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Ah the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. You

Ah the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. You realize that people plan and model growth around these figures. You realize that despite all of this, many people still go with cloud solutions because they get other benefits. I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.

kyledrake 10y ago
> I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.
- webmaven 10y ago
  Feel free to upvote the stuff that you do find interesting, and encourage others to do the same.
- qeternity 10y ago
  For reasons better analyzed by historians and statisticians. The historical statistics are that Vultr is far more likely to be a risk to the business than Google is. It's as simple as that.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Where is this evidence to substantiate this? We would love to read it, please share it with us. I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs. Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on. I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.
    - ctlaltdefeat 10y ago
      To be fair, there are some instances where GC has unique technological advantages compared to VPSes. Their new distributed ACID SQL database comes to mind.
      - misframer 10y ago
        Google Cloud also has live migration of VMs.
        kyledrake 10y ago
        Is that unusual? I just did that with my VMs in the datacenter this morning to add more storage...
      - jazoom 10y ago
        It's true GC has more of these features but I personally avoid stuff like that because that's serious lock-in.
pg314 10y ago
> You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.
- addicted 10y ago
  The industry, and consultants especially, have strongly pushed the idea that cloud will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than alternatives.
zzzcpan 10y ago
Hugely overpriced bandwidth and other resources limit your flexibility a lot and keep a lot of options closed for you, making it harder to compete or offer value to users. It might not matter for some, but could be a matter of life and death for others, because pursuing those closed options anyway and hoping to dig yourself out of a cloud lock-in hole afterwards might be too expensive to survive.

kyledrake 10y ago

> I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.

webmaven 10y ago
Feel free to upvote the stuff that you do find interesting, and encourage others to do the same.
qeternity 10y ago
For reasons better analyzed by historians and statisticians. The historical statistics are that Vultr is far more likely to be a risk to the business than Google is. It's as simple as that.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Where is this evidence to substantiate this? We would love to read it, please share it with us. I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs. Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on. I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.
  - ctlaltdefeat 10y ago
    To be fair, there are some instances where GC has unique technological advantages compared to VPSes. Their new distributed ACID SQL database comes to mind.
    - misframer 10y ago
      Google Cloud also has live migration of VMs.
      - kyledrake 10y ago
        Is that unusual? I just did that with my VMs in the datacenter this morning to add more storage...
    - jazoom 10y ago
      It's true GC has more of these features but I personally avoid stuff like that because that's serious lock-in.

pg314 10y ago

> You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.

addicted 10y ago
The industry, and consultants especially, have strongly pushed the idea that cloud will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than alternatives.

zzzcpan 10y ago

Hugely overpriced bandwidth and other resources limit your flexibility a lot and keep a lot of options closed for you, making it harder to compete or offer value to users. It might not matter for some, but could be a matter of life and death for others, because pursuing those closed options anyway and hoping to dig yourself out of a cloud lock-in hole afterwards might be too expensive to survive.