5 ms·

Seems like a strange approach. It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automa

Seems like a strange approach. It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automate. The article also doesn't mention spot pricing and per-second billing. Being able to burst up to hundreds of machines in minutes is super nice. I did some back of the envelope calculations for some build servers and it came out favorably for $cloud providers. Having idle machines also cost money. For a highly optimized and predictable work load I'm sure providers like OVH can provide better bang for bucks. But that also assumes you don't use any of the cost reduction methods that are available with $cloud, like using spot pricing for variable load and reserved capacity for base load.

twic 6y ago
> It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automate. It's also work you simply don't have to do if you rent hardware.
- cthalupa 6y ago
  You don't think there is variance in performance when you rent hardware? You've never had an HDD or SSD that underperformed vs. others of the same type or model? You've never had a stick of RAM that underperformed, or threw lots of CEs? I'll be frank: If you haven't seen performance variance with physical hardware, you either have been incredibly lucky, not paying attention, or not working at a very large scale.
  - twic 6y ago
    Ah, that delightful cloud propaganda move, where you assert that because some undesirable thing happens to both VMs and physical machines, that they're the same, elegantly glossing over the orders of magnitude difference in severity.
    - cthalupa 6y ago
      I'm not sure how it's "cloud propaganda" to say that performance variance is a very real thing in response to someone making the claim that it doesn't exist when you rent servers.

twic 6y ago

> It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automate. It's also work you simply don't have to do if you rent hardware.

cthalupa 6y ago
You don't think there is variance in performance when you rent hardware? You've never had an HDD or SSD that underperformed vs. others of the same type or model? You've never had a stick of RAM that underperformed, or threw lots of CEs? I'll be frank: If you haven't seen performance variance with physical hardware, you either have been incredibly lucky, not paying attention, or not working at a very large scale.
- twic 6y ago
  Ah, that delightful cloud propaganda move, where you assert that because some undesirable thing happens to both VMs and physical machines, that they're the same, elegantly glossing over the orders of magnitude difference in severity.
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    I'm not sure how it's "cloud propaganda" to say that performance variance is a very real thing in response to someone making the claim that it doesn't exist when you rent servers.