14 ms·

Leaving the Cloud

158 points by thm 4y ago

thm 4y ago
Also https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...
- metadat 4y ago
  Also discussed 3 days ago: 37signals Leaves the Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 (245 points, 78 comments)
k__ 4y ago
I think, Simon Warldley summarised it good today. (0) They (think, they) have a niche use-case which is a bad fit for the cloud. These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud,are probably wrong. Chances are you belong to the vast number of companies that should simply put their workloads in the cloud and be done with it. (0) https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/1583814169656459265 https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/15838141696564592...
- dijit 4y ago
  > These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud,are probably wrong. Conversely: I find that the inverse is true very often. People are very quick to throw their current systems away in favour of the cloud due to a myriad of reasons; be it sticker shock, promise of less headcount, the idea that you can hire people easier or simply because of a Gartner report that your CTO happened to read on a flight. This causes migrations to the cloud that kinda don’t make sense, they’re borne out of ideology or “not being left behind” and sometimes it fails catastrophically. We would do well not to cargo cult, but reasonably deduce and argue what our objectives truly are.
  - mey 4y ago
    I wonder how many companies have been crippled by executives/managers reading Gartner reports. That's probably a business study unto itself.
    - dopylitty 4y ago
      A couple years into my career I came to the realization that working in the tech side of a non-tech business is not necessarily about providing what the business needs. It’s about convincing the business to pay for what you want for your own reasons (resume, prestige, continued employment ) I have been on many teams that could’ve easily been in maintenance mode and not changed anything for years. The business would’ve hummed along stably and profitably. But it’s hard to justify your job in IT if you say your roadmap is to just keep doing what you’re doing. Nevermind the people in between business and IT who really contribute to neither. So we get these pendulum swings and huge projects (move everything to cloud, move everything back, make engineering do ops, make a dedicated ops team, micro segment everything, flat network everything) just so IT management can convince the business they’re providing some value. Gartner is the “independent” third party that allows IT folks and tech vendors to convince the business they are doing the right thing. And yeah I’m sure some of these pendulum swings have come at great cost to the business, even halting it entirely (SAP)
    - semicolon_storm 4y ago
      Some of Gartner’s analysis can be spot on, but god some of it is so bad I can’t help but cringe. Their recent push for low code/no code everywhere and calling this the “final decade of applications” is in the later category. There’s going to be mountain of companies going out of business in 5 years due to following Gartner’s low/no code advice.
      - notabee 4y ago
        Don't forget that the already beleaguered world of government IT also listens to Gartner. But government doesn't really go out of business when that bad advice leads to bad initiatives, it just becomes even more dysfunctional.
- machinekob 4y ago
  Just put everything in cloud, use closed-in vendor solutions and overpriced eager fees as its typical VC way to just burn money cause "developers cost more" (maybe in California). I was big cloud enjoyer in like 2016-20 but then some hacker news post open my eyes to the truth. They are trying to milk everyone and hook every possible person on some free credits then bump prices and get fat profits and ofc make as hard as possible getting out of the platform. I just don't care and move to smaller providers for VPS and database + cloudflare for dns and pseudo s3 (still in almost free tier).
- kortilla 4y ago
  Chances are you belong in the vast number of companies that have a very static workload and you should move to a few colos and be done with it.
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    otoh: very few workload are static. our world isn’t (circadian rhythm is a thing!) and this drives most of our systems not to be such.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Static on a daily rolling average. You’ll be hemorrhaging money if you think moving to the cloud will save you money because you have a daily trough. The only places I’ve seen it work are: - massive seasonal demand with negligible usage during off-season (think TurboTax if it weren’t part of Intuit) - brand new product development where you don’t even know what you need yet or you are going through exponential growth that you can’t get ahead of. (This stage should only last like 6 months though)
      - snotrockets 4y ago
        You are doing measuring wrong (look at distributions, not a number), and moving to the cloud wrong (rearchitect with elasticity and serverless in mind, don’t just put it on instances). I was hoping those lessons would be a bit more common by now.
        kortilla 4y ago
        You don’t understand how the vast majority of compute workloads pan out for regular businesses if you think “elasticity” has any relevance at all.
        ReflectedImage 4y ago
        Well at a company I worked at, on the surface it looked like we only needed to be running compute 9 am - 8 pm. But nowadays, it runs full load 24/7 on the cloud. Turns out the after hours batch jobs are just as demanding. shrugs
- kortilla 4y ago
  That entire thread is just a dumpster fire of bad analysis. He dismisses everything that doesn’t fit “serverless” as a niche and doesn’t mention cost of maintenance, transition, or lock-in in serverless. It’s just a super lazy take from someone who likes to use serverless because he doesn’t like to maintain things. It’s essentially an argument to live in a hotel because they can do maintenance at scale better than you.
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    I think you underestimate Simon’s analysis… don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers And with his maps he’ll have analysed things quite effectively I might disagree with him on the EU but his technology analysis is usually bang on
    - darkwater 4y ago
      IDK the guy but the whole tone of the thread sounds like that he is biased/have some interest. If you go back 4 years in time, everything in 2022 was going to be serverless. Reality check: it didn't happen, the only "fad" that actually materialized for almost everybody is Kubernetes (which actually helps with going back to bare metal).
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers No shit, taking advice from a car salesman on how often to buy cars and what cars to buy is about the dumbest thing you can do. His entire livelihood and career was built on selling this story that you need to pay others to run all of your infrastructure for you. He’s shilling IT illiteracy rather than pushing for more sustainable on-prem solutions.
      - youngtaff 4y ago
        Have you ever used something like Wardley Mapping to do the analysis? Most on-prem solutions I've seen aren't sustainable, massive Capex costs, teams of people that could be better used in other ways just to keep trivial things applications running
- dmitriid 4y ago
  The absolute vast majority of companies can run from the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet for an indefinitely long time. No cloud necessary.
- Veliladon 4y ago
  I don't think it's as niche as people want to believe. The monetization models of cloud compute is clearly having compute act as a loss leader. The real revenue is picked up on the borderline egregious egress charges which are, coincidentally I'm sure, the hardest thing to estimate. Every other provider needs to follow this same monetization because then their choices are the top line being an eye-popping figure or making no money.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > simply put their workloads in the cloud and be done with it I've worked all sorts of cloud environments for about ten years now, and with metal servers before that, and I'm not all that convinced that the cloud is saving all that much in terms of engineering effort. Or if it does, I haven't experienced it. Sure, no one gets woken up at 4AM because your server's disks are failing, but instead you get woken up at 4AM because all your cloud native infrastructure is doing $funky_stuff. And yeah, no need to install and maintain servers any more, but now you need to write a whole bunch of code to interface with all the cloud stuff and maintain that. Lots of open positions for k8s engineers "dev-ops" engineers to make all of that work. I run my stuff on Linode VPS's, which is "the cloud" as in "renting servers", but it's not "the cloud" as in all the "cloud native" stuff we have now. My experience is that sometimes the cloud makes things easy, and it makes things harder. On balance, it seems we just swapped one set of problems for another set of problems, and we haven't really gained all that much in the end. I don't think Hey is running a "niche edge case"; it seems fairly standard stuff to me. That Tweet comes off as quite dismissive.
  - jdoss 4y ago
    I felt the tweet thread was dismissive as well. Hey is running pretty standard Rails things IIRC and I wouldn't consider them niche. They like to make money and they know they can make more of it if they run on baremetal. I think more companies are going to move back to a more hybrid model of cloud + baremetal in the next 10 years. Especially the ones that need more power, flexibility, and cost savings from their infra. You nailed it on the head. The problems have just moved from one camp to another. We make our life easier because we can talk to an API to get our network, compute, and storage but the complexity in doing so has a pretty high price as well. The current devops trends are mindbogglingly complex compared to most of software that is getting deployed with them.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The tweet thread came off in the completely wrong way to me, and suggested that the person writing it was pretty ignorant about how software engineering actually works. Are you suggesting that everyone should be using [insert dev fad here] for all but a few special cases? Have you considered that sometimes (really, almost all the time) people run code that is more than 2 years old? Have you considered the costs of things like serverless when you have a reasonably constant load? I am a huge fan of cloud as a platform for time-shared server rentals. Cloud for "value added" products like serverless and whatever new database they cook up starts to get really funky and weird, in addition to being extremely expensive.
- bayraktar 4y ago
  These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. Talk about broad, sweeping statements. Care to substantiate?
- pojzon 4y ago
  Lift and shift proved itself to not work well. Its not cost efficient for vast majority of businesses with legacy software. To use cloud efficiently you have to build for it. Startups are much more efficient in that regard in comparison to monolithic applications running on premise.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  If you’ve got global consumers of services you build, and or need elastic scalability - sure. Or if you’re a really small company - sure. You should probably rely on SaaS mainly. I would say many companies fall outside of these categories though and could potentially both save money and gain performance staying on-prem. I know my current employer does, and we’re seriously looking at moving back to on-prem/co-lo.
- hinkley 4y ago
  > think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. My sentiment leans toward host your own for a number of reasons, but it's challenging to make good decisions. Can you trust the person who is telling you that you can do it? Their org chart goes away if they lose this argument, so of course you're going to hear from them how we can do this. If the team you have has been doing a decent job, maybe you should listen to them. If they've been doing a poor job, then you have to ask why they're suddenly going to be able to provide a level of service you haven't been enjoying for years. My company went through one of these fishtails. I think everybody is happier that we ended up in the cloud, even those of us who will only begrudgingly admit it. As I said in another thread, I think the Hype Cycle for The Cloud will at least give some orgs with a dysfunctional IT department an opportunity to clean house and then start over in a couple of years as informed consumers. Or find a new kind of service provider that distances itself from The Cloud salespitch.
billythemaniam 4y ago
I think the cloud can reduce the operations team even at their scale if serverless is used on GCP. Many of the serverless offerings on GCP just get it right. I have never had to think about machine sizes, clusters, etc when using BigQuery. My team and I focus on the SQL. Cloud Run gives you a web or API server without having to really think about machines other than number of cores and memory size. I am currently designing a data pipeline architecture that is 100% serverless to move away from Airflow/Composer. Why? Because my team and I can stay focused on the code and logic of moving data around instead of the operations of managing a managed product. Would this work on AWS or Azure? Theoretically yes, but I personally think their serverless offerings are hard to use and don't make things easier.
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  Azure Functions is as easy to use as writing an "Hello World" console application. I have a few services running like clockwork for a few years now, very happy with this service overall. The one thing that complicates matters is Microsoft's eagerness to deprecate libraries, frameworks and best practices every now and then.
- icedchai 4y ago
  The developer experience for AWS serverless offerings, like Lambda, is awful. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole of API gateway configuration, IAM roles, security policies, VPC endpoints, etc. that gives you very little in terms of useful error messages when it's not quite configured right. But, yeah, once you do set it up, the per-request cost is quite cheap. Still, I think if you consider the lost developer productivity dealing with slow deploys and environment/configuration issues, the costs are much, much higher.
shinzui 4y ago
It's worth noting that Basecamp's architecture relies on vertical scaling, which can get very expensive in the cloud.
- qeternity 4y ago
  How so? Email is a fairly embarrassingly parallel problem.
  - shinzui 4y ago
    DHH’s preferred architecture is a rails monolith with a single database behind it that you keep scaling vertically. I believe both Hey and Basecamp are still using that architecture.
jebr224 4y ago
I would enjoy real world (apples to apples) comparison of the cost of cloud vs self hosting. There are many speculations and approximates, but some hard facts would go along way.
- api 4y ago
  It’s 100% work load dependent. Cloud makes dealing with complexity cheaper in many cases by letting you outsource admin to managed services, and is great if you need elastic scaling. Bare metal on the other hand can be many orders of magnitude cheaper for compute and especially bandwidth. Cloud bandwidth pricing is completely insane, up to 1000X more than bare metal hosting. There is no one size fits all advice. You have to model your work load. Take scale into account too. Cloud often makes far more sense at a small scale than a very large scale since labor costs can amortize. There comes a point at which hiring admins may be cheaper than paying cloud costs.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I wrote one of the big speculations and approximates. In real life, it is very much workload dependent, but the balance skews a lot more in favor of self-hosting (or cheap hosting companies) than IT leaders (used to) think. I think the three best reasons to use the cloud are: (1) If you have a very bursty workload, (2) if you need compliance with specific government regulations that are expensive to certify, or (3) if your app is a hobby project or otherwise fits inside the free tier. A lot of applications fit into one of these categories, and, anecdotally, people running them are very happy with the cloud. Most CRUD apps today do not fit into those categories. I have also seen companies have a lot of success with hybrid cloud deployments, where they run a datacenter for their base load and scale out into the cloud when they need to do more work.
- Too 4y ago
  It's heavily dependent on your scope and how much you value your time. I could spin up a postgres docker container locally, in shorter time than it took me to write this comment. On the other hand that wouldn't provide readonly replicas, standby-replicas, cross regional, point in time backups where i can just click on a date and the database will restore, access controls connected to my company directory. All that would take months to engineer properly myself and after that continuous monitoring and replacing of disks. Maybe you don't need all this, maybe you do, it's all a part of your workload and effort equation. It's not possible to just take the cost of a VM and multiply with number of hours in a year.
snotrockets 4y ago
Can’t wait for their post in 3 or so years about moving their workloads back to the cloud.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  It could even be reasonable because (gasp!) the cloud might change yet again. But I'm rather positive it won't.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Can’t wait for their post in 3 or so years about moving their workloads back to the cloud. What leads you to believe that paying a premium to someone else to use their computers is a solution that fits each and every single case? Even AWS is clear in how their present their offering as something that allows projects to grow and scale quickly while avoiding upfront costs buying and hosting their own hardware.
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    You don’t pay the cloud providers (just) for their computing power.
    - tuyenhx 4y ago
      So what do we pay for except computing power? Ease of scale? Ease of development cost? Or other marketing material?
      - andrewguenther 4y ago
        Security, compliance, flexibility...
        simplotek 4y ago
        > Security, compliance, flexibility... AWS's shared responsibility model is quite clear in stating that end users are ultimately the ones responsible for security and compliance. So your points are moot. "Flexibility" in this case is so vague that it's meaningless. I mean, is there anything more flexible than owning the entire infrastructure and software stack you chose all by yourself?
deleted 4y ago
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nonrandomstring 4y ago
A student of mine did a rather good thesis on de-clouding. In the process she discovered the term "cloud repatriation" a fair bit of literature on the movement to bring control of data and hardware back 'on-prem'. She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. As companies move their operations out to the cloud it's not the disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of skill-sets. Later they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days.
- silasdavis 4y ago
  Perhaps you could link the thesis?
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'm definitely encouraging publication in a journal (maybe dealing with industry resilience). Also I want some students to come here and submit things via Show-HN, but they have to want to do that themselves.
    - mstade 4y ago
      Your abstract is very intriguing, I’d love to read the paper! Is there anything beyond commenting we can do to help encourage publishing?
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- deleted 4y ago
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WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
All of this is nice and sounds rather obvious to many over here. I think the HN's hivemind has already chewed through most of the arguments they are making. What I want to see is what they are going to replace the cloud with, how the numbers compare, and what tradeoffs they have had to make. Preferably a year after they make their transitions. An honest comparison that makes it possible for other companies in a similar situation to clear their doubts (in some cases “clearing doubts” would mean “we're staying in the cloud”; I'd like this kind of honest). Thus I'm staying tuned, with a grain of doubt. After all, it's possible that the transition off cloud will take time and may even fizz out without achieving much. Oh, and I'm wondering what's the cost of moving the data itself off cloud is going to be.
braingenious 4y ago
This is kind of tangential, but back in the early-mid 2000s I remember there being a little utility that allowed you to download individual files from inside of a zip file over HTTP. I want to say that it was made by 37signals but I might be completely mis-remembering the whole thing. Does anybody know what I’m talking about?
- jlundberg 4y ago
  Not sure what the name of the tool is, but the phenomenom exist and the ZIP format makes it feasible (especially for store only files). Guesss that’s why a JAR or APK is a ZIP file with another name.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    Just mount it as a user space file system and use standard zip utilities: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/man1/httpfs2.1.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/man1/httpfs2.1.h...
staunch 4y ago
A good definition of The Cloud is just "servers in a datacenter" so the discussion is best framed as Private Cloud (on-prem or co-located servers) vs Public Cloud (AWS, etc) or some combination. People with expertise in running private clouds and using public cloud services can judge each case pretty easily, by taking into account the organization's technical needs, plans, budget, abilities, etc. And for non-experts, the question is even simpler: use the public clouds if or until it becomes a technical or financial blocker. And in that case, hire an expert. There's really not a lot of room for controversy. It seems most of the arguments come from people without the relevant expertise, who only know how to develop in public clouds, responding defensively. Like people with little programming experience flaming each other over which language is "best". There's no single "best" cloud option, since they're just different tools for different things. Sometimes either way would work, in which case it comes down to personal preference, and sometimes there's a clearly better option for a specific organization's needs. Framed correctly, it's a "boring" question just like most technical questions should be.
worik 4y ago
Computing started in the cloud. Once upon a time computer bureaus sold time on their main frames, and you used a terminal (on a 1200 baud modem) to communicate with it. Computer programmers were all men in ties, and fine looking suits..... History rhymes
- seydor 4y ago
  but it really exploded when it decentralized
juanse 4y ago
A kind reminder that the cloud is just other people computers
- EricE 4y ago
  One of my favorite stickers!
rglover 4y ago
Having just spent the better part of the last year building a service that deploys to multiple cloud providers, this choice makes sense (or at the very least, I can understand the root why). Beyond cost concerns, there's a staggering amount of complexity and low-quality UX/DX around this stuff that I don't see changing or improving any time soon (if ever). Once I got into the thick of it, I actually started to have the thought "what would it look like to just run co-located boxes like the old days or do this on prem?" The answer was of course "waaaay simpler." While I don't think we'll see an industry-wide shift back in this direction, I do see it happening on a non-trivial scale. Especially as things like economic instability and censorship wax and wane and wax in the coming decades.
jeffbee 4y ago
A million dollar per year RDS bill buys you, list price, a multi-AZ deployment with 1024 state-of-the-art CPUs and 5TiB of memory per replica, which strikes me as much more than a mere tens of thousands of email accounts would ever need.
- dijit 4y ago
  State-of-the-art CPUs? I am suspicious of that as AWS has a lot of old as hell CPUs floating around and in service. Either way: You're not counting storage costs which are around 70% of the costs in my deployments.
  - qeternity 4y ago
    AWS does not use SOTA anything due to their rigorous testing. I’m not criticizing this…it would be dumb for them to run bleeding edge anything.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      The price I quoted is for the m6i RDS instances which use the very latest Xeon that Intel has ever marketed. You are free to speculate as to whether the Graviton is more SOTA than Ice Lake Xeon, but I know which one I will choose for straight line performance.
      - qeternity 4y ago
        It’s absolutely not the latest Xeon…but also Amazon launched m6i in Aug 2021 and Ice Lake was released in 2019. The latest Xeons are Rocket Lake based.
        jeffbee 4y ago
        Weird take since Rocket Lake is identical microarchitecturally to Ice Lake. The difference is scale: there are no 2S RKL, and the biggest part has only 8 cores. It's a workstation/small business server part.
softwaredoug 4y ago
My naive sense of things is compared to 10 years ago, now that we have k8s and can more easily deploy what we want in arbitrary environments, the cloud proposition becomes more about on-demand, elastic compute, and less about specific services. But that also because of k8s, we can also just have static set of compute and solve 80% of the problem with whatever kind of service we need.
iuvcaw 4y ago
The HN community 1) likes building and hacking, and 2) has nostalgia for old technology. This makes them feel a lot of affinity toward "doing things themselves" -- server infrastructure, running desktop linux, avoiding dependencies in their code. The reality, though, is that the steady march of progress encourages us to outsource what we can to people who are better at the thing that is auxiliary to what we do. I don't grow food because I'm bad at growing. I don't repair my car because I'm bad at auto repair. I do build software, and my company builds a very specific type of software to solve very specific problems. I'm happy to focus on that, because that's how we make money. Other people are much better at building infrastructure than I am, and so I let them do it for me. If there comes a time when the cloud offerings are either worse than what I can build or too expensive, then I trust someone else will come along and fill the gap in the market before it becomes worthwhile for me to do it.
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  You're understating the case: you don't grow food even if you're good at growing, because your value add as a niche software dev probably brings you much greater remuneration and benefit to your customers than if you were a farmer.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  This is true about HN, and a very healthy perspective on cloud. It is very much the minority opinion that using the cloud is like using a repair shop for a car. The vast majority of people think they are saving money by doing it for one reason or another, rather than effectively outsourcing dev competency. Unfortunately, the competency you are outsourcing is rare and getting rarer, meaning that infrastructure products are getting very expensive (and profitable).
- qeternity 4y ago
  > I don't grow food because I'm bad at growing. I don't repair my car because I'm bad at auto repair. These analogies are really bad. It’s not as if this is binary. Nobody is suggesting you fab your own chips or build your own data centers. But you do cook (presumably) most of your own food, and you drive your own car. You capture most of the benefit of economies of scale and specialization, and then you do the last 5%. This is what people are talking about. AWS is like eating out for every meal or taking an Uber everywhere. Sure it’s convenient, and has its time and place, but it’s probably not the best default option.
twarge 4y ago
Can most offices get a sufficiently fast link to properly utilize servers on premises?
- WJW 4y ago
  Confusingly, on-premise does not always mean "in the same building". Oftentimes it also refers to dedicated servers in a shared datacenter (aka colocation), or a separate datacenter that only serves a single company if that company is large enough.
- nske 4y ago
  - Most businesses don't provide Internet Services to customers, so they wouldn't need fast (internet) links and servers for this - However their own employees are typically consumers of services, that can be hosted either on the cloud, or on premises (which turns the argument on its head) - Even for businesses that do offer services to customers over the internet, the alternative to the cloud doesn't have to be servers on their premises for this. They can be bare metal servers, either collocated or leased on datacenters. This is just fine when their services don't anticipate explosive growth. It doesn't even mean they have to sacrifice fancy "infastructure-as-code" tooling, though it does mean that they have to think about scaling in more terms than just cost.
  - EricE 4y ago
    Or you can just architect your application as a hybrid that can surge into the cloud as needed. Lots of ways to go about it rather than just chucking everything to the cloud and never thinking about it again.
georgebarnett 4y ago
One under discussed issue I’ve noticed is how the size of The compute sold to the end user does not increase at the rate the underlying hardware improves at. It’s reasonable to presume there’s now an entire generation of developers who simply don’t know what’s possible in state of the art hardware.
- seydor 4y ago
  or hardware at all. everything runs on VMs
zrail 4y ago
Cloud computing is a machine that turns capex into opex with a hefty markup. Want to repatriate? Get ready to sell your investors on the capital sink.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  This always seems an odd argument for an industry where for most of the last 20 years early money from optimistic VCs has almost been falling from trees. Compensation for technical people has been rocketing even in businesses that haven't actually built any net-value-generating product after several years. Clearly the investors with serious money have no problem with offering huge amounts of it in the hopes of funding the next potential moonshot among the 99 other failures. Would the kind of capex necessary to buy and manage enough infrastructure for most of these businesses to find their market and start scaling rapidly even move the needle at this point?
cs702 4y ago
In the early days of cloud providers, their services were both easy-to-use and cost-effective for many growing companies. Now, cloud providers offer a giant hairball of specialized services, built on top of other specialized services, built on top of yet other specialized services... such that no single person can comprehend all of them, let alone manage them cost-effectively. Moreover, as all these intertwined services become deeply entrenched in IT infrastructure, migrating away from them becomes incredibly disruptive. The financial incentives of cloud providers are not aligned with those of customers. The more a customer is sucked and trapped inside those giant hairballs, the better for the cloud providers. To paraphrase the Dark Knight, cloud providers may have been the heroes at first, but they have lived long enough to become the villains.
- brap 4y ago
  This is why I like DigitalOcean. They have like 4 products, spend 5 minutes on their site and you know exactly which ones you need.
albertgao 4y ago
Have the similar thought before: https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761?s=46&t=iCSm5LZqjSFbPTlendSAgQ https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761?s=4...
nathants 4y ago
unless you want to grow an operationally excellent and well staffed org, control plane should probably be public cloud. cost plane, whether it be heavy on bytes at rest, bytes in flight, or compute, could possibly be private cloud. scale to zero is something not possible without public cloud. it opens interesting doors like services priced cost plus. what if zero usage had zero cost? what is all usage was profitable? from the perspective of an individual customer and assuming light egress, lambda, ec2 spot, and s3 are shockingly affordable. heavy egress is where you maybe do something else with the cost plane. that could be private cloud, or cloudflare et al.
albertgao 4y ago
Similar idea: https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761 https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761
alfor 4y ago
Servers are incredibly powerful today. You don’t need much ’bare metal’ to serve a lot of html. One big box can get you quite far. When it’s not enough: put the DB on another big box. Not enough. Put a caching/proxy server first. You can use Cloudflare or others to offload even more static/caching stuff outside. Still way simpler than to understand why AWS billed you something.
michellerebe4 4y ago
kundejenny 4y ago
KronisLV 4y ago
Due to being kind of on the poor side, using AWS, Azure or GCP for personal projects isn't entirely viable for me. I still do utilize some VPS vendors for when I need a decent uptime, but most of the time it's just a GNU/Linux box that I have SSH access to and I configure everything else myself. Most other things, I run in my homelab, which is just a few old computers repurposed to act as servers for whatever I might need (especially for storing larger amounts of data, e.g. backups), including things like acting as CI/CD nodes, or test environments etc. I still write "cloud native" software (for example, 12 Factor Apps) because those make the portability of everything pretty well, as well as use something like Docker and some lightweight orchestration on top of it (like Docker Swarm or Hashicorp Nomad) because it's like having the ability to make configuration for what you need (ports, storage, memory/CPU limits, scheduling, restart policies etc.) rather easily and also version it, more easily than Ansible lets me (which I still use for configuration of the server nodes themselves). Basically like multi-node systemd, once could say. I actually wrote about some of this a year back: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/how-i-organize-my-docker-deployments-in-2021 https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/how-i-organize-my-docker-de... Though since I've also moved over to using Apache as my ingress, for a few reasons: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-and-why-to-use-apache-httpd-in-2022 https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-and-why-to-use-apache-... Either way, it's nice that we still have the ability to base our workloads on open source solutions and learn about all of this stuff on consumer hardware (though certain configurations might be badly supported on choice OSes, like some BSD versions with driver support). A few days ago I actually published a blog series on making a file and metadata storage solution that's based on open source technologies, which easily handled millions of documents: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/1-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-millions-of-documents-the-data https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/1-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-m...
michellerebe4 4y ago

158 points by thm 4y ago

thm 4y ago

Also https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

metadat 4y ago
Also discussed 3 days ago: 37signals Leaves the Cloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 (245 points, 78 comments)

k__ 4y ago

I think, Simon Warldley summarised it good today. (0) They (think, they) have a niche use-case which is a bad fit for the cloud. These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud,are probably wrong. Chances are you belong to the vast number of companies that should simply put their workloads in the cloud and be done with it. (0) https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/1583814169656459265 https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/15838141696564592...

dijit 4y ago
> These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud,are probably wrong. Conversely: I find that the inverse is true very often. People are very quick to throw their current systems away in favour of the cloud due to a myriad of reasons; be it sticker shock, promise of less headcount, the idea that you can hire people easier or simply because of a Gartner report that your CTO happened to read on a flight. This causes migrations to the cloud that kinda don’t make sense, they’re borne out of ideology or “not being left behind” and sometimes it fails catastrophically. We would do well not to cargo cult, but reasonably deduce and argue what our objectives truly are.
- mey 4y ago
  I wonder how many companies have been crippled by executives/managers reading Gartner reports. That's probably a business study unto itself.
  - dopylitty 4y ago
    A couple years into my career I came to the realization that working in the tech side of a non-tech business is not necessarily about providing what the business needs. It’s about convincing the business to pay for what you want for your own reasons (resume, prestige, continued employment ) I have been on many teams that could’ve easily been in maintenance mode and not changed anything for years. The business would’ve hummed along stably and profitably. But it’s hard to justify your job in IT if you say your roadmap is to just keep doing what you’re doing. Nevermind the people in between business and IT who really contribute to neither. So we get these pendulum swings and huge projects (move everything to cloud, move everything back, make engineering do ops, make a dedicated ops team, micro segment everything, flat network everything) just so IT management can convince the business they’re providing some value. Gartner is the “independent” third party that allows IT folks and tech vendors to convince the business they are doing the right thing. And yeah I’m sure some of these pendulum swings have come at great cost to the business, even halting it entirely (SAP)
  - semicolon_storm 4y ago
    Some of Gartner’s analysis can be spot on, but god some of it is so bad I can’t help but cringe. Their recent push for low code/no code everywhere and calling this the “final decade of applications” is in the later category. There’s going to be mountain of companies going out of business in 5 years due to following Gartner’s low/no code advice.
    - notabee 4y ago
      Don't forget that the already beleaguered world of government IT also listens to Gartner. But government doesn't really go out of business when that bad advice leads to bad initiatives, it just becomes even more dysfunctional.
machinekob 4y ago
Just put everything in cloud, use closed-in vendor solutions and overpriced eager fees as its typical VC way to just burn money cause "developers cost more" (maybe in California). I was big cloud enjoyer in like 2016-20 but then some hacker news post open my eyes to the truth. They are trying to milk everyone and hook every possible person on some free credits then bump prices and get fat profits and ofc make as hard as possible getting out of the platform. I just don't care and move to smaller providers for VPS and database + cloudflare for dns and pseudo s3 (still in almost free tier).
kortilla 4y ago
Chances are you belong in the vast number of companies that have a very static workload and you should move to a few colos and be done with it.
- snotrockets 4y ago
  otoh: very few workload are static. our world isn’t (circadian rhythm is a thing!) and this drives most of our systems not to be such.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Static on a daily rolling average. You’ll be hemorrhaging money if you think moving to the cloud will save you money because you have a daily trough. The only places I’ve seen it work are: - massive seasonal demand with negligible usage during off-season (think TurboTax if it weren’t part of Intuit) - brand new product development where you don’t even know what you need yet or you are going through exponential growth that you can’t get ahead of. (This stage should only last like 6 months though)
    - snotrockets 4y ago
      You are doing measuring wrong (look at distributions, not a number), and moving to the cloud wrong (rearchitect with elasticity and serverless in mind, don’t just put it on instances). I was hoping those lessons would be a bit more common by now.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        You don’t understand how the vast majority of compute workloads pan out for regular businesses if you think “elasticity” has any relevance at all.
      - ReflectedImage 4y ago
        Well at a company I worked at, on the surface it looked like we only needed to be running compute 9 am - 8 pm. But nowadays, it runs full load 24/7 on the cloud. Turns out the after hours batch jobs are just as demanding. shrugs
kortilla 4y ago
That entire thread is just a dumpster fire of bad analysis. He dismisses everything that doesn’t fit “serverless” as a niche and doesn’t mention cost of maintenance, transition, or lock-in in serverless. It’s just a super lazy take from someone who likes to use serverless because he doesn’t like to maintain things. It’s essentially an argument to live in a hotel because they can do maintenance at scale better than you.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  I think you underestimate Simon’s analysis… don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers And with his maps he’ll have analysed things quite effectively I might disagree with him on the EU but his technology analysis is usually bang on
  - darkwater 4y ago
    IDK the guy but the whole tone of the thread sounds like that he is biased/have some interest. If you go back 4 years in time, everything in 2022 was going to be serverless. Reality check: it didn't happen, the only "fad" that actually materialized for almost everybody is Kubernetes (which actually helps with going back to bare metal).
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers No shit, taking advice from a car salesman on how often to buy cars and what cars to buy is about the dumbest thing you can do. His entire livelihood and career was built on selling this story that you need to pay others to run all of your infrastructure for you. He’s shilling IT illiteracy rather than pushing for more sustainable on-prem solutions.
    - youngtaff 4y ago
      Have you ever used something like Wardley Mapping to do the analysis? Most on-prem solutions I've seen aren't sustainable, massive Capex costs, teams of people that could be better used in other ways just to keep trivial things applications running
dmitriid 4y ago
The absolute vast majority of companies can run from the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet for an indefinitely long time. No cloud necessary.
Veliladon 4y ago
I don't think it's as niche as people want to believe. The monetization models of cloud compute is clearly having compute act as a loss leader. The real revenue is picked up on the borderline egregious egress charges which are, coincidentally I'm sure, the hardest thing to estimate. Every other provider needs to follow this same monetization because then their choices are the top line being an eye-popping figure or making no money.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> simply put their workloads in the cloud and be done with it I've worked all sorts of cloud environments for about ten years now, and with metal servers before that, and I'm not all that convinced that the cloud is saving all that much in terms of engineering effort. Or if it does, I haven't experienced it. Sure, no one gets woken up at 4AM because your server's disks are failing, but instead you get woken up at 4AM because all your cloud native infrastructure is doing $funky_stuff. And yeah, no need to install and maintain servers any more, but now you need to write a whole bunch of code to interface with all the cloud stuff and maintain that. Lots of open positions for k8s engineers "dev-ops" engineers to make all of that work. I run my stuff on Linode VPS's, which is "the cloud" as in "renting servers", but it's not "the cloud" as in all the "cloud native" stuff we have now. My experience is that sometimes the cloud makes things easy, and it makes things harder. On balance, it seems we just swapped one set of problems for another set of problems, and we haven't really gained all that much in the end. I don't think Hey is running a "niche edge case"; it seems fairly standard stuff to me. That Tweet comes off as quite dismissive.
- jdoss 4y ago
  I felt the tweet thread was dismissive as well. Hey is running pretty standard Rails things IIRC and I wouldn't consider them niche. They like to make money and they know they can make more of it if they run on baremetal. I think more companies are going to move back to a more hybrid model of cloud + baremetal in the next 10 years. Especially the ones that need more power, flexibility, and cost savings from their infra. You nailed it on the head. The problems have just moved from one camp to another. We make our life easier because we can talk to an API to get our network, compute, and storage but the complexity in doing so has a pretty high price as well. The current devops trends are mindbogglingly complex compared to most of software that is getting deployed with them.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The tweet thread came off in the completely wrong way to me, and suggested that the person writing it was pretty ignorant about how software engineering actually works. Are you suggesting that everyone should be using [insert dev fad here] for all but a few special cases? Have you considered that sometimes (really, almost all the time) people run code that is more than 2 years old? Have you considered the costs of things like serverless when you have a reasonably constant load? I am a huge fan of cloud as a platform for time-shared server rentals. Cloud for "value added" products like serverless and whatever new database they cook up starts to get really funky and weird, in addition to being extremely expensive.
bayraktar 4y ago
These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. Talk about broad, sweeping statements. Care to substantiate?
pojzon 4y ago
Lift and shift proved itself to not work well. Its not cost efficient for vast majority of businesses with legacy software. To use cloud efficiently you have to build for it. Startups are much more efficient in that regard in comparison to monolithic applications running on premise.
jordanbeiber 4y ago
If you’ve got global consumers of services you build, and or need elastic scalability - sure. Or if you’re a really small company - sure. You should probably rely on SaaS mainly. I would say many companies fall outside of these categories though and could potentially both save money and gain performance staying on-prem. I know my current employer does, and we’re seriously looking at moving back to on-prem/co-lo.
hinkley 4y ago
> think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. My sentiment leans toward host your own for a number of reasons, but it's challenging to make good decisions. Can you trust the person who is telling you that you can do it? Their org chart goes away if they lose this argument, so of course you're going to hear from them how we can do this. If the team you have has been doing a decent job, maybe you should listen to them. If they've been doing a poor job, then you have to ask why they're suddenly going to be able to provide a level of service you haven't been enjoying for years. My company went through one of these fishtails. I think everybody is happier that we ended up in the cloud, even those of us who will only begrudgingly admit it. As I said in another thread, I think the Hype Cycle for The Cloud will at least give some orgs with a dysfunctional IT department an opportunity to clean house and then start over in a couple of years as informed consumers. Or find a new kind of service provider that distances itself from The Cloud salespitch.

billythemaniam 4y ago

I think the cloud can reduce the operations team even at their scale if serverless is used on GCP. Many of the serverless offerings on GCP just get it right. I have never had to think about machine sizes, clusters, etc when using BigQuery. My team and I focus on the SQL. Cloud Run gives you a web or API server without having to really think about machines other than number of cores and memory size. I am currently designing a data pipeline architecture that is 100% serverless to move away from Airflow/Composer. Why? Because my team and I can stay focused on the code and logic of moving data around instead of the operations of managing a managed product. Would this work on AWS or Azure? Theoretically yes, but I personally think their serverless offerings are hard to use and don't make things easier.

flyinglizard 4y ago
Azure Functions is as easy to use as writing an "Hello World" console application. I have a few services running like clockwork for a few years now, very happy with this service overall. The one thing that complicates matters is Microsoft's eagerness to deprecate libraries, frameworks and best practices every now and then.
icedchai 4y ago
The developer experience for AWS serverless offerings, like Lambda, is awful. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole of API gateway configuration, IAM roles, security policies, VPC endpoints, etc. that gives you very little in terms of useful error messages when it's not quite configured right. But, yeah, once you do set it up, the per-request cost is quite cheap. Still, I think if you consider the lost developer productivity dealing with slow deploys and environment/configuration issues, the costs are much, much higher.

shinzui 4y ago

It's worth noting that Basecamp's architecture relies on vertical scaling, which can get very expensive in the cloud.

qeternity 4y ago
How so? Email is a fairly embarrassingly parallel problem.
- shinzui 4y ago
  DHH’s preferred architecture is a rails monolith with a single database behind it that you keep scaling vertically. I believe both Hey and Basecamp are still using that architecture.

jebr224 4y ago

I would enjoy real world (apples to apples) comparison of the cost of cloud vs self hosting. There are many speculations and approximates, but some hard facts would go along way.

api 4y ago
It’s 100% work load dependent. Cloud makes dealing with complexity cheaper in many cases by letting you outsource admin to managed services, and is great if you need elastic scaling. Bare metal on the other hand can be many orders of magnitude cheaper for compute and especially bandwidth. Cloud bandwidth pricing is completely insane, up to 1000X more than bare metal hosting. There is no one size fits all advice. You have to model your work load. Take scale into account too. Cloud often makes far more sense at a small scale than a very large scale since labor costs can amortize. There comes a point at which hiring admins may be cheaper than paying cloud costs.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I wrote one of the big speculations and approximates. In real life, it is very much workload dependent, but the balance skews a lot more in favor of self-hosting (or cheap hosting companies) than IT leaders (used to) think. I think the three best reasons to use the cloud are: (1) If you have a very bursty workload, (2) if you need compliance with specific government regulations that are expensive to certify, or (3) if your app is a hobby project or otherwise fits inside the free tier. A lot of applications fit into one of these categories, and, anecdotally, people running them are very happy with the cloud. Most CRUD apps today do not fit into those categories. I have also seen companies have a lot of success with hybrid cloud deployments, where they run a datacenter for their base load and scale out into the cloud when they need to do more work.
Too 4y ago
It's heavily dependent on your scope and how much you value your time. I could spin up a postgres docker container locally, in shorter time than it took me to write this comment. On the other hand that wouldn't provide readonly replicas, standby-replicas, cross regional, point in time backups where i can just click on a date and the database will restore, access controls connected to my company directory. All that would take months to engineer properly myself and after that continuous monitoring and replacing of disks. Maybe you don't need all this, maybe you do, it's all a part of your workload and effort equation. It's not possible to just take the cost of a VM and multiply with number of hours in a year.

snotrockets 4y ago

Can’t wait for their post in 3 or so years about moving their workloads back to the cloud.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
It could even be reasonable because (gasp!) the cloud might change yet again. But I'm rather positive it won't.
simplotek 4y ago
> Can’t wait for their post in 3 or so years about moving their workloads back to the cloud. What leads you to believe that paying a premium to someone else to use their computers is a solution that fits each and every single case? Even AWS is clear in how their present their offering as something that allows projects to grow and scale quickly while avoiding upfront costs buying and hosting their own hardware.
- snotrockets 4y ago
  You don’t pay the cloud providers (just) for their computing power.
  - tuyenhx 4y ago
    So what do we pay for except computing power? Ease of scale? Ease of development cost? Or other marketing material?
    - andrewguenther 4y ago
      Security, compliance, flexibility...
      - simplotek 4y ago
        > Security, compliance, flexibility... AWS's shared responsibility model is quite clear in stating that end users are ultimately the ones responsible for security and compliance. So your points are moot. "Flexibility" in this case is so vague that it's meaningless. I mean, is there anything more flexible than owning the entire infrastructure and software stack you chose all by yourself?

deleted 4y ago

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nonrandomstring 4y ago

A student of mine did a rather good thesis on de-clouding. In the process she discovered the term "cloud repatriation" a fair bit of literature on the movement to bring control of data and hardware back 'on-prem'. She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. As companies move their operations out to the cloud it's not the disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of skill-sets. Later they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days.

silasdavis 4y ago
Perhaps you could link the thesis?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm definitely encouraging publication in a journal (maybe dealing with industry resilience). Also I want some students to come here and submit things via Show-HN, but they have to want to do that themselves.
  - mstade 4y ago
    Your abstract is very intriguing, I’d love to read the paper! Is there anything beyond commenting we can do to help encourage publishing?

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WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

All of this is nice and sounds rather obvious to many over here. I think the HN's hivemind has already chewed through most of the arguments they are making. What I want to see is what they are going to replace the cloud with, how the numbers compare, and what tradeoffs they have had to make. Preferably a year after they make their transitions. An honest comparison that makes it possible for other companies in a similar situation to clear their doubts (in some cases “clearing doubts” would mean “we're staying in the cloud”; I'd like this kind of honest). Thus I'm staying tuned, with a grain of doubt. After all, it's possible that the transition off cloud will take time and may even fizz out without achieving much. Oh, and I'm wondering what's the cost of moving the data itself off cloud is going to be.

braingenious 4y ago

This is kind of tangential, but back in the early-mid 2000s I remember there being a little utility that allowed you to download individual files from inside of a zip file over HTTP. I want to say that it was made by 37signals but I might be completely mis-remembering the whole thing. Does anybody know what I’m talking about?

jlundberg 4y ago
Not sure what the name of the tool is, but the phenomenom exist and the ZIP format makes it feasible (especially for store only files). Guesss that’s why a JAR or APK is a ZIP file with another name.
- candiodari 4y ago
  Just mount it as a user space file system and use standard zip utilities: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/man1/httpfs2.1.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/man1/httpfs2.1.h...

staunch 4y ago

A good definition of The Cloud is just "servers in a datacenter" so the discussion is best framed as Private Cloud (on-prem or co-located servers) vs Public Cloud (AWS, etc) or some combination. People with expertise in running private clouds and using public cloud services can judge each case pretty easily, by taking into account the organization's technical needs, plans, budget, abilities, etc. And for non-experts, the question is even simpler: use the public clouds if or until it becomes a technical or financial blocker. And in that case, hire an expert. There's really not a lot of room for controversy. It seems most of the arguments come from people without the relevant expertise, who only know how to develop in public clouds, responding defensively. Like people with little programming experience flaming each other over which language is "best". There's no single "best" cloud option, since they're just different tools for different things. Sometimes either way would work, in which case it comes down to personal preference, and sometimes there's a clearly better option for a specific organization's needs. Framed correctly, it's a "boring" question just like most technical questions should be.

worik 4y ago

Computing started in the cloud. Once upon a time computer bureaus sold time on their main frames, and you used a terminal (on a 1200 baud modem) to communicate with it. Computer programmers were all men in ties, and fine looking suits..... History rhymes

seydor 4y ago
but it really exploded when it decentralized

juanse 4y ago

A kind reminder that the cloud is just other people computers

EricE 4y ago
One of my favorite stickers!

rglover 4y ago

Having just spent the better part of the last year building a service that deploys to multiple cloud providers, this choice makes sense (or at the very least, I can understand the root why). Beyond cost concerns, there's a staggering amount of complexity and low-quality UX/DX around this stuff that I don't see changing or improving any time soon (if ever). Once I got into the thick of it, I actually started to have the thought "what would it look like to just run co-located boxes like the old days or do this on prem?" The answer was of course "waaaay simpler." While I don't think we'll see an industry-wide shift back in this direction, I do see it happening on a non-trivial scale. Especially as things like economic instability and censorship wax and wane and wax in the coming decades.

jeffbee 4y ago

A million dollar per year RDS bill buys you, list price, a multi-AZ deployment with 1024 state-of-the-art CPUs and 5TiB of memory per replica, which strikes me as much more than a mere tens of thousands of email accounts would ever need.

dijit 4y ago
State-of-the-art CPUs? I am suspicious of that as AWS has a lot of old as hell CPUs floating around and in service. Either way: You're not counting storage costs which are around 70% of the costs in my deployments.
- qeternity 4y ago
  AWS does not use SOTA anything due to their rigorous testing. I’m not criticizing this…it would be dumb for them to run bleeding edge anything.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    The price I quoted is for the m6i RDS instances which use the very latest Xeon that Intel has ever marketed. You are free to speculate as to whether the Graviton is more SOTA than Ice Lake Xeon, but I know which one I will choose for straight line performance.
    - qeternity 4y ago
      It’s absolutely not the latest Xeon…but also Amazon launched m6i in Aug 2021 and Ice Lake was released in 2019. The latest Xeons are Rocket Lake based.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Weird take since Rocket Lake is identical microarchitecturally to Ice Lake. The difference is scale: there are no 2S RKL, and the biggest part has only 8 cores. It's a workstation/small business server part.

softwaredoug 4y ago

My naive sense of things is compared to 10 years ago, now that we have k8s and can more easily deploy what we want in arbitrary environments, the cloud proposition becomes more about on-demand, elastic compute, and less about specific services. But that also because of k8s, we can also just have static set of compute and solve 80% of the problem with whatever kind of service we need.

iuvcaw 4y ago

The HN community 1) likes building and hacking, and 2) has nostalgia for old technology. This makes them feel a lot of affinity toward "doing things themselves" -- server infrastructure, running desktop linux, avoiding dependencies in their code. The reality, though, is that the steady march of progress encourages us to outsource what we can to people who are better at the thing that is auxiliary to what we do. I don't grow food because I'm bad at growing. I don't repair my car because I'm bad at auto repair. I do build software, and my company builds a very specific type of software to solve very specific problems. I'm happy to focus on that, because that's how we make money. Other people are much better at building infrastructure than I am, and so I let them do it for me. If there comes a time when the cloud offerings are either worse than what I can build or too expensive, then I trust someone else will come along and fill the gap in the market before it becomes worthwhile for me to do it.

lr4444lr 4y ago
You're understating the case: you don't grow food even if you're good at growing, because your value add as a niche software dev probably brings you much greater remuneration and benefit to your customers than if you were a farmer.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
This is true about HN, and a very healthy perspective on cloud. It is very much the minority opinion that using the cloud is like using a repair shop for a car. The vast majority of people think they are saving money by doing it for one reason or another, rather than effectively outsourcing dev competency. Unfortunately, the competency you are outsourcing is rare and getting rarer, meaning that infrastructure products are getting very expensive (and profitable).
qeternity 4y ago
> I don't grow food because I'm bad at growing. I don't repair my car because I'm bad at auto repair. These analogies are really bad. It’s not as if this is binary. Nobody is suggesting you fab your own chips or build your own data centers. But you do cook (presumably) most of your own food, and you drive your own car. You capture most of the benefit of economies of scale and specialization, and then you do the last 5%. This is what people are talking about. AWS is like eating out for every meal or taking an Uber everywhere. Sure it’s convenient, and has its time and place, but it’s probably not the best default option.

twarge 4y ago

Can most offices get a sufficiently fast link to properly utilize servers on premises?

WJW 4y ago
Confusingly, on-premise does not always mean "in the same building". Oftentimes it also refers to dedicated servers in a shared datacenter (aka colocation), or a separate datacenter that only serves a single company if that company is large enough.
nske 4y ago
- Most businesses don't provide Internet Services to customers, so they wouldn't need fast (internet) links and servers for this - However their own employees are typically consumers of services, that can be hosted either on the cloud, or on premises (which turns the argument on its head) - Even for businesses that do offer services to customers over the internet, the alternative to the cloud doesn't have to be servers on their premises for this. They can be bare metal servers, either collocated or leased on datacenters. This is just fine when their services don't anticipate explosive growth. It doesn't even mean they have to sacrifice fancy "infastructure-as-code" tooling, though it does mean that they have to think about scaling in more terms than just cost.
- EricE 4y ago
  Or you can just architect your application as a hybrid that can surge into the cloud as needed. Lots of ways to go about it rather than just chucking everything to the cloud and never thinking about it again.

georgebarnett 4y ago

One under discussed issue I’ve noticed is how the size of The compute sold to the end user does not increase at the rate the underlying hardware improves at. It’s reasonable to presume there’s now an entire generation of developers who simply don’t know what’s possible in state of the art hardware.

seydor 4y ago
or hardware at all. everything runs on VMs

zrail 4y ago

Cloud computing is a machine that turns capex into opex with a hefty markup. Want to repatriate? Get ready to sell your investors on the capital sink.

Silhouette 4y ago
This always seems an odd argument for an industry where for most of the last 20 years early money from optimistic VCs has almost been falling from trees. Compensation for technical people has been rocketing even in businesses that haven't actually built any net-value-generating product after several years. Clearly the investors with serious money have no problem with offering huge amounts of it in the hopes of funding the next potential moonshot among the 99 other failures. Would the kind of capex necessary to buy and manage enough infrastructure for most of these businesses to find their market and start scaling rapidly even move the needle at this point?

cs702 4y ago

In the early days of cloud providers, their services were both easy-to-use and cost-effective for many growing companies. Now, cloud providers offer a giant hairball of specialized services, built on top of other specialized services, built on top of yet other specialized services... such that no single person can comprehend all of them, let alone manage them cost-effectively. Moreover, as all these intertwined services become deeply entrenched in IT infrastructure, migrating away from them becomes incredibly disruptive. The financial incentives of cloud providers are not aligned with those of customers. The more a customer is sucked and trapped inside those giant hairballs, the better for the cloud providers. To paraphrase the Dark Knight, cloud providers may have been the heroes at first, but they have lived long enough to become the villains.

brap 4y ago
This is why I like DigitalOcean. They have like 4 products, spend 5 minutes on their site and you know exactly which ones you need.

albertgao 4y ago

Have the similar thought before: https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761?s=46&t=iCSm5LZqjSFbPTlendSAgQ https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761?s=4...

nathants 4y ago

unless you want to grow an operationally excellent and well staffed org, control plane should probably be public cloud. cost plane, whether it be heavy on bytes at rest, bytes in flight, or compute, could possibly be private cloud. scale to zero is something not possible without public cloud. it opens interesting doors like services priced cost plus. what if zero usage had zero cost? what is all usage was profitable? from the perspective of an individual customer and assuming light egress, lambda, ec2 spot, and s3 are shockingly affordable. heavy egress is where you maybe do something else with the cost plane. that could be private cloud, or cloudflare et al.

albertgao 4y ago

Similar idea: https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761 https://twitter.com/albertgao/status/1582402385569525761

alfor 4y ago

Servers are incredibly powerful today. You don’t need much ’bare metal’ to serve a lot of html. One big box can get you quite far. When it’s not enough: put the DB on another big box. Not enough. Put a caching/proxy server first. You can use Cloudflare or others to offload even more static/caching stuff outside. Still way simpler than to understand why AWS billed you something.

michellerebe4 4y ago

kundejenny 4y ago

KronisLV 4y ago

Due to being kind of on the poor side, using AWS, Azure or GCP for personal projects isn't entirely viable for me. I still do utilize some VPS vendors for when I need a decent uptime, but most of the time it's just a GNU/Linux box that I have SSH access to and I configure everything else myself. Most other things, I run in my homelab, which is just a few old computers repurposed to act as servers for whatever I might need (especially for storing larger amounts of data, e.g. backups), including things like acting as CI/CD nodes, or test environments etc. I still write "cloud native" software (for example, 12 Factor Apps) because those make the portability of everything pretty well, as well as use something like Docker and some lightweight orchestration on top of it (like Docker Swarm or Hashicorp Nomad) because it's like having the ability to make configuration for what you need (ports, storage, memory/CPU limits, scheduling, restart policies etc.) rather easily and also version it, more easily than Ansible lets me (which I still use for configuration of the server nodes themselves). Basically like multi-node systemd, once could say. I actually wrote about some of this a year back: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/how-i-organize-my-docker-deployments-in-2021 https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/how-i-organize-my-docker-de... Though since I've also moved over to using Apache as my ingress, for a few reasons: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-and-why-to-use-apache-httpd-in-2022 https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-and-why-to-use-apache-... Either way, it's nice that we still have the ability to base our workloads on open source solutions and learn about all of this stuff on consumer hardware (though certain configurations might be badly supported on choice OSes, like some BSD versions with driver support). A few days ago I actually published a blog series on making a file and metadata storage solution that's based on open source technologies, which easily handled millions of documents: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/1-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-millions-of-documents-the-data https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/1-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-m...

michellerebe4 4y ago