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It's relatively easy to run 10 machines. It's harder to run 100 machines. Even harder at 1000 machines. Then you start talking about 10,000+ machines and you're

It's relatively easy to run 10 machines. It's harder to run 100 machines. Even harder at 1000 machines. Then you start talking about 10,000+ machines and you're talking about a lot of people process & logistics, taking up your organizations time. Then you talk about the bureaucracy an organization might have to provision new machines, or provide elasticity, and the hinderance it has on your development velocity. It's at this scale the benefits of cloud really shine. The improvement to your development velocity, the shift from large CAPEX purchases to monthly opex, and the ease at which you can shift infrastructure direction. It's similar to why a lot of businesses rent office space vs buying it outright. Or why you might pay for Bon Appetit to manage your cafeterias vs doing it yourself.

hughrr 5y ago
Really most organisations that end up in the cloud don't need elasticity. I have worked with a number of companies and they all run entirely static sized clusters. They don't even benefit from scaling down the cluster out of peak hours because their load is that small.
marcosdumay 5y ago
The CAPEX vs. OPEX argument does really not hold water. Scalable clouds are 100s to 1000s of times more expensive than using your own hardware. That's a pretty absurd ROI to get from a loan, even on high-interest economies. Also renting non-scalable hardware is a perfectly viable option with costs more similar to owning it. Renting non-scalable hardware makes the same change from CAPEX into OPEX.
- dastbe 5y ago
  > Scalable clouds are 100s to 1000s of times more expensive than using your own hardware. This is trending into hyperbole. a c6g.metal at AWS is $21,502 for a 3 year all upfront reserved instance. You're telling me you can pay just $21 for 3 years to get a 64 core/128gb machine racked in a datacenter?
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Don't forget that if you have millions in EC2 spend that you'll be able to negotiate an additional discount.
  - nwmcsween 5y ago
    You can get a 16c/64gb semi managed (break/fix hw) for ~ $40USD/mo of course this isn't the same IPC of a 64c cpu
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Well, reserved instance means it's not scalable. More generally, if you are renting entire servers, you are not on the scalable part of the cloud. You are getting something much closer to a colocated machine than to a lambda, and paying just a 3 to 4 times mark-up over a rented server (where the owner will care about the hardware, not you). And, of course, you have to compute your network usage on the cloud. It's almost certainly already included on the renting.

hughrr 5y ago

Really most organisations that end up in the cloud don't need elasticity. I have worked with a number of companies and they all run entirely static sized clusters. They don't even benefit from scaling down the cluster out of peak hours because their load is that small.

marcosdumay 5y ago

The CAPEX vs. OPEX argument does really not hold water. Scalable clouds are 100s to 1000s of times more expensive than using your own hardware. That's a pretty absurd ROI to get from a loan, even on high-interest economies. Also renting non-scalable hardware is a perfectly viable option with costs more similar to owning it. Renting non-scalable hardware makes the same change from CAPEX into OPEX.

dastbe 5y ago
> Scalable clouds are 100s to 1000s of times more expensive than using your own hardware. This is trending into hyperbole. a c6g.metal at AWS is $21,502 for a 3 year all upfront reserved instance. You're telling me you can pay just $21 for 3 years to get a 64 core/128gb machine racked in a datacenter?
- bushbaba 5y ago
  Don't forget that if you have millions in EC2 spend that you'll be able to negotiate an additional discount.
- nwmcsween 5y ago
  You can get a 16c/64gb semi managed (break/fix hw) for ~ $40USD/mo of course this isn't the same IPC of a 64c cpu
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, reserved instance means it's not scalable. More generally, if you are renting entire servers, you are not on the scalable part of the cloud. You are getting something much closer to a colocated machine than to a lambda, and paying just a 3 to 4 times mark-up over a rented server (where the owner will care about the hardware, not you). And, of course, you have to compute your network usage on the cloud. It's almost certainly already included on the renting.