If you buy 2x as expensive cloud solutions and “auto scale” you will have a much higher utilization for the same coat.

I feel like companies are unreasonably afraid of cost up front, never mind that they’re going to pay more for cloud over the next 6 months, spending 6x monthly cloud cost on a single server makes them hesitate.

It’s how they always refuse to spend half my monthly salary on the computer I work on, and instead insist I use an underpowered windows machine.

Blame finance and accounting... Rent compute in the cloud can be immediately expensed against revenues. Purchasing equipment has to be depreciated over a few years. Also why spending $$$$$ on labor (salaries) to solve an ops issue rather than spending $$$$ on some software to do it happens. If the business relies on the software it looks like an ever ongoing cost of operating the business. Spending more on labor to juggle the craziness can "hide" that and make the business look more attractive to investors... Cutting labor costs is easier to improve the bottom line (in the short term).

You also don't need to commit to upfront costs. You can easily rent, rent to own/lease these resources.

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