5 ms·

Reminder that the cloud is just someone else's computer.

• hpoe 5y ago
  In the same way that Uber is just someone else's car.
  • helaoban 5y ago
    Would you be willing to to sell all of your vehicles and sign a time-charter contract with Uber to manage all of your ground transportation for the foreseeable future?
    • GianFabien 5y ago
      Short answer: No $%^&* way !
    • hpoe 5y ago
      No but I am a single individual. If I was a company that produced widgets I would use FedEx or UPS rather than maintaining my own fleet of trucks, drivers, maintenance staff, etc.
• gary_0 5y ago
  Unless you have the up-front cash, time, and know-how to get your own box in a datacenter, isn't it the most logical option to rent something? The problem seems to be the market for servers is so large now, and incumbents have so many customers, they can afford to kick random people to the curb with no repercussions.
  • garbagecoder 5y ago
    It would be if cloud providers didn't keep changing the deal all the time. Ownership is control and control comes with a premium.
• usr1106 5y ago
  The someone else's computer is not the problem. Most of us take someone else's plane (or more climate-friendly train) and stay at someone else's hotel. The problem is that customer "service" is handled by algorithms with no chance to reach competent humans who have the power to make reasonable decisions.
  • jrockway 5y ago
    Cloud providers have a tough business model. The instant you use their compute resource, it's gone forever. But they bill you post-usage, and you can dispute the charges for a very long time. And, there are thousands of simple shell scripts that convert CPU time to cash. All of this makes it very easy to farm cloud providers for money. Not very much money, but free money doesn't have to be efficient. For work, I run a cloud service like this, and we do indeed have this kind of fraud. Every stolen credit card number under the sun has signed up for an account. People create thousands of emails (and brand new domains) to get free trials. And, when our systems identify them and we shut them down, they whine in all possible support forums. I don't think we've ever made a mistake, but that is likely due to the small scale of our operation. The only thing that keeps me sane is the extremely poor opsec of the fraudsters. They have pools of thousands of compromised IPs they're using for the command-and-control infrastructure that they install, but they often mistakenly use the same destination crypto wallet (they have a little LD_PRELOAD script they install to try to prevent us from seeing this, but it doesn't work if you don't load dynamic libraries to read the process table), or use a predictable naming scheme, or taint accounts by accessing a few of them from the same IP. (I have a graph that connects the accounts through things like IP address, so this is often the fatal screwup for thousands of accounts all at once.) I imagine that Digital Ocean has this same problem, but at a million times the volume. So, there are going to be mistakes. It's intrinsically difficult to establish trust at these small scales. DO probably feels pretty uncomfortable giving someone a bunch of compute resources when they haven't even tried billing the credit card. You would feel pretty uncomfortable paying up front. So this is where we land, sometimes you look like fraud and get killed with fire. (As you get bigger, you'll have weekly meetings with your cloud provider, and they probably won't shut you down automatically. But at that small scale, it's tough for everyone!)
• primax 5y ago
  Sure and a bank is just someone else's safe as well, while we are doing the ridiculous reductionism thing