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>Businesses’ main motive for moving to the cloud was never about cost but “scalability”: having access to additional computing resources with a few clicks. Th

by jasode 5y ago

>Businesses’ main motive for moving to the cloud was never about cost but “scalability”: having access to additional computing resources with a few clicks. That's not accurate because many businesses do migrate for cost reasons. Especially for internal non-public facing servers like email. E.g. They moved from self-hosted Microsoft Exchange servers to cloud-managed email like Office 365 Exchange Online -- or switch to another cloud competitor like G Suite. >Ms Wang and Mr Casado have suggested that firms should think about building their own private clouds to keep costs down. So far few firms have opted for such “repatriation”, which is both costly and makes it harder for businesses to enjoy the benefits of essentially unlimited computing resources in the public cloud. As a case study, The Guardian newspaper tried building their own private cloud and failed. They ultimately just went with AWS: https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.computerworlduk.com/cloud-computing/guardian-goes-all-in-on-aws-public-cloud-after-openstack-disaster-3629790/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.compu... If the company's business profit is not in the tech sector (like The Guardian), this means its IT datacenter operations is not its core competency which makes it hard to build internal IT that can keep up with AWS capabilities. Tech businesses like Dropbox, Facebook, can hire & maintain skilled IT staff like AWS but most other non-tech businesses can't.

rmbyrro 5y ago
They say the "main motive", not the sole motive. Cost is also a motive, for sure, but do you consider they'd move to reduce costs if there wasn't scalability?
krab 5y ago
> The Guardian newspaper tried building their own private cloud and failed What I see often is that it's hard and costly to replicate the whole cloud experience in-house. OpenStack is a behemoth to operate. However, if you build something more specific to your needs (and often mix in selected public cloud services), you'll get a much cheaper stack. Small businesses can often run very efficiently with a few rented physical servers in a colo, G Suite and AWS S3. Larger ones can provide a platform specific to the technologies used in-house and combine with public cloud for any other tech stacks.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Why are you recommending S3 when Ceph exists? You almost literally just throw hard drives at it and it gives you remote block devices for VMs, a NFS style shared FS, and an S3 client compatible object store.
  - Eikon 5y ago
    What? Operating a small ceph cluster is almost a full time job, at least if you care about your data...
    - Spivak 5y ago
      People always think Ceph is super complicated but I promise you it isn't. I worked at a place where my (3 person) team and I operated a 1 PB Ceph cluster replicated across two datacenters along with literally every other service needed to run a production web app. It was one of the lowest maintenance services we deployed -- Kafka and our RabbitMQ clusters were the things that always gave us trouble.
      - krab 5y ago
        I was on a team that had a tiny (a few GBs) Ceph cluster because it was the easiest option for high availability of these files that we really wanted to have on premise. There were never any issues so I can believe what you're saying. Still, for the amount of data I work with, the cloud storage usually wins.
  - krab 5y ago
    Others may have other preferences. This is what worked for me. I just find S3 quite cheap for storing a few (tens of) terabytes plus some glacier archives. For data I often want multiple locations redundancy and encryption. That gets more complicated than what I can save. I guess the equation changes when you have more data or looser requirements. That's actually my point. It's very hard to recreate the whole AWS experience, but it's quite possible to pick any piece and do it much cheaper.
- 5y ago
nojito 5y ago
Why are you comparing it to selfhosted? BareMetal has been a thing for decades and outperforms the "cloud" on cost and performance for the vast majority of usecases.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Except that you have high initial costs in setting up this hardware, especially in a scalable fashion; it quickly adds up to tens of thousands, plus you need employees that can manage something like that, including 24/7 support or monitoring. Or at least, that's part of AWS' sales pitch. But it makes sense, if you're just an application developer, you can fire up a hosted, scalable, redundant cluster fairly easily and quickly, whereas if you go self-hosted you need to buy hardware, colocation, and either know or hire people that can set it up and mange it.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The high upfront cost only applies to buying the hardware. What about renting from Hetzner or OVH?
    - yholio 5y ago
      Sure, but you need to put it into Powerpoint and sell it as the next big thing in cloud computing: your cloud provider no longer offers you shared, cheap virtual servers that anyone might be using at the same time, but 100% dedicated servers in the cloud, with unmatched reliability, stability and performance. You just might impress top brass and convince them to get on this bandwagon before they are disrupted.
    - harpratap 5y ago
      How is Hetzner not a cloud computing business? You click a few buttons and get a a ready-made infra from an already provisioned pool of hardware. This is by definition cloud. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles from the big 3 cloud vendors but Hetzner is very much Cloud computing
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
redwood 5y ago
It's TCO through the lens of "do you really want to have to have specialists in that?" Akin to running your own power plant -- MAYBE you can do so "more cheaply" than grid power through a one dimensional cost of inputs lens but all of a sudden you're running a power plant which is a bummer when your customer complains that the burger doesn't taste right
lumost 5y ago
Arguably, the guardian is a tech business at this point. However fundamentally - hosting is not its core competency. If you've ever tried to pinpoint a businesses's core competency the simple test is "is this something that if we fail at, we'll keep trying". There is a big execution risk in building a private cloud, you end up paying this risk both on whether you have the right people to build, maintain, and grow a datacenter - as well as whether you have the right set of APIs to support growing your application. Most businesses will look at the relative costs and opt for a private cloud solution, then price in the risk and go for the cloud solution. There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware.
- dijit 5y ago
  > There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware. No, but it has potential political ramifications, right? All the Cloud providers are US. Does this mean the guardian will be more wary about saying anything negative about the US? All the cloud providers are big companies, does this mean that the Guardian might be less critical of big companies? Obviously being completely vendor agnostic is difficult; but we shouldn't pretend that there could not be backlash in unexpected ways- even if "hosting is not a core competency". A thing that comes to my mind is Edward Snowden's revaluations: given the things he talked about (NSA was even tapping Google lines, for example): how could any whistleblower expect to not be exposed by accident if everyone is using a cloud provider in the US? It just strikes me as marginally naive to assume that nothing can/could go wrong here, you hand off an immeasurably large amount of control to an ambivalent entity and whatever regime they happen to be under.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    You bring up a good point. Last year when Parlor was kicked off of AWS, it was a dude awakening. Before that, I had (correctly) thought that AWS doesn't read the data you store and (incorrectly) AWS doesn't care what you store. I now realize the cloud providers are willing and able to express political opinions and delist people/companies that disagree with political parties.
hodgesrm 5y ago
It very much depends on the business. We offer managed data warehouses, which (a) are major consumers of compute/storage/networking and (b) often have stringent requirements around security and control of data. We're betting that not everyone will be in the main public clouds for these reasons and prepared for the pendulum to swing back for some applications. Financial services companies for example still have major on-prem / self-managed footprints. They are very sophisticated consumers. (My company Altinity was the one cited at the head of the article.)
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
The fundamental promise of the cloud was that it was going to be cheaper over time. That was 100% how it was sold back in the days. “We buy all the hardware to a fraction of the cost comparing to any private company”, and so on. Scale arguments. And “We manage the hardware and the platform so you can focus on features”. Today, Azure for instance motivates the high prices per request with things like security and compliance. I guess it is the same with other providers.
- gatvol 5y ago
  Azure is the joker / clown in the cloud security pack. I'd wager they're both the most expensive and insecure.
mr_toad 5y ago
> If the company's business profit is not in the tech sector (like The Guardian), this means its IT datacenter operations is not its core competency By that logic a bookseller has no business running the world’s largest cloud! Not that I’m disagreeing with you in general, Amazon is very much an exception to the rule.

by jasode 5y ago

rmbyrro 5y ago

They say the "main motive", not the sole motive. Cost is also a motive, for sure, but do you consider they'd move to reduce costs if there wasn't scalability?

krab 5y ago

> The Guardian newspaper tried building their own private cloud and failed What I see often is that it's hard and costly to replicate the whole cloud experience in-house. OpenStack is a behemoth to operate. However, if you build something more specific to your needs (and often mix in selected public cloud services), you'll get a much cheaper stack. Small businesses can often run very efficiently with a few rented physical servers in a colo, G Suite and AWS S3. Larger ones can provide a platform specific to the technologies used in-house and combine with public cloud for any other tech stacks.

Spivak 5y ago
Why are you recommending S3 when Ceph exists? You almost literally just throw hard drives at it and it gives you remote block devices for VMs, a NFS style shared FS, and an S3 client compatible object store.
- Eikon 5y ago
  What? Operating a small ceph cluster is almost a full time job, at least if you care about your data...
  - Spivak 5y ago
    People always think Ceph is super complicated but I promise you it isn't. I worked at a place where my (3 person) team and I operated a 1 PB Ceph cluster replicated across two datacenters along with literally every other service needed to run a production web app. It was one of the lowest maintenance services we deployed -- Kafka and our RabbitMQ clusters were the things that always gave us trouble.
    - krab 5y ago
      I was on a team that had a tiny (a few GBs) Ceph cluster because it was the easiest option for high availability of these files that we really wanted to have on premise. There were never any issues so I can believe what you're saying. Still, for the amount of data I work with, the cloud storage usually wins.
- krab 5y ago
  Others may have other preferences. This is what worked for me. I just find S3 quite cheap for storing a few (tens of) terabytes plus some glacier archives. For data I often want multiple locations redundancy and encryption. That gets more complicated than what I can save. I guess the equation changes when you have more data or looser requirements. That's actually my point. It's very hard to recreate the whole AWS experience, but it's quite possible to pick any piece and do it much cheaper.
5y ago

nojito 5y ago

Why are you comparing it to selfhosted? BareMetal has been a thing for decades and outperforms the "cloud" on cost and performance for the vast majority of usecases.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Except that you have high initial costs in setting up this hardware, especially in a scalable fashion; it quickly adds up to tens of thousands, plus you need employees that can manage something like that, including 24/7 support or monitoring. Or at least, that's part of AWS' sales pitch. But it makes sense, if you're just an application developer, you can fire up a hosted, scalable, redundant cluster fairly easily and quickly, whereas if you go self-hosted you need to buy hardware, colocation, and either know or hire people that can set it up and mange it.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The high upfront cost only applies to buying the hardware. What about renting from Hetzner or OVH?
  - yholio 5y ago
    Sure, but you need to put it into Powerpoint and sell it as the next big thing in cloud computing: your cloud provider no longer offers you shared, cheap virtual servers that anyone might be using at the same time, but 100% dedicated servers in the cloud, with unmatched reliability, stability and performance. You just might impress top brass and convince them to get on this bandwagon before they are disrupted.
  - harpratap 5y ago
    How is Hetzner not a cloud computing business? You click a few buttons and get a a ready-made infra from an already provisioned pool of hardware. This is by definition cloud. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles from the big 3 cloud vendors but Hetzner is very much Cloud computing

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

redwood 5y ago

It's TCO through the lens of "do you really want to have to have specialists in that?" Akin to running your own power plant -- MAYBE you can do so "more cheaply" than grid power through a one dimensional cost of inputs lens but all of a sudden you're running a power plant which is a bummer when your customer complains that the burger doesn't taste right

lumost 5y ago

Arguably, the guardian is a tech business at this point. However fundamentally - hosting is not its core competency. If you've ever tried to pinpoint a businesses's core competency the simple test is "is this something that if we fail at, we'll keep trying". There is a big execution risk in building a private cloud, you end up paying this risk both on whether you have the right people to build, maintain, and grow a datacenter - as well as whether you have the right set of APIs to support growing your application. Most businesses will look at the relative costs and opt for a private cloud solution, then price in the risk and go for the cloud solution. There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware.

dijit 5y ago
> There is no reason the Guardian must control its own hardware. No, but it has potential political ramifications, right? All the Cloud providers are US. Does this mean the guardian will be more wary about saying anything negative about the US? All the cloud providers are big companies, does this mean that the Guardian might be less critical of big companies? Obviously being completely vendor agnostic is difficult; but we shouldn't pretend that there could not be backlash in unexpected ways- even if "hosting is not a core competency". A thing that comes to my mind is Edward Snowden's revaluations: given the things he talked about (NSA was even tapping Google lines, for example): how could any whistleblower expect to not be exposed by accident if everyone is using a cloud provider in the US? It just strikes me as marginally naive to assume that nothing can/could go wrong here, you hand off an immeasurably large amount of control to an ambivalent entity and whatever regime they happen to be under.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  You bring up a good point. Last year when Parlor was kicked off of AWS, it was a dude awakening. Before that, I had (correctly) thought that AWS doesn't read the data you store and (incorrectly) AWS doesn't care what you store. I now realize the cloud providers are willing and able to express political opinions and delist people/companies that disagree with political parties.

hodgesrm 5y ago

It very much depends on the business. We offer managed data warehouses, which (a) are major consumers of compute/storage/networking and (b) often have stringent requirements around security and control of data. We're betting that not everyone will be in the main public clouds for these reasons and prepared for the pendulum to swing back for some applications. Financial services companies for example still have major on-prem / self-managed footprints. They are very sophisticated consumers. (My company Altinity was the one cited at the head of the article.)

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

The fundamental promise of the cloud was that it was going to be cheaper over time. That was 100% how it was sold back in the days. “We buy all the hardware to a fraction of the cost comparing to any private company”, and so on. Scale arguments. And “We manage the hardware and the platform so you can focus on features”. Today, Azure for instance motivates the high prices per request with things like security and compliance. I guess it is the same with other providers.

gatvol 5y ago
Azure is the joker / clown in the cloud security pack. I'd wager they're both the most expensive and insecure.

mr_toad 5y ago

> If the company's business profit is not in the tech sector (like The Guardian), this means its IT datacenter operations is not its core competency By that logic a bookseller has no business running the world’s largest cloud! Not that I’m disagreeing with you in general, Amazon is very much an exception to the rule.