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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 usec

by 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
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      It's not "cloud" in the sense it's not AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and is orders of magnitude cheaper (and bandwidth is free). But yes technically it's "cloud" in the sense that it's still someone else's computer for rent.
- nojito 5y ago
  I can get a dedicated baremetal server up and running in 10 minutes after paying for it (some can get it done in seconds). Scale does NOT matter for the vast majority of usecases. For example, the parent comment talked about on-prem exchange server.
jacobr1 5y ago
The problem is social and bureaucratic. Business unit X wants to buy software that solves a certain business problem. Oops you missed this annual budget cycle that is tied to hardware purchasing, better try again next year. Or, great we'll help you buy that hardware, but there is a 3-6 month leadtime. So many organization had an adversarial relationship to their IT group. Even when they didn't want it, the structures prevented solid partnership. On the other hand, SaaS, or self-service cloud (either on-prem openstack stuff, or real cloud aws/gcp/azure) allows groups to manage their own resources while still having a central coordinating function. Working in enterprise software, I was am always surprised when I find a killer feature may not the functional value of something we've built, but that fact it works around some internal disfunction of operations between internal teams.
- fragmede 5y ago
  That's the opposite side of Conway's law, but the real point is large organizations can be dysfunctional. Cloud computing lets customers bypass their organization's particular dysfunction.

by 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
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It's not "cloud" in the sense it's not AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and is orders of magnitude cheaper (and bandwidth is free). But yes technically it's "cloud" in the sense that it's still someone else's computer for rent.
nojito 5y ago
I can get a dedicated baremetal server up and running in 10 minutes after paying for it (some can get it done in seconds). Scale does NOT matter for the vast majority of usecases. For example, the parent comment talked about on-prem exchange server.

jacobr1 5y ago

The problem is social and bureaucratic. Business unit X wants to buy software that solves a certain business problem. Oops you missed this annual budget cycle that is tied to hardware purchasing, better try again next year. Or, great we'll help you buy that hardware, but there is a 3-6 month leadtime. So many organization had an adversarial relationship to their IT group. Even when they didn't want it, the structures prevented solid partnership. On the other hand, SaaS, or self-service cloud (either on-prem openstack stuff, or real cloud aws/gcp/azure) allows groups to manage their own resources while still having a central coordinating function. Working in enterprise software, I was am always surprised when I find a killer feature may not the functional value of something we've built, but that fact it works around some internal disfunction of operations between internal teams.

fragmede 5y ago
That's the opposite side of Conway's law, but the real point is large organizations can be dysfunctional. Cloud computing lets customers bypass their organization's particular dysfunction.