4 ms·

I think you're missing some use cases here. Cloud can be really helpful for prototyping systems that you may not even want running in a few months. Another use

by agrajag 10y ago

I think you're missing some use cases here. Cloud can be really helpful for prototyping systems that you may not even want running in a few months. Another use case would be where infrastructure costs are minor compared to dev and ops staff costs. If hosting on AWS makes your ops team 2x as productive at a 30% infrastructure markup that can be a steal.

candiodari 10y ago
Look at those cost factors. If you have an ops team (ie. 2+ people) it is a near certainty that cloud is more expensive. And if you absolutely do not need an ops team, VPS is going to beat the cloud by a huge margin. 2 people doing ops work cost 7-8k $ per month. Let's assume each of them is managing at least 5x their own cost in infrastructure spend, ie 35k+ $/month. That easily buys you 20-30 extremely high spec dedicated machines, if necessary all around the world, with unlimited bandwidth. On the cloud it wouldn't buy you 5 high spec machines with zero bandwidth, and zero disk. Let's compare. Amazon EC2 m3.2xlarge (not a spectacularly high end config I might add, 8vCPU, 30Gig ram, 160G disk, ZERO network) costs $23k per month. So this budget would buy you 2 of those. Using reserved instances you can halve that cost, so up to about 4, maybe 5 machines. Now compare softlayer dedicated (far from the cheapest provider), most expensive machine they got: $1439/month. Quad cpu (32 cores), 120G ram, 1Tb SSD, 500G network included (and more network is about 10% of the price amazon charges for the same). For that budget it gets you 25 of these beasts (in any of 20+ datacenters around the globe). On a low cost provider, like Hetzner, Leaseweb or OVH you can quadruple that. That's how big the difference is. It used to be the case that Amazon would have more geographic reach than dedicated servers, but that has long since ceased to be true. There is a spot in the middle where it makes sense, let's say from $100+ to maybe $10k where cloud does work. And you are right that it lets a smaller team do more. But there's 2 things to keep in mind : higher base cost that rises far faster when you expand compared to dedicated or colo. This is not a good trade to make.
- boulos 10y ago
  Your math is off by 60x for AWS and 100x for GCE. An m3.2xlarge is $.532/hr or $388/month, not $23k/month [1]. A similar instance on GCE (n1-standard-8) is $204/month with our sustained use discount, and then you need to add 160 GB of PD-SSD at another $27/month (so $231 total) [2]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but this is just a factual response. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ [2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
  - jcrites 10y ago
    EC2 m3.2xlarge can be had for $153/month as well when purchased as a reserved instance. EC2 reserved instances offer a substantial discount over on-demand pricing. The all-up-front price for a 3-year reservation for m3.2xlarge would be an amortized monthly rate of $153/month, which is a 61% saving vs. the on-demand price of $388/month, according to the EC2 reserved instances pricing page. Granted, using this capacity type requires some confidence in one's need for it over that period of time, since RIs are purchased up front for 1 or 3 year terms. But RIs can also be changed using RI modification, or by using Convertible RIs, and can be resold on a secondary marketplace. As a tradeoff in comparison to GCE's automatic sustained use discount, the EC2 RI discount requires deliberate and up-front action.
djsumdog 10y ago
I was thinking this too while reading the above comment. For starting up and prototypes, the aspect of a managed host far outweighs and initial performance losses. As companies scale, we see them move to their own hardware (Stackoverflow, Gitlab, etc.) It's best to design your stuff so it can easily go from hosted solutions (this "cloud" bullshit term people keep using) to something you manage yourself. Docker containers are a great solution to this. If you setup some ansible or puppet scripts to create a docker cluster (using mesos/marathon, kubernets, docker swarm, etc) and built it in a hosted data center; it's not going to take a whole lot of effort to provision real machines and run that same stack on dedicated hardware.
- Macha 10y ago
  I don't think stack overflow ever used cloud providers for their main compute and storage needs, just periphery stuff like cloudflare.

by agrajag 10y ago

candiodari 10y ago

Look at those cost factors. If you have an ops team (ie. 2+ people) it is a near certainty that cloud is more expensive. And if you absolutely do not need an ops team, VPS is going to beat the cloud by a huge margin. 2 people doing ops work cost 7-8k $ per month. Let's assume each of them is managing at least 5x their own cost in infrastructure spend, ie 35k+ $/month. That easily buys you 20-30 extremely high spec dedicated machines, if necessary all around the world, with unlimited bandwidth. On the cloud it wouldn't buy you 5 high spec machines with zero bandwidth, and zero disk. Let's compare. Amazon EC2 m3.2xlarge (not a spectacularly high end config I might add, 8vCPU, 30Gig ram, 160G disk, ZERO network) costs $23k per month. So this budget would buy you 2 of those. Using reserved instances you can halve that cost, so up to about 4, maybe 5 machines. Now compare softlayer dedicated (far from the cheapest provider), most expensive machine they got: $1439/month. Quad cpu (32 cores), 120G ram, 1Tb SSD, 500G network included (and more network is about 10% of the price amazon charges for the same). For that budget it gets you 25 of these beasts (in any of 20+ datacenters around the globe). On a low cost provider, like Hetzner, Leaseweb or OVH you can quadruple that. That's how big the difference is. It used to be the case that Amazon would have more geographic reach than dedicated servers, but that has long since ceased to be true. There is a spot in the middle where it makes sense, let's say from $100+ to maybe $10k where cloud does work. And you are right that it lets a smaller team do more. But there's 2 things to keep in mind : higher base cost that rises far faster when you expand compared to dedicated or colo. This is not a good trade to make.

boulos 10y ago
Your math is off by 60x for AWS and 100x for GCE. An m3.2xlarge is $.532/hr or $388/month, not $23k/month [1]. A similar instance on GCE (n1-standard-8) is $204/month with our sustained use discount, and then you need to add 160 GB of PD-SSD at another $27/month (so $231 total) [2]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, but this is just a factual response. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ [2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
- jcrites 10y ago
  EC2 m3.2xlarge can be had for $153/month as well when purchased as a reserved instance. EC2 reserved instances offer a substantial discount over on-demand pricing. The all-up-front price for a 3-year reservation for m3.2xlarge would be an amortized monthly rate of $153/month, which is a 61% saving vs. the on-demand price of $388/month, according to the EC2 reserved instances pricing page. Granted, using this capacity type requires some confidence in one's need for it over that period of time, since RIs are purchased up front for 1 or 3 year terms. But RIs can also be changed using RI modification, or by using Convertible RIs, and can be resold on a secondary marketplace. As a tradeoff in comparison to GCE's automatic sustained use discount, the EC2 RI discount requires deliberate and up-front action.

djsumdog 10y ago

I was thinking this too while reading the above comment. For starting up and prototypes, the aspect of a managed host far outweighs and initial performance losses. As companies scale, we see them move to their own hardware (Stackoverflow, Gitlab, etc.) It's best to design your stuff so it can easily go from hosted solutions (this "cloud" bullshit term people keep using) to something you manage yourself. Docker containers are a great solution to this. If you setup some ansible or puppet scripts to create a docker cluster (using mesos/marathon, kubernets, docker swarm, etc) and built it in a hosted data center; it's not going to take a whole lot of effort to provision real machines and run that same stack on dedicated hardware.

Macha 10y ago
I don't think stack overflow ever used cloud providers for their main compute and storage needs, just periphery stuff like cloudflare.