4 ms·

I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation. The time where this was a

I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation. The time where this was a good idea has genuinely passed. There is no earthly way that any reasonable organization will be able to provide even the security that is present by relying on a large-scale cloud provider. There is no way they will come out on top money-wise either. The big cloud players have a _absurd_ number of servers that _teams_ of some of the best CA talent the globe has to offer stressing to improve KPIs for. 10k employees in a municipality is small potatoes to what azure / AWS / GCP have dedicated to their products.

dx034 7y ago
Maybe not own dc, but colocation could still make sense? You don't need to be more efficient than Azure & Co. They have pretty solid profit margins, even being 30% less efficient should still be cheaper for you. And beyond a few thousand servers, I'm not even sure if scale matters that much (for server virtualization only).
vidarh 7y ago
I have literally never seen a setup where cloud came out less than ~twice the cost of dedicated hosting. I have seen instances where dedicated hosting comes out cheaper than putting your own equipment in a colo, but even that depends on being in a location where energy and property prices (and so colo rental costs) are high. And this does factor in devops - when doing consulting I earned consistently more (because of more hours) from clients that went for cloud setups; often they'd end up spending more times solving problems that generally didn't exist in the first place in a dedicated setup. I do see lots of people that keep assuming that the cloud players must be cheap because they're so big, but I just have never seen that bear out in practice - in part because of that attitude, the margins they can charge are far higher. Cloud providers are great for ease and for the number of services they provide, but they are generally an expensive step up.
- dcolebatch 7y ago
  I suspect you’re doing it wrong, or there’s some niche type of computing you specialize in. In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting. IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently. Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.
  - mitchty 7y ago
    > IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently. I see you've never setup or had to deal with setting up SAP. There are a ton of legacy line of business applications which, won't be close to "cloud" any time in the near future. And are all run on if you're lucky, vm clusters, if you're unlucky on bare iron due to silly crap like per cpu licensing on where it "might" be run. Or if virtualized, a sum of all the physical hardware cpu's. "Enterprise" software running on premises is... problematic at best. Good luck replatforming something like this. They ask for your arm, leg, first unborn child, and your great grandkids children for the opportunity to run their software. I'm avoiding talking about the vendors that require up to or over a month to have a contractor on site helping you "integrate and install" their application on your systems. That crap is so far removed from instant and decentralized resource provisioning its like being in another universe. God help you if you need to change anything.
  - travbrack 7y ago
    Parent is probably comparing the cost of on prem to running VMs 24x7. Most IT departments are running software they did not write and don’t have the luxury of even getting access to the source code. If these customers want to do cloud they have to do it ‘wrong’
  - vidarh 7y ago
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  It's amazing how people fail to see that public cloud is the equivalent of a hotel. It's far cheaper than buying a house... in the short term. Cloud providers are not getting hardware, datacenters, electricity and labor for free. You are still paying for it.
  - castlecrasher2 7y ago
    Public cloud is only the equivalent of renting a hotel if buying a house means hiring the builders full-time for continued maintenance.
    - gpm 7y ago
      Hiring the builders full-time is only the equivalent of building a private data center if building a private data center means buying the entire companies of Intel and Supermicro.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      I used to provide devops consulting services exactly because nobody but large organizations "hires the builders full-time for continued maintenance" for dedicated servers any more than for cloud, because it takes really large systems before you need hardware intervention very often. Even when working clients that had multiple racks of hardware they owned, I spent on average a couple of days a year dealing with that. On the contrary, clients with cloud setups "hired the builder" for far more hours on average than those with dedicated setups. For my billable hours it'd have been far more beneficial if more people went to cloud setups.
- blaird 7y ago
  I think this will always be the case when looking at the base cost of infrastructure itself (price of a compute/GB of storage in the cloud vs on prem) However, the cost of cloud pays off so dramatically (in my past experience across companies) when you can see what new things the company can do with IaaS/PaaS and how quickly its done. I've been at a large bank and a small startup that was forced to use an external datacenter, but the result was the same until we went to AWS/GCP: Infra needs were highly manual and often required purchase orders to scale that took months. As soon as we moved to the cloud and embraced infra as code things started to move 5x faster and we could focus on building software and products, not fighting legacy IT teams
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Nothing stops you from doing infra as code on dedicated hosting. All of my setups for the last decade or so have been built around VMs and/or containers with deployment systems where we spun up containers across multiple datacenters on servers we had full control over. Many dedicated hosting providers now provide APIs for deploying servers, as well, so you can handle even deployment of the underlying servers in an automated way. Several have combined cloud deployments with deployments to dedicated servers from the same container images, bound together in a single virtual network. E.g. I had client that hosted across AWS, GCP and Hetzner, and migrated services between them zero-downtime. Eventually they moved everything to Hetzner because it cost them about 1/10th of AWS and GCP given their bandwidth use (at the time outbound bandwidth at AWS cost 50x what it cost at Hetzner). If organizational dysfunction means you're not allowed to order the resources you need, then that is of course a problem, but a very different one.
fulafel 7y ago
This varies by case - Office365 phishing breakins have been a bad epidemic for a long time now and the anti-phishing measures have not kept up well enough. I think MS still doesn't support any phishing resistant 2FA method there...
- hirsin 7y ago
  FIDO is supported, which is cred phishing resistant - but Oauth permissions phishing obviously can't be prevented if it's all 'legitimate' traffic to a bad app.

dx034 7y ago

Maybe not own dc, but colocation could still make sense? You don't need to be more efficient than Azure & Co. They have pretty solid profit margins, even being 30% less efficient should still be cheaper for you. And beyond a few thousand servers, I'm not even sure if scale matters that much (for server virtualization only).

vidarh 7y ago

I have literally never seen a setup where cloud came out less than ~twice the cost of dedicated hosting. I have seen instances where dedicated hosting comes out cheaper than putting your own equipment in a colo, but even that depends on being in a location where energy and property prices (and so colo rental costs) are high. And this does factor in devops - when doing consulting I earned consistently more (because of more hours) from clients that went for cloud setups; often they'd end up spending more times solving problems that generally didn't exist in the first place in a dedicated setup. I do see lots of people that keep assuming that the cloud players must be cheap because they're so big, but I just have never seen that bear out in practice - in part because of that attitude, the margins they can charge are far higher. Cloud providers are great for ease and for the number of services they provide, but they are generally an expensive step up.

dcolebatch 7y ago
I suspect you’re doing it wrong, or there’s some niche type of computing you specialize in. In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting. IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently. Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.
- mitchty 7y ago
  > IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently. I see you've never setup or had to deal with setting up SAP. There are a ton of legacy line of business applications which, won't be close to "cloud" any time in the near future. And are all run on if you're lucky, vm clusters, if you're unlucky on bare iron due to silly crap like per cpu licensing on where it "might" be run. Or if virtualized, a sum of all the physical hardware cpu's. "Enterprise" software running on premises is... problematic at best. Good luck replatforming something like this. They ask for your arm, leg, first unborn child, and your great grandkids children for the opportunity to run their software. I'm avoiding talking about the vendors that require up to or over a month to have a contractor on site helping you "integrate and install" their application on your systems. That crap is so far removed from instant and decentralized resource provisioning its like being in another universe. God help you if you need to change anything.
- travbrack 7y ago
  Parent is probably comparing the cost of on prem to running VMs 24x7. Most IT departments are running software they did not write and don’t have the luxury of even getting access to the source code. If these customers want to do cloud they have to do it ‘wrong’
- vidarh 7y ago
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
It's amazing how people fail to see that public cloud is the equivalent of a hotel. It's far cheaper than buying a house... in the short term. Cloud providers are not getting hardware, datacenters, electricity and labor for free. You are still paying for it.
- castlecrasher2 7y ago
  Public cloud is only the equivalent of renting a hotel if buying a house means hiring the builders full-time for continued maintenance.
  - gpm 7y ago
    Hiring the builders full-time is only the equivalent of building a private data center if building a private data center means buying the entire companies of Intel and Supermicro.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    I used to provide devops consulting services exactly because nobody but large organizations "hires the builders full-time for continued maintenance" for dedicated servers any more than for cloud, because it takes really large systems before you need hardware intervention very often. Even when working clients that had multiple racks of hardware they owned, I spent on average a couple of days a year dealing with that. On the contrary, clients with cloud setups "hired the builder" for far more hours on average than those with dedicated setups. For my billable hours it'd have been far more beneficial if more people went to cloud setups.
blaird 7y ago
I think this will always be the case when looking at the base cost of infrastructure itself (price of a compute/GB of storage in the cloud vs on prem) However, the cost of cloud pays off so dramatically (in my past experience across companies) when you can see what new things the company can do with IaaS/PaaS and how quickly its done. I've been at a large bank and a small startup that was forced to use an external datacenter, but the result was the same until we went to AWS/GCP: Infra needs were highly manual and often required purchase orders to scale that took months. As soon as we moved to the cloud and embraced infra as code things started to move 5x faster and we could focus on building software and products, not fighting legacy IT teams
- vidarh 7y ago
  Nothing stops you from doing infra as code on dedicated hosting. All of my setups for the last decade or so have been built around VMs and/or containers with deployment systems where we spun up containers across multiple datacenters on servers we had full control over. Many dedicated hosting providers now provide APIs for deploying servers, as well, so you can handle even deployment of the underlying servers in an automated way. Several have combined cloud deployments with deployments to dedicated servers from the same container images, bound together in a single virtual network. E.g. I had client that hosted across AWS, GCP and Hetzner, and migrated services between them zero-downtime. Eventually they moved everything to Hetzner because it cost them about 1/10th of AWS and GCP given their bandwidth use (at the time outbound bandwidth at AWS cost 50x what it cost at Hetzner). If organizational dysfunction means you're not allowed to order the resources you need, then that is of course a problem, but a very different one.

fulafel 7y ago

This varies by case - Office365 phishing breakins have been a bad epidemic for a long time now and the anti-phishing measures have not kept up well enough. I think MS still doesn't support any phishing resistant 2FA method there...

hirsin 7y ago
FIDO is supported, which is cred phishing resistant - but Oauth permissions phishing obviously can't be prevented if it's all 'legitimate' traffic to a bad app.