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> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of

> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful. There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle traffic peaks. With dedcicated servers you need to always have those resources available. It's attractive to managers that they're only paying for resources when they're using it. There are also managed services like DynamoDb, Lambda, S3, etc that can make things easier and reduce your sysadmin work. And allow you to get up and running very quickly. Obivously, a major downside is that the pricing is extremely vulnerable to spikes like this. I think we see an article like this every 3 months or so. This one is rather tame compared to some others that were 10x as much for a 24-hour period.

withinboredom 5y ago
Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  You could do that. But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory. You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic. Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    I’ve never worked anywhere where that was really necessary. Even when I worked at Microsoft, the services my team built needed to be big scale, high perf, etc… But they would have easily run on a fixed number of beefy machines even at our peak load for a fraction of the cost of Azure.
    - that_guy_iain 5y ago
      It really was necessary due to some silly people not listening to me 2-years ago and ignoring technical debt until it got to the point the service they sold with a 1.5 million penalty fee for failing to deliver was needed to be delivered and load tested. And that is literally the largest AWS Elasticsearch cluster option. So clearly that will be deployed for multiple orginsations. Otherwise they wouldn't have created a default node that size.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    > But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. I would probably send you back to where ever you came from and tell you to re-engineer that. Cloud or no cloud.
    - that_guy_iain 5y ago
      And you would be told that it needs to go live because of a customer contract and failure to deliver would be a 1.5 million euro penalty fee. Sometimes you need to spend lots of money on tech debt. I think it's nuts that was required but it was.
- christophilus 5y ago
  The German companies are really nuts. The cost to value ratio is through the roof. I’m a happy Netcup customer, and I honestly don’t know how they do it and make any profit at all. I wish they’d bring those same prices to some US data centers.
  - immibis 5y ago
    I'm sure there are some big political flamewars to be had in this area regarding per capita productivity.

withinboredom 5y ago

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

that_guy_iain 5y ago
You could do that. But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory. You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic. Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.
- christophilus 5y ago
  I’ve never worked anywhere where that was really necessary. Even when I worked at Microsoft, the services my team built needed to be big scale, high perf, etc… But they would have easily run on a fixed number of beefy machines even at our peak load for a fraction of the cost of Azure.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    It really was necessary due to some silly people not listening to me 2-years ago and ignoring technical debt until it got to the point the service they sold with a 1.5 million penalty fee for failing to deliver was needed to be delivered and load tested. And that is literally the largest AWS Elasticsearch cluster option. So clearly that will be deployed for multiple orginsations. Otherwise they wouldn't have created a default node that size.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  > But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. I would probably send you back to where ever you came from and tell you to re-engineer that. Cloud or no cloud.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    And you would be told that it needs to go live because of a customer contract and failure to deliver would be a 1.5 million euro penalty fee. Sometimes you need to spend lots of money on tech debt. I think it's nuts that was required but it was.
christophilus 5y ago
The German companies are really nuts. The cost to value ratio is through the roof. I’m a happy Netcup customer, and I honestly don’t know how they do it and make any profit at all. I wish they’d bring those same prices to some US data centers.
- immibis 5y ago
  I'm sure there are some big political flamewars to be had in this area regarding per capita productivity.