8 ms·

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers

I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.

HWR_14 4y ago
You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.
- LanceH 4y ago
  And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    Making IT an OPEX problem is the main reason that C-suites love cloud providers
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    I thought that was less true when you started signing deals for discounts. Commit to a spend of X and they'll reduce your bill. That kind of stuff
- zo1 4y ago
  Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
      - alex_suzuki 4y ago
        Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
      - unregistereddev 4y ago
        On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
        olddustytrail 4y ago
        I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I mean, in theory all services are sold to you with the goal of making a profit, so there must be some margin baked in, but AWS has enough margins to run the Amazon retail store as basically a non-profit while also making enough money to finance Bezos's penis rocket rides.
rossdavidh 4y ago
I think some of this is due to the presence (until just recently) of abundant VC money, encouraging tech companies to trade of money for time by outsourcing their server admin (or part of it, anyway). It's one less thing you have to hire for and spend time getting good corporate policies and procedures on. But, now that the emphasis seems to have shifted from growth-at-all-costs to where-can-we-cut-costs, I think there may be more organizations with a large enough server load to realize that they can do it cheaper (or even just get a different cloud provider to do it cheaper).
- dkarl 4y ago
  It would be shocking if, in the long term, there were not cloud providers with lower prices than any but the biggest companies could achieve by themselves. AWS will have to work hard to keep giving customers a reason to pay the premium.
  - nithril 4y ago
    Still waiting for OVH or Scaleway to be really multi AZ (>2) with a network that cannot be cut by anyone...
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  imo this is the right takeaway. You see a lot of posters commenting that it isn't obvious that it's more expensive, but that's a large part of why I said I'm flabbergasted at how many people don't find it obvious. It is obvious, someone may still choose to pay it because there's a natural tradeoff, but it's absolutely obvious. I suspect most developers don't find it obvious because they've never dealt with actual servers themselves. It's akin to arguing changing the oil on your vehicle is more expensive than paying someone to do it. No, it's more convenient, and that may make it worth the price.
  - elcomet 4y ago
    Again, you seem to not take into account the developer/admin time. In your example with oil, if you track your time, it's gonna be certainly more expensive than going to the garage. And also of course, it allows you to go faster, which can have a huge value
Octoth0rpe 4y ago
> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. That is _not_ a given. They're charging you more than it costs _them_ to run it. They get: - much lower hardware prices than you - lower bandwidth prices than you - likely lower electricity costs than you
- Marazan 4y ago
  Aws bandwidth costs charged to consumers are a notorious ripoff.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  AWS's bandwidth charges are highway robbery. It's my impression that AWS competes with the EC2 instance cost (as it that's what new customers look at), and the bandwidth/storage only becomes apparent when you are locked in. Really what AWS should be is one or two phases of service maturity: dev infrastructure and experimentation is phase one, phase two would be the "its a couple servers" production, BUT: with a scale plan for phase 3 being not-AWS. Having a mature/battle tested phase 2 --> phase 3 should be a market advantage in the modern business landscape, but that's also a post-acquisition/exit phase, so none of the presumed target HN crowd care about it. There are extensive articles and public knowledgebases on various technologies and architectures, but there is effectively nothing on AWS independence out there, even though almost every mature organization will need to face it.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. I assumed phase 3 was where AWS started giving you massive discounts because you represent so much business for them, but I've never been at a place big enough to swing that stick at them.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. Could it be magical thinking based on marketing hype and autoscaling fantasies?
ehutch79 4y ago
When you're a small team, possibly solo, having someone else deal with hardware is key. Focusing just on what you're working on is great.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  assuming the money isn't an existential risk, that's absolutely true. I was commenting on the expense rather than why you would (or wouldn't) want to use cloud.
elcomet 4y ago
> These cloud providers are by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself That's totally non-obvious and certainly false in most cases. Cloud providers have huge economies of scale, which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud if you factor in all your costs related to running it yourself. This is like saying buying furniture is more expensive than making your own furniture because they have a profit margin. Even if you don't account for your own time, it will certainly be false as you'll pay your raw materials much more.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  The furniture example is great. If I wanted to build an Ikea table from scratch, I could not do it for less than the $20 they charge, given the cost of materials available to me, and the fact that I can’t buy a cup of paint for $2.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud AWS would pass that difference to Amazon shareholders than passing them to you.
goodpoint 4y ago
> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself That's pretty obvious but years ago you would have been downvoted into oblivion for writing that.

HWR_14 4y ago

You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.

LanceH 4y ago
And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.
- whatever1 4y ago
  Making IT an OPEX problem is the main reason that C-suites love cloud providers
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I thought that was less true when you started signing deals for discounts. Commit to a spend of X and they'll reduce your bill. That kind of stuff
zo1 4y ago
Sure you can. Ask one of your devs to spend X amount of time on something. Might not be an exact 1 for 1 or 0.1% but it still beats the many many hours you'd waste architecting around cloud-specific issues and nuances. Or the cost of dealing with the friction that comes when you want to do anything with cloud in a manner that isn't cloud-supported.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Devs love being told to set up servers! And always do so well. After all, computer person is a fungible skill set. I mean, it is fungible enough that they can learn, but they'll probably make a lot of mistakes along the way and be less efficient.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Any developer that can't setup a server has fundamental gaps in their skillset.
    - alex_suzuki 4y ago
      Someone missed the DevOps revolution…
    - unregistereddev 4y ago
      On a trivial level I agree, but only on a trivial level. Most developers will not set up a server in the most secure, maintainable manner. They're going to miss important things: - Disable password-based auth for ssh (require key-based auth) - Enable fail2ban or similar to slow down brute-force login attempts - Configure firewall - Install monitoring tools, antivirus, possibly backup daemons, etc - Setup a sane swapfile for your use case, and configure monitoring tools to alert when memory pressure gets too high - Setup disk mounts, configure monitoring tools to alert when disk space is low, and consider a cron job to automatically clean up tempfiles - Either set up automated updates (typically excluding kernel upgrades), or have a standard schedule for manually applying updates ...and probably other things that I'm forgetting because I'm a developer, and it has been years since I've been a sysadmin.
      - olddustytrail 4y ago
        I've done the sysadmin, DevOps, SRE journey. A couple of others spring to mind: - if you're not regularly testing your backups, you don't have backups - monitor SSL certs for expiry. It's amazing how many outages I've seen because this was missed. - are you allowing direct connection to your server from the internet, or do you want to go through a bastion host. Do you need 2FA on this, say because you need to meet ISO27001. - do all the above through CM (like Ansible or Puppet) for obvious reasons.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I mean, in theory all services are sold to you with the goal of making a profit, so there must be some margin baked in, but AWS has enough margins to run the Amazon retail store as basically a non-profit while also making enough money to finance Bezos's penis rocket rides.

rossdavidh 4y ago

I think some of this is due to the presence (until just recently) of abundant VC money, encouraging tech companies to trade of money for time by outsourcing their server admin (or part of it, anyway). It's one less thing you have to hire for and spend time getting good corporate policies and procedures on. But, now that the emphasis seems to have shifted from growth-at-all-costs to where-can-we-cut-costs, I think there may be more organizations with a large enough server load to realize that they can do it cheaper (or even just get a different cloud provider to do it cheaper).

dkarl 4y ago
It would be shocking if, in the long term, there were not cloud providers with lower prices than any but the biggest companies could achieve by themselves. AWS will have to work hard to keep giving customers a reason to pay the premium.
- nithril 4y ago
  Still waiting for OVH or Scaleway to be really multi AZ (>2) with a network that cannot be cut by anyone...
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
imo this is the right takeaway. You see a lot of posters commenting that it isn't obvious that it's more expensive, but that's a large part of why I said I'm flabbergasted at how many people don't find it obvious. It is obvious, someone may still choose to pay it because there's a natural tradeoff, but it's absolutely obvious. I suspect most developers don't find it obvious because they've never dealt with actual servers themselves. It's akin to arguing changing the oil on your vehicle is more expensive than paying someone to do it. No, it's more convenient, and that may make it worth the price.
- elcomet 4y ago
  Again, you seem to not take into account the developer/admin time. In your example with oil, if you track your time, it's gonna be certainly more expensive than going to the garage. And also of course, it allows you to go faster, which can have a huge value

Octoth0rpe 4y ago

> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. That is _not_ a given. They're charging you more than it costs _them_ to run it. They get: - much lower hardware prices than you - lower bandwidth prices than you - likely lower electricity costs than you

Marazan 4y ago
Aws bandwidth costs charged to consumers are a notorious ripoff.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
AWS's bandwidth charges are highway robbery. It's my impression that AWS competes with the EC2 instance cost (as it that's what new customers look at), and the bandwidth/storage only becomes apparent when you are locked in. Really what AWS should be is one or two phases of service maturity: dev infrastructure and experimentation is phase one, phase two would be the "its a couple servers" production, BUT: with a scale plan for phase 3 being not-AWS. Having a mature/battle tested phase 2 --> phase 3 should be a market advantage in the modern business landscape, but that's also a post-acquisition/exit phase, so none of the presumed target HN crowd care about it. There are extensive articles and public knowledgebases on various technologies and architectures, but there is effectively nothing on AWS independence out there, even though almost every mature organization will need to face it.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. I assumed phase 3 was where AWS started giving you massive discounts because you represent so much business for them, but I've never been at a place big enough to swing that stick at them.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > I'm also a bit blown away that anyone is surprised that AWS is expensive. Sure you can express a lot of the costs in small numbers per hour or $0.08 per gigabyte of bandwidth, but those things all add up quickly at scale. Could it be magical thinking based on marketing hype and autoscaling fantasies?

ehutch79 4y ago

When you're a small team, possibly solo, having someone else deal with hardware is key. Focusing just on what you're working on is great.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
assuming the money isn't an existential risk, that's absolutely true. I was commenting on the expense rather than why you would (or wouldn't) want to use cloud.

elcomet 4y ago

> These cloud providers are by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself That's totally non-obvious and certainly false in most cases. Cloud providers have huge economies of scale, which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud if you factor in all your costs related to running it yourself. This is like saying buying furniture is more expensive than making your own furniture because they have a profit margin. Even if you don't account for your own time, it will certainly be false as you'll pay your raw materials much more.

thehappypm 4y ago
The furniture example is great. If I wanted to build an Ikea table from scratch, I could not do it for less than the $20 they charge, given the cost of materials available to me, and the fact that I can’t buy a cup of paint for $2.
unity1001 4y ago
> which certainly makes it less expensive to use cloud AWS would pass that difference to Amazon shareholders than passing them to you.

goodpoint 4y ago

> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself That's pretty obvious but years ago you would have been downvoted into oblivion for writing that.