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As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it. In-house

by dkarl 5y ago

As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it. In-house servers might be cheap, but in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware. Not only can you end up spending $10k of engineering time to optimize and test a random, non-core-competency bit of code instead of an extra $1k/year on hardware, you also have to maintain the optimized code instead of the simpler code. Maybe I just worked at companies that did a poor job of managing servers, or had a dysfunctional relationship between software engineering and operations, but at least that's no longer something I have to worry about in a cloud environment. If spending a little extra on hardware is the best solution to the problem, process/planning/politics won't get in the way.

jjav 5y ago
> As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it. Yes, that's the beauty of it and sometimes you need it. OTOH, how often do you need to grow capacity without any lead time like that? If you are in a hyper-growth stage in a startup you absolutely need it and it is a lifesaver. But, most companies never see a hyper-growth stage. Even those which do, it's a relatively short timeframe (you can't grow exponentially very long). All the rest of the time it's a fairly large premium to pay just in case another hyper-growth period happens. Sometimes it's totally worth it. But good to review the likelyhood and cost tradeoffs every now and then.
Nextgrid 5y ago
> in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware. That's true with owning your hardware, but what about renting from Hetzner/OVH/etc? You get servers set up in minutes unless you have a very specific request (the only time I've had lead time with these providers is when I had a very custom request, a machine with 300+ TB of storage - yes that is not a typo). Everything else has been delivered pretty much instantly. But even if let's say you have a very specific use-case such as needing a 300TB server that would typically require lead-time, well in that case the prices are so cheap that you can just keep it around all the time sitting mostly unused and still come out ahead compared to cloud pricing.
folmar 5y ago
> the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it It stopped to be the case in pandemic times at most cloud operators due to general hardware and capacity shortage.
martinald 5y ago
To give you an example - we run quite a lot of workloads on Azure app service, which isn't the same as bare metal, but does allow serious scaling if required. We run most workloads on a 3.5GB/2 "vCPU" box. This costs around $70/month per instance. We actually haven't scaled this out past 8 instances, at a cost of $560/month (and that has been extremely rare). On bare metal we could have ran it on a $100/month 16core/128GB box and always had that capacity in reserve. While app service gives a lot of benefits, the scalability argument is somewhat moot as basically you can provision all the capacity you would scale to 24/7 and still the same/less than cloud. Maybe it's just the projects I've worked on, but I haven't really ever seen people require 100x or 1000x the capacity in a very short period of time (which obviously bare metal could not do). I've seen traffic grow that much - but generally over weeks, months or years.

by dkarl 5y ago

jjav 5y ago

> As a software developer, I think the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it. Yes, that's the beauty of it and sometimes you need it. OTOH, how often do you need to grow capacity without any lead time like that? If you are in a hyper-growth stage in a startup you absolutely need it and it is a lifesaver. But, most companies never see a hyper-growth stage. Even those which do, it's a relatively short timeframe (you can't grow exponentially very long). All the rest of the time it's a fairly large premium to pay just in case another hyper-growth period happens. Sometimes it's totally worth it. But good to review the likelyhood and cost tradeoffs every now and then.

Nextgrid 5y ago

> in my experience it could be incredibly hard to get that money spent when it's needed, and I've seen companies throw expensive software engineering time at optimizing software when it would have been much cheaper to solve the problem with hardware. That's true with owning your hardware, but what about renting from Hetzner/OVH/etc? You get servers set up in minutes unless you have a very specific request (the only time I've had lead time with these providers is when I had a very custom request, a machine with 300+ TB of storage - yes that is not a typo). Everything else has been delivered pretty much instantly. But even if let's say you have a very specific use-case such as needing a 300TB server that would typically require lead-time, well in that case the prices are so cheap that you can just keep it around all the time sitting mostly unused and still come out ahead compared to cloud pricing.

folmar 5y ago

> the best thing about the cloud is knowing that if you need the capacity, and it makes sense cost-wise, you'll get it It stopped to be the case in pandemic times at most cloud operators due to general hardware and capacity shortage.

martinald 5y ago

To give you an example - we run quite a lot of workloads on Azure app service, which isn't the same as bare metal, but does allow serious scaling if required. We run most workloads on a 3.5GB/2 "vCPU" box. This costs around $70/month per instance. We actually haven't scaled this out past 8 instances, at a cost of $560/month (and that has been extremely rare). On bare metal we could have ran it on a $100/month 16core/128GB box and always had that capacity in reserve. While app service gives a lot of benefits, the scalability argument is somewhat moot as basically you can provision all the capacity you would scale to 24/7 and still the same/less than cloud. Maybe it's just the projects I've worked on, but I haven't really ever seen people require 100x or 1000x the capacity in a very short period of time (which obviously bare metal could not do). I've seen traffic grow that much - but generally over weeks, months or years.