6 ms·

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly co

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost structure business like a restaurant, you can still calculate the maximum cost of ingredients for one month, the salaries, energy, etc. if you simply use the "best case scenario" of having every seat at every table booked for all opening hours, with people ordering your most sold dishes. Cloud computing is still leagues above that in terms of cost predictability. I once worked for small, non-startup software company who pondered moving servers to Azure. The Azure partner shop analysed the needs and came up with a monthly cost "between 30k and 120k per month". They were really surprised the company stuck with their non-cloud setup because "everybody is moving into the cloud!!"

avrionov 5y ago
I worked on both cloud computing and on premise project. Before cloud computing the risks were different: - much harder to scale. It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. - when we were hit with very high traffic due to a bug or something else, most of the time it would lead to customer outages. Based on the contract some times it requires to pay back because SLAs were not reached. Also an outage could lead to customers canceling the subscription. We swapped one type of problems with another.
- suction 5y ago
  If you have a bug that renders your product unusable and refunds are in order, the flexibility of handling traffic peaks which a cloud provider offers won't solve that problem for you. It could even aggravate it. If a show-stopping bug is introduced, it would probably be preferable to fail quickly.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    If there was an outage in early 2000, we just went outside to play, or watch tv. Now if Facebook is down for 15 seconds everyone has heart failure like their life is over.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Amazon uptime is 99.95 which calculates to 43 seconds of downtime everyday.
- lytefm 5y ago
  > It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. But the overprovisioned server might still be a lot cheaper than the cloud bill. It can be totally reasonable to have a server running at 1-5% load 98% of the time if you really need the capacity for the remaining 2%. Also, neither "scaling up" as in "re-deploying the same setup on a beefier instance" nor "scaling out" as in "let's expand to the US and have a server there" is too difficult if the setup is automated (Ansible).
tolien 5y ago
> Even if you run a relatively opaque cost structure business like a restaurant, you can still calculate the maximum cost of ingredients for one month, the salaries, energy, etc. If the restaurant suddenly ordered ten thousand times more ingredients than usual, their supplier would probably call back and say "is that really what you want?" rather than just shrugging and shipping them tonnes of tomatoes with a bill for one billion dollars.
- suction 5y ago
  Very true. And in terms of cloud computing, it would mean that alerts and notifications and limits are worth absolutely nothing if it's on the customer to set them up in the correct way for every scenario imaginable. Which is nearly impossible. The tomato supplier's human alerting system is a catch-all-system which would be easily implementable as well.
  - tolien 5y ago
    Yeah - if you look at Troy's graphs they're already calculating an average bandwidth and the alert he's configured has a threshold ~1/50th his current level. Trying to set a hard number limit ahead of time is hard (estimating how much you'll use, don't want to set a number too low and get cut off plus cloud cost structures can be really hard to get your head around) but that basic level of anomaly detection should be there by default.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      > estimating how much you'll use, don't want to set a number too low and get cut off plus cloud cost structures can be really hard to get your head around Easy way of avoiding this: Don't use shitty hosts that make you pay per GB served and shut you down once you hit your cost limit. Instead get limited by the available bandwidth you have, and clients will just access your server slower rather than being fully denied access.
      - tolien 5y ago
octoberfranklin 5y ago
Banking. Credit card chargebacks, especially.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bstpierre 5y ago
A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous. Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your meter regularly throughout the month. But, for the electrical case anyway, you can't drill into what exactly is consuming watts without either fancy monitoring equipment or potentially tedious investigation.
- macintux 5y ago
  > A gas or electric bill works a bit like this Just ask Texans.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your house or steal your phone to rack up a huge bill. In contrast, with the cloud the bill is directly proportional to the amount of inbound requests from the Internet, with no out of the box way to implement a limit (I guess you could install Apache/Nginx and enforce a limit there, but doesn't that kinda defeat the whole point of the cloud?).
  - bstpierre 5y ago
    Some cell plans have a charge for incoming texts, roughly like the cloud bill you’re talking about. And (as sibling comment points out) if you’ve got critical household infrastructure that needs gas/electric, you’re not always in control. An unexpected hard freeze could provide you with a big bill next month and you can’t fully control it. I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference of scale and asymmetry but the concept of unpredictable postpaid bills is not a new thing.

avrionov 5y ago

I worked on both cloud computing and on premise project. Before cloud computing the risks were different: - much harder to scale. It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. - when we were hit with very high traffic due to a bug or something else, most of the time it would lead to customer outages. Based on the contract some times it requires to pay back because SLAs were not reached. Also an outage could lead to customers canceling the subscription. We swapped one type of problems with another.

suction 5y ago
If you have a bug that renders your product unusable and refunds are in order, the flexibility of handling traffic peaks which a cloud provider offers won't solve that problem for you. It could even aggravate it. If a show-stopping bug is introduced, it would probably be preferable to fail quickly.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  If there was an outage in early 2000, we just went outside to play, or watch tv. Now if Facebook is down for 15 seconds everyone has heart failure like their life is over.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Amazon uptime is 99.95 which calculates to 43 seconds of downtime everyday.
lytefm 5y ago
> It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. But the overprovisioned server might still be a lot cheaper than the cloud bill. It can be totally reasonable to have a server running at 1-5% load 98% of the time if you really need the capacity for the remaining 2%. Also, neither "scaling up" as in "re-deploying the same setup on a beefier instance" nor "scaling out" as in "let's expand to the US and have a server there" is too difficult if the setup is automated (Ansible).

tolien 5y ago

> Even if you run a relatively opaque cost structure business like a restaurant, you can still calculate the maximum cost of ingredients for one month, the salaries, energy, etc. If the restaurant suddenly ordered ten thousand times more ingredients than usual, their supplier would probably call back and say "is that really what you want?" rather than just shrugging and shipping them tonnes of tomatoes with a bill for one billion dollars.

suction 5y ago
Very true. And in terms of cloud computing, it would mean that alerts and notifications and limits are worth absolutely nothing if it's on the customer to set them up in the correct way for every scenario imaginable. Which is nearly impossible. The tomato supplier's human alerting system is a catch-all-system which would be easily implementable as well.
- tolien 5y ago
  Yeah - if you look at Troy's graphs they're already calculating an average bandwidth and the alert he's configured has a threshold ~1/50th his current level. Trying to set a hard number limit ahead of time is hard (estimating how much you'll use, don't want to set a number too low and get cut off plus cloud cost structures can be really hard to get your head around) but that basic level of anomaly detection should be there by default.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > estimating how much you'll use, don't want to set a number too low and get cut off plus cloud cost structures can be really hard to get your head around Easy way of avoiding this: Don't use shitty hosts that make you pay per GB served and shut you down once you hit your cost limit. Instead get limited by the available bandwidth you have, and clients will just access your server slower rather than being fully denied access.
    - tolien 5y ago

octoberfranklin 5y ago

Banking. Credit card chargebacks, especially.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bstpierre 5y ago

A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous. Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your meter regularly throughout the month. But, for the electrical case anyway, you can't drill into what exactly is consuming watts without either fancy monitoring equipment or potentially tedious investigation.

macintux 5y ago
> A gas or electric bill works a bit like this Just ask Texans.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your house or steal your phone to rack up a huge bill. In contrast, with the cloud the bill is directly proportional to the amount of inbound requests from the Internet, with no out of the box way to implement a limit (I guess you could install Apache/Nginx and enforce a limit there, but doesn't that kinda defeat the whole point of the cloud?).
- bstpierre 5y ago
  Some cell plans have a charge for incoming texts, roughly like the cloud bill you’re talking about. And (as sibling comment points out) if you’ve got critical household infrastructure that needs gas/electric, you’re not always in control. An unexpected hard freeze could provide you with a big bill next month and you can’t fully control it. I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference of scale and asymmetry but the concept of unpredictable postpaid bills is not a new thing.