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I think it is lemming stupidity. Building one's own "cloud" is easy, and can be one in a tiny fraction of the expense any cloud provider charges. The mindless m

I think it is lemming stupidity. Building one's own "cloud" is easy, and can be one in a tiny fraction of the expense any cloud provider charges. The mindless march to the cloud is a huge competitive advantage for anyone "brave" enough to buck the propaganda and run their own hardware. There is a breed of developer that is doing REST in C++, building services that live in only a few hundred K, and a single physical server can concurrently host thousands of such services for an expense of $75 a month, running 24/7 with 16 cores and 16 GB RAM. The same capacity on a cloud provider is exponentially higher for a single server. You know that "fake news" idea? I think it has been manipulating developer opinion for a while. The cloud does not make sense, unless you are a cloud provider with a reason to sell that lie.

kuschku 10y ago
Exponentially higher does not even cover it. You pay several orders of magnitudes more. I’ve run the numbers several times, going from colo -> rented dedicated -> rented VPS -> cloud VPS (think EC2) -> containerized cloud (think heroku) -> serverless (think AWS lambda) is, on each step, at least a 2x or 5x increase in cost for the same computational power. I started out a few years ago with my hobby projects on Heroku, migrated them to Digital Ocean, from there to OVH’ VPS, and now migrated them last year to rented bare metal. Every migration multiplied my available resources at the same cost, and it’s definitely been worth it. I did a price comparison of VPS and some bare metal providers over at https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39... and the result is pretty much just that. For 16$ a month I can get enough performance to run services handling tenthousands of concurrent users if I go with bare metal, or I can’t even handle a few hundred if I go with the "cloud".
- bsenftner 10y ago
  A few years ago, I got a deal on a cabinet at a colo, and then when one of the research labs at USC dumped their servers for the cloud, and they gave me 17 servers. I'd previously custom built a 32 core, 32 gig server just out of hacker interest, and between the USC servers and my previously owned hardware I put together a 196 core cluster with 3 redundant ( dev, staging, live ) environments for my own playground, and similar setups for hosting clients. Adding to and modifying the system for a few years, I had what would have cost $96K a month at AWS, but was only $600 a month to me.
mschuster91 10y ago
> Building one's own "cloud" is easy, and can be one in a tiny fraction of the expense any cloud provider charges. Yeah, I've recently run the math - 176 real Xeon cores and 1TB of RAM are around 70k€ (4x 2x22 core Xeon 2699 v4), while the same from Amazon costs a load more. On the other side, it's the good old capex vs opex debate, plus you're going to need someone to do occasional disk swapping, worry about RAID setup etc. - all this is done by the cloud provider for you. > The cloud does not make sense, unless you are a cloud provider with a reason to sell that lie. It certainly makes sense if you have an architecture that allows you to handle the base load with your own bare metal but allows you to quickly (and automatically) add power via cloud instances.
- ddorian43 10y ago
  You know you can always rent a dedicated server, right ?
devonkim 10y ago
You're basically advocating the model similar to how WhatsApp grew. The truth is that most companies are willing to throw more money for delivering a result faster, and even the fastest C++ programmers cannot pump out a CRUD app and re-iterate as those using some random crap like Node.js and that's a fundamental reality of languages you have to compile and ship versus just modify in-place. I think it's a great idea for bootstrapped startups to host their own hardware until they've got the capital to try to spend more for results faster. But again, I think the current software market primarily driven by an obsession of faster iterations even at a far greater up-front cost is what de-emphasizes your romanticized notion of development cycles and care for efficiency (which I personally fully support - I started in embedded dev and all this web stuff has been boring to me since the 90s).
- bsenftner 10y ago
  The tooling is just arriving to enable as rapid a development cycle in C++ as with managed languages. I was having multiple issues, only optimizing portions of a traditional (W/L)AMP stack or node.js solution with C/C++ components until I found Restbed (https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed). Now I can create a complete self-contained REST API server in a 100K executable with no (W/L)AMP stack or other infrastructure required. Compiling C++ is fast, and unlike the typical (W/L)AMP, node.js, or other "conventional web stack" one is not compiling and/or executing through gigs of data and executable - the re-compile and execute/debug cycle in C++ for Restbed is instantaneous on modern hardware, and the execution speed runs circles around any managed language. Such a development solution is faster, consumes exponentially fewer resources, and is a great idea for much more than startups. You just need good C++ developers that also know the web - a bit rare right now, but the savings are too real for the situation to remain that way.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Thanks for the hint - I'll definitely have a look at it. Compile it statically and you can run it on a bare Linux kernel (or on a container) without any dependency... reminds me a bit of Go. Do you happen to know if there's a benchmark comparison (CPU usage, RAM usage, RPS) against nodejs and php (the code style of the example reminds me of Silex)?

kuschku 10y ago

Exponentially higher does not even cover it. You pay several orders of magnitudes more. I’ve run the numbers several times, going from colo -> rented dedicated -> rented VPS -> cloud VPS (think EC2) -> containerized cloud (think heroku) -> serverless (think AWS lambda) is, on each step, at least a 2x or 5x increase in cost for the same computational power. I started out a few years ago with my hobby projects on Heroku, migrated them to Digital Ocean, from there to OVH’ VPS, and now migrated them last year to rented bare metal. Every migration multiplied my available resources at the same cost, and it’s definitely been worth it. I did a price comparison of VPS and some bare metal providers over at https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39... and the result is pretty much just that. For 16$ a month I can get enough performance to run services handling tenthousands of concurrent users if I go with bare metal, or I can’t even handle a few hundred if I go with the "cloud".

bsenftner 10y ago
A few years ago, I got a deal on a cabinet at a colo, and then when one of the research labs at USC dumped their servers for the cloud, and they gave me 17 servers. I'd previously custom built a 32 core, 32 gig server just out of hacker interest, and between the USC servers and my previously owned hardware I put together a 196 core cluster with 3 redundant ( dev, staging, live ) environments for my own playground, and similar setups for hosting clients. Adding to and modifying the system for a few years, I had what would have cost $96K a month at AWS, but was only $600 a month to me.

mschuster91 10y ago

> Building one's own "cloud" is easy, and can be one in a tiny fraction of the expense any cloud provider charges. Yeah, I've recently run the math - 176 real Xeon cores and 1TB of RAM are around 70k€ (4x 2x22 core Xeon 2699 v4), while the same from Amazon costs a load more. On the other side, it's the good old capex vs opex debate, plus you're going to need someone to do occasional disk swapping, worry about RAID setup etc. - all this is done by the cloud provider for you. > The cloud does not make sense, unless you are a cloud provider with a reason to sell that lie. It certainly makes sense if you have an architecture that allows you to handle the base load with your own bare metal but allows you to quickly (and automatically) add power via cloud instances.

ddorian43 10y ago
You know you can always rent a dedicated server, right ?

devonkim 10y ago

You're basically advocating the model similar to how WhatsApp grew. The truth is that most companies are willing to throw more money for delivering a result faster, and even the fastest C++ programmers cannot pump out a CRUD app and re-iterate as those using some random crap like Node.js and that's a fundamental reality of languages you have to compile and ship versus just modify in-place. I think it's a great idea for bootstrapped startups to host their own hardware until they've got the capital to try to spend more for results faster. But again, I think the current software market primarily driven by an obsession of faster iterations even at a far greater up-front cost is what de-emphasizes your romanticized notion of development cycles and care for efficiency (which I personally fully support - I started in embedded dev and all this web stuff has been boring to me since the 90s).

bsenftner 10y ago
The tooling is just arriving to enable as rapid a development cycle in C++ as with managed languages. I was having multiple issues, only optimizing portions of a traditional (W/L)AMP stack or node.js solution with C/C++ components until I found Restbed (https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed). Now I can create a complete self-contained REST API server in a 100K executable with no (W/L)AMP stack or other infrastructure required. Compiling C++ is fast, and unlike the typical (W/L)AMP, node.js, or other "conventional web stack" one is not compiling and/or executing through gigs of data and executable - the re-compile and execute/debug cycle in C++ for Restbed is instantaneous on modern hardware, and the execution speed runs circles around any managed language. Such a development solution is faster, consumes exponentially fewer resources, and is a great idea for much more than startups. You just need good C++ developers that also know the web - a bit rare right now, but the savings are too real for the situation to remain that way.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Thanks for the hint - I'll definitely have a look at it. Compile it statically and you can run it on a bare Linux kernel (or on a container) without any dependency... reminds me a bit of Go. Do you happen to know if there's a benchmark comparison (CPU usage, RAM usage, RPS) against nodejs and php (the code style of the example reminds me of Silex)?