15 ms·

The cost of cloud

134 points by harryruhr 5y ago

savant_penguin 5y ago
"My rough estimate is that the unit cost of provisioning a service on AWS is about 3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house." The word competent here is doing a lot of weight lifting. I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  > I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds If those companies ever migrated to AWS it would probably still take months to get a small EC2 instance allocated to them. Likely the problem is bureaucracy, not competence.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    Well at least then you're only waiting on the bureaucracy and then seconds for AWS instead of beaurocracy and then machine order, setup, provisioning, and re-provisioning time, all with their own bureaucracy time :) When I worked in Sony games I had the choice between AWS and the IT department. The IT department was fine, just it was a 6 month lead time for the hardware and they had a tendency to optimize servers they didn't understand. The problem was that they wanted 6 months and a capacity plan. 2 months to get me a test server. I knew server capacity about 2 weeks before launch. I also needed 5 server class machines with which to test against (which was the end cluster number) and the kicker which was 250 load generators to prove it. The real kicker is that for many games load peak is the Friday after launch, we really only needed 1 machine a week later, and .25 going forward thereafter. With the IT department we would have bought $160k worth of servers. And we still couldn't have actually tested things without AWS. AWS Cost $30k the first year and then we actually moved to new instance classes which cost $12k, $6k, and $1k a year thereafter. It was enough cost dropping that it wasn't worth dev time to even downgrade the cluster to a single instance. None of that includes what IT would have cost to run the hardware. I'd make the same choice every time.
    - pclmulqdq 5y ago
      This is the use case that the cloud is really designed for, and most people who are 100% anti-cloud don't realize how peaky many workloads can actually be. However, I doubt that most cloud advocates understand this.
  - benjaminwootton 5y ago
    Hacking away at that beuracracy is one of the main advantages of moving to cloud. Maybe it all comes back in the end, but for a while it is definetly a source of speed and agility.
Clubber 5y ago
I'm sure people will disagree, but I've always viewed the main benefit of cloud is a company with no talent or time to do networking / infrastructure early on, so they use the cloud, which requires less expertise. Once they grow and can afford network / infrastructure talent, the switching costs are hard to justify, even with the 3x markup (according to the article). I can see why it's compelling, but for me running my stuff on other people's servers in this day and age is concerning. Like many computing things, it really depends on the situation.
- CodeAndCuffs 5y ago
  Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?
  - Clubber 5y ago
    That's a good point. Redundancy requires more cost and more expertise, but as a counter argument, AWS has had its share of outages lately as well.
  - flashgordon 5y ago
    +1. On top of this if you need to provide slos on availability, diaster recovery, respect regionalized requirements, even with a technical playbook just acquiring physical space gets hard and expensive real quick!
  - greatgib 5y ago
    Any decent IT team will backup, replicate, shard, to different locations, and not rely on a single datacenter. As said in the blog post, with the cloud you will get the same thing that you can pay your inhouse IT for 3 times the price. For example, lots of people are thinking that by just using 'the cloud', your data is safe / replicated to multiple geographically separated areas. But no, it is not automatic, it needs to be configured like that with the associated costs. If you lose an ec2 instance, it will be lost in the same way as a node in your personal data center.
kyrra 5y ago
For those that didn't read it, I recommend the thread on bandwidth costs from 5 month ago this article links to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930151
StephenJGL 5y ago
These 3x calculations for cloud almost always ignore a real TCO calculation for a real organization and real app deployment and rarely compare capability, flexibility and recovery which have real value, but have tough calculations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moltar 5y ago
I think the mistake is often made by comparing primitives. E.g. running my own RAID vs S3. Colo traffic vs AWS traffic. But what about comparing the whole ecosystem? Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? How hard is it to configure and maintain? Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? When you run your own services, you have to reinvent so much it doesn’t seem to be worth it.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? Yes. > How hard is it to configure and maintain? Very few things are harder to configure or maintain than they are on a cloud service, because if they were, someone (e.g. you) would get frustrated and make them easier, and then they wouldn't be for anyone else. > Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? Ah yes, S3 can handle serving that many requests and keep everything online. But then don't you get a bill for $72 billion dollars?
  - taspeotis 5y ago
    I believe both Azure and AWS (probably GCP too) have built in DDOS mitigations for free. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-standard.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-s... You might be on the hook for bandwidth costs from a more sophisticated attack though.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      That isn't very specific about how it works ("defends against the most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks" whatever that means), but it sounds like they're going to drop weird looking packets. The problem is, one of the more common types of DDoS is that the attacker has a botnet with a million machines in it and has them all make legitimate requests to your service all day, thereby overloading it. This looks just like a large volume of legitimate requests, because it is. S3 or similar isn't going to get overloaded, but then what stops you from getting a bill the size of the moon? To do otherwise they'd either have to be able to distinguish these from legitimate requests (how?) or give you free traffic when you claim you were under a DDoS that they can't distinguish from a large volume of legitimate traffic (unlikely).
bushbaba 5y ago
Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just cost. The biggest two values you get with AWS is 1) reducing time spent outside your business’s core competencies and 2) a vast ecosystem - 3rd party offerings, readily available devs, consulting services, and compliance services. I’d add that for those having compliance needs. It’s not always as simple as rack and stacking infra. You have to use services that meet the compliance auditors needs.
- nine_k 5y ago
  It's still about cost. (1) opportunity cost: doing your own systems administration instead of growing your business (features, marketing, etc). (2) switching cost: once you have a working system that outgrows the free / cheap AWS tiers, and might be cheaper to run outside cloud, switching away from the cloud becomes expensive, and does not look like a good investment to many, see (1).
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.
    - izacus 5y ago
      And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired). So what's the balance?
      - fragmede 5y ago
mac-chaffee 5y ago
> In particular, traditional legacy IT infrastructures are ridiculously overpriced. (If you're using commercial virtualization platforms and/or SAN storage, then you're overpaying by as much as a factor of 10, and getting an inferior product into the bargain Could someone elaborate? Is this saying something free like OpenStack would be better than something paid like VMware? Is that really common knowledge?
nijave 5y ago
I wouldn't underestimate the cost of internal politics...
zerotolerance 5y ago
"...3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house." A competent IT organization is a real stretch for most organizations.
curious_cat_163 5y ago
Just curious: if you are an enterprise, what do you think (besides cost) is a compelling argument in 2022 for not going to a public cloud? This is probably a Ask HN, so please do point me to it if you know an existing one.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Cost is a huge one, but availability and service priority is a big one for me: Amazon and Microsoft are going to provide service and choose to deploy updates and do maintenance on schedules that work for them, not schedules that work for you. Your in-house IT department knows not to take a risk the week before your big product launch. Amazon and Microsoft simply do not care about your product launch at all, and probably aren't even aware of it. You're going to pay for infrastructure and IT staff either way, so why not pay for IT staff and infrastructure that prioritizes your business needs and not their own business needs?
  - kazen44 5y ago
    having your own control about maintenances is a big one. the same with being able to give your customers flexibility in terms of when maintenance happens. this is a big deal in b2b space, especially with long running client relationships because it gives customers some form of control they never are going to get back in the public cloud unless they are insanely large customers.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
manishsharan 5y ago
I wonder how the costs compare if you choose to go outside of the big three. Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway etc are so much cheaper and the network exit costs are much lower than with AWS GCP or Azure.
awill 5y ago
These types of posts rarely measure operational cost. Anybody can buy infrastructure and stick it behind an API. But can you make it fault tolerant with high availability and low latency. Can you do all of that and _still_ beat AWS's costs? For the vast majority of customers the answer is no. I used to work at a medium sized company, and they saved millions by moving to the cloud, and gained much better availability/performance. It wasn't even close, because that medium-sized company didn't have the expertise to operate the service efficiently. They just bought off the shelf stuff from VMWare etc.. Plus, DR meant paying double. disclaimer, I now work for AWS.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.
  - awill 5y ago
    when looking at these things, you always need to look over the long term. Sure, December wasn't great, but how was all of 2021 overall? It's also not just cost/availability, but flexibility and scalability. Most high-growth startups would have not been able to scale quickly enough pre-cloud. Facebook is literally the unicorn.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      My datacenter has better uptime than AWS across all of 2021. Pretty sure in December alone, Amazon did worse than I've done in the past couple years combined. I have also enjoyed not being affected by various Azure or Microsoft 365-related outages throughout the year. Scalability is a niche perk of the cloud, absolutely. I work somewhere that has a customer base that does not meaningfully scale, so it's not a concern for me. But then: Once an organization has established and has a relatively predictable scale rate, they should exit the public cloud if they can. An established company with a stable capacity need shouldn't ever be moving to a cloud provider with a generous big tech profit margin. But that also poses a risk for the scalability of the cloud: If you don't have people overpaying for stable capacity usage, can the cloud provider afford tons of extra capacity for flexible needs?
endisneigh 5y ago
I don't know why there are so many articles in this vain: - use the cloud until you're making so much money that you can afford to hire the sufficient talent to replicate cheaper. fin
- hatesinterviews 5y ago
  How many organizations move either between clouds or off cloud entirely? I imagine for the former there’s some import tools in order to poach customers. But between all the advanced proprietary software solutions and exorbitant egress fees, moving off cloud entirely is rather difficult.
trabant00 5y ago
I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of listenting to people who can't do it explain that what I do every day can't or should not be done.
- csydas 5y ago
  I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly budget in a month because of unexpected cost upticks, and I've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership by reducing needed licensing/staff/building costs. I get both sides on what the public cloud can do. I've also seen what you can do on-premises; I've worked with clients who manage 7000+ machines (mostly virtual + some physical) with a team of 4 using pretty reasonably priced on-site hardware. (pro-tip, I guess Hitachi boxes are absurdly great servers with fantastic uptime, pockmarked only by an absolutely horrendous UI to manage) My experience from the many clients I work with is that it is less about the specific stack you settle on and more your comfort level in getting the most efficiency out of it. The deeper and more intimate you are with all levels of your infrastructure, the better you know how to eke out the most from every single $.01 you spend on it.
  - trabant00 5y ago
    When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc). I guess this justifies companies looking at cloud a little bit. But if you really search you can find engineers sub 100k per year being able to deliver 100k per month savings compared to AWS. There are also engineers who stayed away from cloud and can't deliver that option. A lot more rare though. The same level of wrong if they argue against cloud from ignorance. The right choice for serious infrastructures is always both these days. Have the bulk on premise for steady loads and 95% of features, expand to public clouds for dynamic scaling and features you don't want do do yourself, at least yet. This combination offers good costs, flexibility, covers possible future needs, etc
MangoCoffee 5y ago
a lot of time its not about saving money. you can't even hire/afford people if you are a small/mid size company.
StreamBright 5y ago
I really like how these claim in the post not backed up by anything.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
A crucial point is to ensure that you give yourself the ability to move from your cloud providers to on prem, and / or to a different cloud. A bad example: If you are with provide X and they change pricing structure and it impacts you 3 times the cost, you can move it without too much hassle. Once you embrace all the proprietary and fancy features that your cloud provider has, then you are stuck and moving will be a nightmare. compute/s3 are easy to move. k8s should be easy to move but I have not tried it myself. Database hosting is easy to change as long as you are using an independent product, not a custom database your cloud provider has. It is much more difficult when you have AWS/Azure pipelines, AWS/Azure Geo location/manipulation AWS/Azure proprietary scaling etc etc Terraform is supposed to help here but in my experience with TF consultants it is not at all straightforward not compatible with a lot of AWS/Azure offerings. Then you are stuck and moving will be difficult and expensive. Which of course is the business plan for the cloud providers.
acd 5y ago
I think there is room for hybrid cloud built with open source software. Datbases and virtual machines tend to be expensive in cloud providers. Steady state workloads. Object storge tend to be fairly cheap. There is also cost of vendor lock in if you use propritary cloud technologies such as databases. You can build open source infrastructure with hybrid solution. Probably less risk of downtime.
sherifnada 5y ago
If you run your own datacenter, there is also the opportunity cost of slowing down R&D and new development work. Let's say the year is 2012 and Redshift is introduced, completely changing how organizations can generate insights from their data. Running your own datacenter? good luck waiting for the ops team to install something similar! It might take you a couple of quarters assuming they are already competent at it. On the Cloud? Press a few buttons and you're off to the races. velocity is a competitive advantage
- pas 5y ago
  What? Vertica exists since 2005. New products/services come and go. If that precious data truly has so much value, then it is already being processed in your inhouse system. These new services are nice for startups and for eventually outsourcing... Aaaand of course for upselling to folks who are already in the faith. Velocity is and advantage. Yes, but if you really see a brutally good deal with some new AWS service there's nothing preventing you from using it, DC or no DC.
- headsoup 5y ago
  So what you're saying is on premises you need competence to do things but in cloud incompetence is no problem! These are arguments that wreak of developers who don't see the need to worry about things like 'cost,' 'reliability' and 'efficiency' because of the need to be 'innovative' and breaking stuff faster to win the market. I'm sure it's fine so long as the developers are really competent.
- bsagdiyev 5y ago
  Is this how people really think?
  - orev 5y ago
    It’s definitely the message cloud marketing has been cramming into people’s brains, and most of them are falling for it. Why am I seeing cloud ads in an airport, and never ads for any other low level technology like Ethernet or LDAP? Because they’re doing an end-run around tech people and targeting CEOs with these completely unrealistic messages.
ksec 5y ago
I dont think many are actually against "Cloud" per se. But Specifically AWS, Azure and GCP. Especially when you are only looking at like EC2 and wondering why they are 3x more expensive to other managed server / cloud vendor even on Reserve instances with zero bandwidth bundled. If you look at prices from Oracle Cloud ( ignoring whatever feeling you have against it ) than all of a sudden it is extremely attractive.
abagheri43 5y ago
sparkling 5y ago
I agree that 99% of companies should not be buying their own hardware and setting up a datacenter in their basements. But: not all clouds are created equal. The "cloud" can just be a blank Debian box on Digitalocean where you have root access _or_ it could be some obscure managed AWS service where all the technical days are abstracted away behind a REST API.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I managed a deep learning team at Capital One during the period when they dropped their own data centers and moved completely to AWS. I am 100% sure that they made the right decision. My current company also uses AWS. With modern corporate infrastructure with micro services, and buying vs. building many 3rd party services, it can make sense to go all in on Cloud. Personally, I miss the days of monolith web applications that were relatively easy to host on a leased server. I continue to be a big fan of Hetzner and their hosted servers as well as their VPSs are very reasonably priced. Another thing that I like about Hetzner, OVH, etc. is that their bandwidth costs are also very reasonable so moving databases and monolith web applications to a similar service does not have to be a big deal. I think that each company’s needs have to be assessed separately.
Damogran6 5y ago
I figured a large portion of the blame could be laid at the feet of leadership; these people want to lead people, not run IT. Moving to the cloud gets rid of all those pesky power and environmental and raised floor and employing all those weird people…and if it’s more money, that makes my budget look good, too. If you save money, you’ll get less next year.
throwaway984393 5y ago
"I use AWS for a lot of things, but I strongly regard the cloud as just another tool, to be used as occasion demands, rather than because the high priests say you should." He's right. Evaluate your needs and use it if it makes sense. Not a very controversial opinion, I think! The problem is, how do you evaluate your needs if you aren't an expert in either self-hosting or using managed services (AWS)? I think you should treat it like going to a doctor: get two opinions from two different senior professionals in two different specializations. And definitely make an assessment based on real numbers. Try to get ballpark figures from similar-sized businesses about their costs (capex/opex, infrastructure, staff) and requirements (expertise, time-to-market, FRs/NFRs, regulations, etc). Building a business is a huge thing, and how you use technology can either be a hindrance or an accelerator, but it has to fit your use case.
BizyDev 5y ago
Mid sized cloud companies like OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner or Infomaniak are the way to go for me. But here's is the point that's completely missing from the article. Many choices in organisations are leaded by two wrong drivers : - Career risk awareness : like we said in the good old days, nobody was fired for buying Sun Microsystems. Same thing applies for Azure and AWS. You're not paying the bill so why looking for a cheaper alternative that might cost you personally a lot. - CV driven decision : on your CV it's better and more valuable to have 3 years of Azure/AWS than having 3 years on OVH/Hetzner/etc. Finally, as a leader in an organisation, it's always easier to follow the trend rather than trying to convince your coworkers to follow you to a more "exotic" solution.
agrippanux 5y ago
Maybe tangent to this but I am really enjoying Cloudflare Workers w/KV and Durable Objects. Currently running over 80% of my company’s infra on it and it’s a monthly cost under $50.
- realityking 5y ago
  Interesting. What workloads are you running there? Internal in-house built line of business apps?
slac 5y ago
Have not seen this being mentioned yet, here goes: Choosing a large cloud provider is often much greener than doing your own or using a smaller provider. Carbon is a large cost. GCP has been carbon neutral for over a decade, AWS and Azure have made big public commitments. Sourcing clean energy for 1000s of servers is not always easy.
yob28 5y ago

134 points by harryruhr 5y ago

"My rough estimate is that the unit cost of provisioning a service on AWS is about 3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house." The word competent here is doing a lot of weight lifting. I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds

bluefirebrand 5y ago
> I know companies in which you have to wait _months_ for a small server to be allocated to your team. AWS does it in seconds If those companies ever migrated to AWS it would probably still take months to get a small EC2 instance allocated to them. Likely the problem is bureaucracy, not competence.
- grogenaut 5y ago
  Well at least then you're only waiting on the bureaucracy and then seconds for AWS instead of beaurocracy and then machine order, setup, provisioning, and re-provisioning time, all with their own bureaucracy time :) When I worked in Sony games I had the choice between AWS and the IT department. The IT department was fine, just it was a 6 month lead time for the hardware and they had a tendency to optimize servers they didn't understand. The problem was that they wanted 6 months and a capacity plan. 2 months to get me a test server. I knew server capacity about 2 weeks before launch. I also needed 5 server class machines with which to test against (which was the end cluster number) and the kicker which was 250 load generators to prove it. The real kicker is that for many games load peak is the Friday after launch, we really only needed 1 machine a week later, and .25 going forward thereafter. With the IT department we would have bought $160k worth of servers. And we still couldn't have actually tested things without AWS. AWS Cost $30k the first year and then we actually moved to new instance classes which cost $12k, $6k, and $1k a year thereafter. It was enough cost dropping that it wasn't worth dev time to even downgrade the cluster to a single instance. None of that includes what IT would have cost to run the hardware. I'd make the same choice every time.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    This is the use case that the cloud is really designed for, and most people who are 100% anti-cloud don't realize how peaky many workloads can actually be. However, I doubt that most cloud advocates understand this.
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Hacking away at that beuracracy is one of the main advantages of moving to cloud. Maybe it all comes back in the end, but for a while it is definetly a source of speed and agility.

Clubber 5y ago

I'm sure people will disagree, but I've always viewed the main benefit of cloud is a company with no talent or time to do networking / infrastructure early on, so they use the cloud, which requires less expertise. Once they grow and can afford network / infrastructure talent, the switching costs are hard to justify, even with the 3x markup (according to the article). I can see why it's compelling, but for me running my stuff on other people's servers in this day and age is concerning. Like many computing things, it really depends on the situation.

CodeAndCuffs 5y ago
Part of the issue I see overlooked is the cost of acquiring and losing physical assets. If you have an onsite data center and a meteor hits it, how bad off are you? Disclaimer, I barely passed my aws associates cert and have 0 qualifications to weigh in on this subject with any authority. It's just a point I've seen glossed over before. Yeah your data center is cheaper to run, but is it cheaper to replace?
- Clubber 5y ago
  That's a good point. Redundancy requires more cost and more expertise, but as a counter argument, AWS has had its share of outages lately as well.
- flashgordon 5y ago
  +1. On top of this if you need to provide slos on availability, diaster recovery, respect regionalized requirements, even with a technical playbook just acquiring physical space gets hard and expensive real quick!
- greatgib 5y ago
  Any decent IT team will backup, replicate, shard, to different locations, and not rely on a single datacenter. As said in the blog post, with the cloud you will get the same thing that you can pay your inhouse IT for 3 times the price. For example, lots of people are thinking that by just using 'the cloud', your data is safe / replicated to multiple geographically separated areas. But no, it is not automatic, it needs to be configured like that with the associated costs. If you lose an ec2 instance, it will be lost in the same way as a node in your personal data center.

kyrra 5y ago

For those that didn't read it, I recommend the thread on bandwidth costs from 5 month ago this article links to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930151

StephenJGL 5y ago

These 3x calculations for cloud almost always ignore a real TCO calculation for a real organization and real app deployment and rarely compare capability, flexibility and recovery which have real value, but have tough calculations.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

moltar 5y ago

I think the mistake is often made by comparing primitives. E.g. running my own RAID vs S3. Colo traffic vs AWS traffic. But what about comparing the whole ecosystem? Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? How hard is it to configure and maintain? Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? When you run your own services, you have to reinvent so much it doesn’t seem to be worth it.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Can you provide a self hosted granular access permission to your RAID? Yes. > How hard is it to configure and maintain? Very few things are harder to configure or maintain than they are on a cloud service, because if they were, someone (e.g. you) would get frustrated and make them easier, and then they wouldn't be for anyone else. > Will your colo deflect a DDOS attack? Ah yes, S3 can handle serving that many requests and keep everything online. But then don't you get a bill for $72 billion dollars?
- taspeotis 5y ago
  I believe both Azure and AWS (probably GCP too) have built in DDOS mitigations for free. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-standard.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/ddos-s... You might be on the hook for bandwidth costs from a more sophisticated attack though.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    That isn't very specific about how it works ("defends against the most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks" whatever that means), but it sounds like they're going to drop weird looking packets. The problem is, one of the more common types of DDoS is that the attacker has a botnet with a million machines in it and has them all make legitimate requests to your service all day, thereby overloading it. This looks just like a large volume of legitimate requests, because it is. S3 or similar isn't going to get overloaded, but then what stops you from getting a bill the size of the moon? To do otherwise they'd either have to be able to distinguish these from legitimate requests (how?) or give you free traffic when you claim you were under a DDoS that they can't distinguish from a large volume of legitimate traffic (unlikely).

bushbaba 5y ago

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just cost. The biggest two values you get with AWS is 1) reducing time spent outside your business’s core competencies and 2) a vast ecosystem - 3rd party offerings, readily available devs, consulting services, and compliance services. I’d add that for those having compliance needs. It’s not always as simple as rack and stacking infra. You have to use services that meet the compliance auditors needs.

nine_k 5y ago
It's still about cost. (1) opportunity cost: doing your own systems administration instead of growing your business (features, marketing, etc). (2) switching cost: once you have a working system that outgrows the free / cheap AWS tiers, and might be cheaper to run outside cloud, switching away from the cloud becomes expensive, and does not look like a good investment to many, see (1).
- fragmede 5y ago
  Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.
  - izacus 5y ago
    And every dollar you bleed on expensive AWS (and expensive devops engineers to wrangle it), is a dollar less you can pay for a new employee to deliver value quickly and get you profitable (or aquired). So what's the balance?
    - fragmede 5y ago

mac-chaffee 5y ago

> In particular, traditional legacy IT infrastructures are ridiculously overpriced. (If you're using commercial virtualization platforms and/or SAN storage, then you're overpaying by as much as a factor of 10, and getting an inferior product into the bargain Could someone elaborate? Is this saying something free like OpenStack would be better than something paid like VMware? Is that really common knowledge?

nijave 5y ago

I wouldn't underestimate the cost of internal politics...

zerotolerance 5y ago

"...3 times that of a competent IT organization providing a similar service in house." A competent IT organization is a real stretch for most organizations.

curious_cat_163 5y ago

Just curious: if you are an enterprise, what do you think (besides cost) is a compelling argument in 2022 for not going to a public cloud? This is probably a Ask HN, so please do point me to it if you know an existing one.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Cost is a huge one, but availability and service priority is a big one for me: Amazon and Microsoft are going to provide service and choose to deploy updates and do maintenance on schedules that work for them, not schedules that work for you. Your in-house IT department knows not to take a risk the week before your big product launch. Amazon and Microsoft simply do not care about your product launch at all, and probably aren't even aware of it. You're going to pay for infrastructure and IT staff either way, so why not pay for IT staff and infrastructure that prioritizes your business needs and not their own business needs?
- kazen44 5y ago
  having your own control about maintenances is a big one. the same with being able to give your customers flexibility in terms of when maintenance happens. this is a big deal in b2b space, especially with long running client relationships because it gives customers some form of control they never are going to get back in the public cloud unless they are insanely large customers.
redis_mlc 5y ago

manishsharan 5y ago

I wonder how the costs compare if you choose to go outside of the big three. Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway etc are so much cheaper and the network exit costs are much lower than with AWS GCP or Azure.

awill 5y ago

These types of posts rarely measure operational cost. Anybody can buy infrastructure and stick it behind an API. But can you make it fault tolerant with high availability and low latency. Can you do all of that and _still_ beat AWS's costs? For the vast majority of customers the answer is no. I used to work at a medium sized company, and they saved millions by moving to the cloud, and gained much better availability/performance. It wasn't even close, because that medium-sized company didn't have the expertise to operate the service efficiently. They just bought off the shelf stuff from VMWare etc.. Plus, DR meant paying double. disclaimer, I now work for AWS.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
My availability on-prem is vastly higher than AWS, especially over the past month.
- awill 5y ago
  when looking at these things, you always need to look over the long term. Sure, December wasn't great, but how was all of 2021 overall? It's also not just cost/availability, but flexibility and scalability. Most high-growth startups would have not been able to scale quickly enough pre-cloud. Facebook is literally the unicorn.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    My datacenter has better uptime than AWS across all of 2021. Pretty sure in December alone, Amazon did worse than I've done in the past couple years combined. I have also enjoyed not being affected by various Azure or Microsoft 365-related outages throughout the year. Scalability is a niche perk of the cloud, absolutely. I work somewhere that has a customer base that does not meaningfully scale, so it's not a concern for me. But then: Once an organization has established and has a relatively predictable scale rate, they should exit the public cloud if they can. An established company with a stable capacity need shouldn't ever be moving to a cloud provider with a generous big tech profit margin. But that also poses a risk for the scalability of the cloud: If you don't have people overpaying for stable capacity usage, can the cloud provider afford tons of extra capacity for flexible needs?

endisneigh 5y ago

I don't know why there are so many articles in this vain: - use the cloud until you're making so much money that you can afford to hire the sufficient talent to replicate cheaper. fin

hatesinterviews 5y ago
How many organizations move either between clouds or off cloud entirely? I imagine for the former there’s some import tools in order to poach customers. But between all the advanced proprietary software solutions and exorbitant egress fees, moving off cloud entirely is rather difficult.

trabant00 5y ago

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of listenting to people who can't do it explain that what I do every day can't or should not be done.

csydas 5y ago
I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly budget in a month because of unexpected cost upticks, and I've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership by reducing needed licensing/staff/building costs. I get both sides on what the public cloud can do. I've also seen what you can do on-premises; I've worked with clients who manage 7000+ machines (mostly virtual + some physical) with a team of 4 using pretty reasonably priced on-site hardware. (pro-tip, I guess Hitachi boxes are absurdly great servers with fantastic uptime, pockmarked only by an absolutely horrendous UI to manage) My experience from the many clients I work with is that it is less about the specific stack you settle on and more your comfort level in getting the most efficiency out of it. The deeper and more intimate you are with all levels of your infrastructure, the better you know how to eke out the most from every single $.01 you spend on it.
- trabant00 5y ago
  When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc). I guess this justifies companies looking at cloud a little bit. But if you really search you can find engineers sub 100k per year being able to deliver 100k per month savings compared to AWS. There are also engineers who stayed away from cloud and can't deliver that option. A lot more rare though. The same level of wrong if they argue against cloud from ignorance. The right choice for serious infrastructures is always both these days. Have the bulk on premise for steady loads and 95% of features, expand to public clouds for dynamic scaling and features you don't want do do yourself, at least yet. This combination offers good costs, flexibility, covers possible future needs, etc

MangoCoffee 5y ago

a lot of time its not about saving money. you can't even hire/afford people if you are a small/mid size company.

StreamBright 5y ago

I really like how these claim in the post not backed up by anything.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

A crucial point is to ensure that you give yourself the ability to move from your cloud providers to on prem, and / or to a different cloud. A bad example: If you are with provide X and they change pricing structure and it impacts you 3 times the cost, you can move it without too much hassle. Once you embrace all the proprietary and fancy features that your cloud provider has, then you are stuck and moving will be a nightmare. compute/s3 are easy to move. k8s should be easy to move but I have not tried it myself. Database hosting is easy to change as long as you are using an independent product, not a custom database your cloud provider has. It is much more difficult when you have AWS/Azure pipelines, AWS/Azure Geo location/manipulation AWS/Azure proprietary scaling etc etc Terraform is supposed to help here but in my experience with TF consultants it is not at all straightforward not compatible with a lot of AWS/Azure offerings. Then you are stuck and moving will be difficult and expensive. Which of course is the business plan for the cloud providers.

acd 5y ago

I think there is room for hybrid cloud built with open source software. Datbases and virtual machines tend to be expensive in cloud providers. Steady state workloads. Object storge tend to be fairly cheap. There is also cost of vendor lock in if you use propritary cloud technologies such as databases. You can build open source infrastructure with hybrid solution. Probably less risk of downtime.

sherifnada 5y ago

If you run your own datacenter, there is also the opportunity cost of slowing down R&D and new development work. Let's say the year is 2012 and Redshift is introduced, completely changing how organizations can generate insights from their data. Running your own datacenter? good luck waiting for the ops team to install something similar! It might take you a couple of quarters assuming they are already competent at it. On the Cloud? Press a few buttons and you're off to the races. velocity is a competitive advantage

pas 5y ago
What? Vertica exists since 2005. New products/services come and go. If that precious data truly has so much value, then it is already being processed in your inhouse system. These new services are nice for startups and for eventually outsourcing... Aaaand of course for upselling to folks who are already in the faith. Velocity is and advantage. Yes, but if you really see a brutally good deal with some new AWS service there's nothing preventing you from using it, DC or no DC.
headsoup 5y ago
So what you're saying is on premises you need competence to do things but in cloud incompetence is no problem! These are arguments that wreak of developers who don't see the need to worry about things like 'cost,' 'reliability' and 'efficiency' because of the need to be 'innovative' and breaking stuff faster to win the market. I'm sure it's fine so long as the developers are really competent.
bsagdiyev 5y ago
Is this how people really think?
- orev 5y ago
  It’s definitely the message cloud marketing has been cramming into people’s brains, and most of them are falling for it. Why am I seeing cloud ads in an airport, and never ads for any other low level technology like Ethernet or LDAP? Because they’re doing an end-run around tech people and targeting CEOs with these completely unrealistic messages.

ksec 5y ago

I dont think many are actually against "Cloud" per se. But Specifically AWS, Azure and GCP. Especially when you are only looking at like EC2 and wondering why they are 3x more expensive to other managed server / cloud vendor even on Reserve instances with zero bandwidth bundled. If you look at prices from Oracle Cloud ( ignoring whatever feeling you have against it ) than all of a sudden it is extremely attractive.

abagheri43 5y ago

sparkling 5y ago

I agree that 99% of companies should not be buying their own hardware and setting up a datacenter in their basements. But: not all clouds are created equal. The "cloud" can just be a blank Debian box on Digitalocean where you have root access _or_ it could be some obscure managed AWS service where all the technical days are abstracted away behind a REST API.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I managed a deep learning team at Capital One during the period when they dropped their own data centers and moved completely to AWS. I am 100% sure that they made the right decision. My current company also uses AWS. With modern corporate infrastructure with micro services, and buying vs. building many 3rd party services, it can make sense to go all in on Cloud. Personally, I miss the days of monolith web applications that were relatively easy to host on a leased server. I continue to be a big fan of Hetzner and their hosted servers as well as their VPSs are very reasonably priced. Another thing that I like about Hetzner, OVH, etc. is that their bandwidth costs are also very reasonable so moving databases and monolith web applications to a similar service does not have to be a big deal. I think that each company’s needs have to be assessed separately.

Damogran6 5y ago

I figured a large portion of the blame could be laid at the feet of leadership; these people want to lead people, not run IT. Moving to the cloud gets rid of all those pesky power and environmental and raised floor and employing all those weird people…and if it’s more money, that makes my budget look good, too. If you save money, you’ll get less next year.

throwaway984393 5y ago

"I use AWS for a lot of things, but I strongly regard the cloud as just another tool, to be used as occasion demands, rather than because the high priests say you should." He's right. Evaluate your needs and use it if it makes sense. Not a very controversial opinion, I think! The problem is, how do you evaluate your needs if you aren't an expert in either self-hosting or using managed services (AWS)? I think you should treat it like going to a doctor: get two opinions from two different senior professionals in two different specializations. And definitely make an assessment based on real numbers. Try to get ballpark figures from similar-sized businesses about their costs (capex/opex, infrastructure, staff) and requirements (expertise, time-to-market, FRs/NFRs, regulations, etc). Building a business is a huge thing, and how you use technology can either be a hindrance or an accelerator, but it has to fit your use case.

BizyDev 5y ago

Mid sized cloud companies like OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner or Infomaniak are the way to go for me. But here's is the point that's completely missing from the article. Many choices in organisations are leaded by two wrong drivers : - Career risk awareness : like we said in the good old days, nobody was fired for buying Sun Microsystems. Same thing applies for Azure and AWS. You're not paying the bill so why looking for a cheaper alternative that might cost you personally a lot. - CV driven decision : on your CV it's better and more valuable to have 3 years of Azure/AWS than having 3 years on OVH/Hetzner/etc. Finally, as a leader in an organisation, it's always easier to follow the trend rather than trying to convince your coworkers to follow you to a more "exotic" solution.

agrippanux 5y ago

Maybe tangent to this but I am really enjoying Cloudflare Workers w/KV and Durable Objects. Currently running over 80% of my company’s infra on it and it’s a monthly cost under $50.

realityking 5y ago
Interesting. What workloads are you running there? Internal in-house built line of business apps?

slac 5y ago

Have not seen this being mentioned yet, here goes: Choosing a large cloud provider is often much greener than doing your own or using a smaller provider. Carbon is a large cost. GCP has been carbon neutral for over a decade, AWS and Azure have made big public commitments. Sourcing clean energy for 1000s of servers is not always easy.

yob28 5y ago