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I hear that said a lot. I don’t think it stands. A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially t

I hear that said a lot. I don’t think it stands. A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. The cloud actually requires more investment for large organisations. Previously you might of only had a handful of sysadmins but now you have a large dedicated platform team doing devops type work building your own abstractions/paas on top of your cloud. The advantage the cloud has is flexibility. You don’t need to go through a lengthy process to acquire hardware. Likewise cloud services are disposable, no longer need something? Hit the delete button. I think the more PaaS like services such as Heroku, Lambda, Fargate, Google Cloud Run do better realise the less maintenance story but not cloud generally.

deleted 5y ago
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maccard 5y ago
> I think the more PaaS like services such as Heroku, Lambda, Fargate, Google Cloud Run do better realise the less maintenance story but not cloud generally. Completely agree here. Running an EC2 Spot instance + ebs volumes for 730 hours a month is a total waste of money, but running RDS behind fargate and ECS with an ALB is likely to save you time and money by month 2.
stephbu 5y ago
I broadly agree with the statement that owning an OS in general is toil that applies any of these IaaS/VPS/BM scenarios. Owning a BM server different toil - server parts fail, the network it attaches to needs control and it fails too, firmware needs updating more regularly than ever, DC space needs managing over time etc. For a small number of machines maybe this is NBD. For thousands of machines this is just grunt work which while automated, still needs change management and control - rebooting the whole fleet in the middle of the day definitely opens doors in your career. Doing everything you did in the DC in the Cloud is absolutely the worst way to adopt Cloud. Owning an OS is a non-goal, you’ve gotta climb to a higher abstraction - workloads, and quit caring about machines. This is where most companies fail.
philliphaydon 5y ago
> A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. Ani. If the hardware you’re running on is dying. In ec2 you stop it and start it. It’s on new hardware. If you run bare metal you’re screwed. Disk is dying ? Don’t matter cos your data exists multiple times over in AWS elastic storage. With bare metal you got to shut down and replace. The cost of managing hardware is gone with ec2. Software on the other hand yes that is the same amount of effort.
- dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
  The cost isn't gone. It's just included. Fact is, at scale, it's still cheaper to do it yourself. You just need to reach the scale it's worth paying people to do the managing.
  - BryanRamirez 5y ago
    I agree, with the caveat that at scale it's cheaper to do it well yourself. If that weren't true, then Amazon would not be making money on EC2. If you don't have sysadmins and network admins with the right experience, you can easily find yourself in a bad spot with single points of failure, servers that can't be easily replaced, oversubscribed PDUs, misconfigured switches/routers... and any number of other problems that aren't occurring to me right now.
    - dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
      This is very true. You also probably need the scale having multiple install locations makes sense. We went dedicated early and while it didn't make sense at the time we now run at way lower cost than the competition could dream of.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      If you don't have sysadmins with the right experience, there is a vast number of companies that can do this for you on a fractional basis on retainer. I was one of them. The crossover point where cloud is more expensive is really low even if you have zero in-house experience. Exactly where it is depends on your amount of egress, as that is where AWS in particular really takes advantage of you.
whiplash451 5y ago
> A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. Definitely not true. With a dedicated server, you need to handle backup and security yourself.
- greedo 5y ago
  With ec2 you still need to backup. You still need to validate the backups. Security it still something you need to do since an instance is still just a VM. Same with s3 buckets etc. Google for public s3 bucket "breaches." You still need to apply patches, to configure access, to expand volumes, to configure VPCs and security groups.
  - whiplash451 5y ago
    As far as I understand, when you use an EC2 volume, it is already backed up for you. It is not the case for an OVH dedicated server. For instance, backing up your OS image is a lot more work with a dedicated server than with an EC2 instance.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      That addresses one possible set of failure scenarios. If you think that means you have a backup that is guaranteed to be accessible to you whenever you need it, you don't have a backup. If your only backup is in the same cloud provider where your primary system is, you don't have a backup, you only think you do. Any reasonable dedicated setup will involve imaging your server, and so the OS image is not something you need to back up - if it fails you reimage. If you even store the OS image on the server at all rather than network boot.
      - whiplash451 5y ago
        That's still a lot better than what you have with a dedicated server. For you to lose your OS image with a dedicated server only takes your HDD to die. For you to lose your OS image on EC2 (where you made a snapshot of your volume in one-click) would take a lot of shitstorm to happen at AWS -- as I presume that they backup across sites.

deleted 5y ago

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maccard 5y ago

> I think the more PaaS like services such as Heroku, Lambda, Fargate, Google Cloud Run do better realise the less maintenance story but not cloud generally. Completely agree here. Running an EC2 Spot instance + ebs volumes for 730 hours a month is a total waste of money, but running RDS behind fargate and ECS with an ALB is likely to save you time and money by month 2.

stephbu 5y ago

I broadly agree with the statement that owning an OS in general is toil that applies any of these IaaS/VPS/BM scenarios. Owning a BM server different toil - server parts fail, the network it attaches to needs control and it fails too, firmware needs updating more regularly than ever, DC space needs managing over time etc. For a small number of machines maybe this is NBD. For thousands of machines this is just grunt work which while automated, still needs change management and control - rebooting the whole fleet in the middle of the day definitely opens doors in your career. Doing everything you did in the DC in the Cloud is absolutely the worst way to adopt Cloud. Owning an OS is a non-goal, you’ve gotta climb to a higher abstraction - workloads, and quit caring about machines. This is where most companies fail.

philliphaydon 5y ago

> A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. Ani. If the hardware you’re running on is dying. In ec2 you stop it and start it. It’s on new hardware. If you run bare metal you’re screwed. Disk is dying ? Don’t matter cos your data exists multiple times over in AWS elastic storage. With bare metal you got to shut down and replace. The cost of managing hardware is gone with ec2. Software on the other hand yes that is the same amount of effort.

dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
The cost isn't gone. It's just included. Fact is, at scale, it's still cheaper to do it yourself. You just need to reach the scale it's worth paying people to do the managing.
- BryanRamirez 5y ago
  I agree, with the caveat that at scale it's cheaper to do it well yourself. If that weren't true, then Amazon would not be making money on EC2. If you don't have sysadmins and network admins with the right experience, you can easily find yourself in a bad spot with single points of failure, servers that can't be easily replaced, oversubscribed PDUs, misconfigured switches/routers... and any number of other problems that aren't occurring to me right now.
  - dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
    This is very true. You also probably need the scale having multiple install locations makes sense. We went dedicated early and while it didn't make sense at the time we now run at way lower cost than the competition could dream of.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    If you don't have sysadmins with the right experience, there is a vast number of companies that can do this for you on a fractional basis on retainer. I was one of them. The crossover point where cloud is more expensive is really low even if you have zero in-house experience. Exactly where it is depends on your amount of egress, as that is where AWS in particular really takes advantage of you.

whiplash451 5y ago

> A ec2 instance or other vps requires the exact same maintenance as a bare metal server. They are essentially the same except one is virtualised and the other isn’t. Definitely not true. With a dedicated server, you need to handle backup and security yourself.

greedo 5y ago
With ec2 you still need to backup. You still need to validate the backups. Security it still something you need to do since an instance is still just a VM. Same with s3 buckets etc. Google for public s3 bucket "breaches." You still need to apply patches, to configure access, to expand volumes, to configure VPCs and security groups.
- whiplash451 5y ago
  As far as I understand, when you use an EC2 volume, it is already backed up for you. It is not the case for an OVH dedicated server. For instance, backing up your OS image is a lot more work with a dedicated server than with an EC2 instance.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    That addresses one possible set of failure scenarios. If you think that means you have a backup that is guaranteed to be accessible to you whenever you need it, you don't have a backup. If your only backup is in the same cloud provider where your primary system is, you don't have a backup, you only think you do. Any reasonable dedicated setup will involve imaging your server, and so the OS image is not something you need to back up - if it fails you reimage. If you even store the OS image on the server at all rather than network boot.
    - whiplash451 5y ago
      That's still a lot better than what you have with a dedicated server. For you to lose your OS image with a dedicated server only takes your HDD to die. For you to lose your OS image on EC2 (where you made a snapshot of your volume in one-click) would take a lot of shitstorm to happen at AWS -- as I presume that they backup across sites.