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And for whatever reason everyone bought the rhetoric that you could save so much money by moving your stuff to these services in the "cloud" though there is no

And for whatever reason everyone bought the rhetoric that you could save so much money by moving your stuff to these services in the "cloud" though there is no clear reason to think that this is true. You still need employees to manage those services, you still need to backup stuff and restore it if that stuff fails. etc.

ccrush 8y ago
Because you buy these services, you can blame someone else when they fail. That's why cloud services are favored among IT staff. You can no longer get fired for the backup failing if it's Google Compute that failed to back up your instances.
- laumars 8y ago
  That's certainly an attractive aspect of the cloud but in my experience what tends to be the bigger driving factor is because you're effectively paying for your hardware on a subscription basis rather than paying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars up front.
  - zrm 8y ago
    I don't really get either of these. If your backups fail then you still get fired, but now it's for choosing an unreliable cloud vendor. If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan. I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself.
    - laumars 8y ago
      > If your backups fail then you still get fired, but now it's for choosing an unreliable cloud vendor It wasn't me that came up with the backup example - which I do think is the best example of the point they were making because you wouldn't expect that particular service to fail nor someone to get fired. And if it does, it's more likely yourselves to blame for setting it up wrong than it is the cloud vendor at fault. Their general point was more that if you self-host and the infra goes down due to hardware failure (eg switch goes pop) then it's up to you to fix. With cloud services that responsibility now becomes someone else's problem. Personally I find this the least convincing reason to move to the cloud because I'd rather be proactive fixing something than waiting for someone else. However it's undeniable that it is an incentive to some - I suspect more for manager types than engineers though. > If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan. You pay a premium for that (interest and insurance) and are still stuck with the repayments even if your project crash and burns before the instalment plan finishes. If you're a business and looking to buy hardware you are much better off buying it outright - you have a stronger position to negotiate a discount (so you're not paying advertised price) and you have capital you can resell if the worst happens. However if your a small or medium sized company and you don't have any self-hosted equipment currently or are looking to re-outfit several racks of gear, then the cloud is a very attractive offering. > I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself. It sounds like your impression of the cloud is massively outdated. If you're just looking for a VMWare equivalent then AWS et al isn't going to be that impressive. Where public clouds have overtaken self-hosted solutions is with their SaaS solutions. This is why in my other post I make the distinction between "lift and shift" type deployments on the cloud, and using their SaaS offerings. I do totally get the appeal of self hosting though. I've spent the majority of my career in server rooms and love the feeling of owning my own equipment. However pragmatically I can also see why the cloud is such an attractive solution to businesses these days.
      - zrm 7y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Ha. Yeah right, that assumes the boss is stupid enough not to know who recommended using Google Compute and what justifications they used. Don't worry, they'll be asking all sorts of questions while you're twiddling your thumbs, unable to do anything at all about the infrastructure being unavailable.
laumars 8y ago
It really depends. If you're doing a "lift and shift" then running stuff in the cloud is almost certainly going to be more expensive. However if you migrate to using managed services then there can be a lot of cost savings. To be honest it's a lot like the old days of PHP hosts - comparing VPS to shared hosting - except it's now the shared hosting is scaled up and "enterprisey". What I do find most people overlook when saying "the cloud is cheap" is just how much time is required to deploy to the cloud. I don't mean POCing a few things in the AWS console but rather deploying stuff properly using Terraform, Puppet, etc and architecting it correctly so you have resilience without paying through the nose for it.

ccrush 8y ago

Because you buy these services, you can blame someone else when they fail. That's why cloud services are favored among IT staff. You can no longer get fired for the backup failing if it's Google Compute that failed to back up your instances.

laumars 8y ago
That's certainly an attractive aspect of the cloud but in my experience what tends to be the bigger driving factor is because you're effectively paying for your hardware on a subscription basis rather than paying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars up front.
- zrm 8y ago
  I don't really get either of these. If your backups fail then you still get fired, but now it's for choosing an unreliable cloud vendor. If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan. I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself.
  - laumars 8y ago
    > If your backups fail then you still get fired, but now it's for choosing an unreliable cloud vendor It wasn't me that came up with the backup example - which I do think is the best example of the point they were making because you wouldn't expect that particular service to fail nor someone to get fired. And if it does, it's more likely yourselves to blame for setting it up wrong than it is the cloud vendor at fault. Their general point was more that if you self-host and the infra goes down due to hardware failure (eg switch goes pop) then it's up to you to fix. With cloud services that responsibility now becomes someone else's problem. Personally I find this the least convincing reason to move to the cloud because I'd rather be proactive fixing something than waiting for someone else. However it's undeniable that it is an incentive to some - I suspect more for manager types than engineers though. > If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan. You pay a premium for that (interest and insurance) and are still stuck with the repayments even if your project crash and burns before the instalment plan finishes. If you're a business and looking to buy hardware you are much better off buying it outright - you have a stronger position to negotiate a discount (so you're not paying advertised price) and you have capital you can resell if the worst happens. However if your a small or medium sized company and you don't have any self-hosted equipment currently or are looking to re-outfit several racks of gear, then the cloud is a very attractive offering. > I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself. It sounds like your impression of the cloud is massively outdated. If you're just looking for a VMWare equivalent then AWS et al isn't going to be that impressive. Where public clouds have overtaken self-hosted solutions is with their SaaS solutions. This is why in my other post I make the distinction between "lift and shift" type deployments on the cloud, and using their SaaS offerings. I do totally get the appeal of self hosting though. I've spent the majority of my career in server rooms and love the feeling of owning my own equipment. However pragmatically I can also see why the cloud is such an attractive solution to businesses these days.
    - zrm 7y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Ha. Yeah right, that assumes the boss is stupid enough not to know who recommended using Google Compute and what justifications they used. Don't worry, they'll be asking all sorts of questions while you're twiddling your thumbs, unable to do anything at all about the infrastructure being unavailable.

laumars 8y ago

It really depends. If you're doing a "lift and shift" then running stuff in the cloud is almost certainly going to be more expensive. However if you migrate to using managed services then there can be a lot of cost savings. To be honest it's a lot like the old days of PHP hosts - comparing VPS to shared hosting - except it's now the shared hosting is scaled up and "enterprisey". What I do find most people overlook when saying "the cloud is cheap" is just how much time is required to deploy to the cloud. I don't mean POCing a few things in the AWS console but rather deploying stuff properly using Terraform, Puppet, etc and architecting it correctly so you have resilience without paying through the nose for it.