6 ms·

How is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forev

by slackingoff2017 9y ago

How is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forever because your customers never own anything. I've done the math many times and it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.

mostly_harmless 9y ago
Theres other hidden costs as well. What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust. GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  These are solved problems though. RAID works great around 99% of the time and for the others you can use off-site backup. It's extremely rare that something needs a true 100% uptime. Salesforce and Reddit still go down for maintenance windows in 2017. For one project I setup log streaming with Postgres to the cloud(since inbound BW is free :) ) and ran a hot backup there just in case. Really though in my experience the cloud is far less reliable than colocation. I've had AWS VMs "degrade" or randomly die countless times but I can't remember the last time my Colo boxes went down, probably not since I last upgraded the OS.
carterehsmith 9y ago
> it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware. It may be. But for many people, it does not matter. Let's say you work at the place (I do) where "compute" cost is like ~0.5% of the total costs. Almost all of the cost is employee's salaries and benefits. BTW we get (and from what I hear, everyone does) offers from other cloud vendors to switch, and get 1 year free or whatever. And it gets ignored because it is a big risk for a tiny possible gain.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  Fair enough. I just think that infastructure is a bigger differentiator of success than most give it credit for. By using the cloud you're giving up the possible performance and money advantages of doing it yourself. It's really just a new form of vertical integration. If you're working only at the high levels you're not only paying someone to do that rest for you, those people are making profit off of you. Profit that could be yours.

mostly_harmless 9y ago

Theres other hidden costs as well. What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust. GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.

slackingoff2017 9y ago
These are solved problems though. RAID works great around 99% of the time and for the others you can use off-site backup. It's extremely rare that something needs a true 100% uptime. Salesforce and Reddit still go down for maintenance windows in 2017. For one project I setup log streaming with Postgres to the cloud(since inbound BW is free :) ) and ran a hot backup there just in case. Really though in my experience the cloud is far less reliable than colocation. I've had AWS VMs "degrade" or randomly die countless times but I can't remember the last time my Colo boxes went down, probably not since I last upgraded the OS.

carterehsmith 9y ago

> it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware. It may be. But for many people, it does not matter. Let's say you work at the place (I do) where "compute" cost is like ~0.5% of the total costs. Almost all of the cost is employee's salaries and benefits. BTW we get (and from what I hear, everyone does) offers from other cloud vendors to switch, and get 1 year free or whatever. And it gets ignored because it is a big risk for a tiny possible gain.

slackingoff2017 9y ago
Fair enough. I just think that infastructure is a bigger differentiator of success than most give it credit for. By using the cloud you're giving up the possible performance and money advantages of doing it yourself. It's really just a new form of vertical integration. If you're working only at the high levels you're not only paying someone to do that rest for you, those people are making profit off of you. Profit that could be yours.