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One benefit of "the cloud" not mentioned here is elapsed time to acquire a new instance If you have moved to AWS / other then that time is around 5 minutes. I

One benefit of "the cloud" not mentioned here is elapsed time to acquire a new instance If you have moved to AWS / other then that time is around 5 minutes. If you are in a major fortune 500 and need a new server, quite often that time will measure in months (yes really). This simple equation just blows every other cost/benefit calculation out of the water. I may have missed it in the discussion.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
If you need that server today, absolutely, build an AMI and fire it up, and then place an order for a server to migrate to. It’s not binary, and it is possible between engineering and finance for balancing velocity and spend. Not everyone needs a server immediately. And not every use case will generate business value by having that server immediately available. This blog post cuts to the core of that: cloud gets you from product market fit to scale, but once at scale, it’s time to revisit capex vs opex.
kelp 5y ago
Yes and, it depends. Last time I was procuring racks of servers, it was about a 6 week lead time, sometimes more. So yeah, you have to do a lot more capacity planning, and probably keep capacity in reserve for things that are unexpected. I've had to go around to every engineering team and try to get them to tell me how much gear they might need in the next 1-2 quarters. They rarely know, so it's a lot of guess work. So in a situation with a quickly growing product, that grows in an unpredictable way. Or a really new product where you just have no idea what the adoption is going to look like. Then yeah, getting those new instances right now is really really important. At Segment we very often needed more instances in a huge hurry due to some customer load spike. And sometimes AWS ran out of the instances we needed in the region we were in. So we had to get creative to use other instance types. Also the cloud provider pricing structure heavily incentives you to actually do some capacity planning. On AWS, Savings Plan gives you huge savings. But if your workload is fairly predictable, then this on demand benefit isn't nearly as compelling and at the right scale, it makes sense to start buying servers to put in your own datacenter.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
I would go as far as to argue the ability to deploy new hardware almost instantly is the primary benefit of the cloud. And a very valuable one. It is "supply chain management as a service". You can automate operations but managing delivery dates, vendors, logistics, etc is the least pleasant part of operating a data center. Outsourcing the "where the hell is my container full of hard drives" phone calls, and subsequent scramble when you find out it was delayed for four weeks but they failed to notify you, is almost worth it. (In fairness, this mostly goes away if you select and manage your vendor relationships well.)
closeparen 5y ago
That depends on your infrastructure operations. We run almost all of production on a shared cluster, which maintains enough headroom for new services to be provisioned instantly and offers self-service tools to do so. Now if someone wants 20,000 additional instances overnight that’s going to be a problem, but you can certainly get enough to prototype and and run a small scale rollout while your capacity paperwork goes through.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

If you need that server today, absolutely, build an AMI and fire it up, and then place an order for a server to migrate to. It’s not binary, and it is possible between engineering and finance for balancing velocity and spend. Not everyone needs a server immediately. And not every use case will generate business value by having that server immediately available. This blog post cuts to the core of that: cloud gets you from product market fit to scale, but once at scale, it’s time to revisit capex vs opex.

kelp 5y ago

Yes and, it depends. Last time I was procuring racks of servers, it was about a 6 week lead time, sometimes more. So yeah, you have to do a lot more capacity planning, and probably keep capacity in reserve for things that are unexpected. I've had to go around to every engineering team and try to get them to tell me how much gear they might need in the next 1-2 quarters. They rarely know, so it's a lot of guess work. So in a situation with a quickly growing product, that grows in an unpredictable way. Or a really new product where you just have no idea what the adoption is going to look like. Then yeah, getting those new instances right now is really really important. At Segment we very often needed more instances in a huge hurry due to some customer load spike. And sometimes AWS ran out of the instances we needed in the region we were in. So we had to get creative to use other instance types. Also the cloud provider pricing structure heavily incentives you to actually do some capacity planning. On AWS, Savings Plan gives you huge savings. But if your workload is fairly predictable, then this on demand benefit isn't nearly as compelling and at the right scale, it makes sense to start buying servers to put in your own datacenter.

jandrewrogers 5y ago

I would go as far as to argue the ability to deploy new hardware almost instantly is the primary benefit of the cloud. And a very valuable one. It is "supply chain management as a service". You can automate operations but managing delivery dates, vendors, logistics, etc is the least pleasant part of operating a data center. Outsourcing the "where the hell is my container full of hard drives" phone calls, and subsequent scramble when you find out it was delayed for four weeks but they failed to notify you, is almost worth it. (In fairness, this mostly goes away if you select and manage your vendor relationships well.)

closeparen 5y ago

That depends on your infrastructure operations. We run almost all of production on a shared cluster, which maintains enough headroom for new services to be provisioned instantly and offers self-service tools to do so. Now if someone wants 20,000 additional instances overnight that’s going to be a problem, but you can certainly get enough to prototype and and run a small scale rollout while your capacity paperwork goes through.