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At some point people will rediscover that "buying" whole sets of equipment through a lease financing company on a lease-to-own plan with $1 end payment, and col

At some point people will rediscover that "buying" whole sets of equipment through a lease financing company on a lease-to-own plan with $1 end payment, and colocating it the traditional way can often be significantly cheaper than paying endless "cloud" costs. naysayers will say, but the cloud allows you abstract away your salary costs of engineers! look at all the people you aren't hiring! I say: If your needs are sufficiently complex you already have a number of well paid six figure salary people on staff to admin your cloud-based software architecture/setup... Hire people who know how to build infrastructure down to the bare metal.

marricks 4y ago
It's funny that that is exactly how disruption works. Use tons of VC money to flood a market with a cheaper product, become dominant, then jack up prices hoping people forgot the alternatives. It doesn't have to be jacking up prices for exploitation either, just sometimes the costs were always there dictating the price and, eventually, you have to foot the bill for those costs.
manv1 4y ago
I've configured Cisco routers, F5s, LOMs, PDCs, NAS boxes, built servers from parts. And I'd never do it again. That shit has literally no value, and it's quite difficult to configure, manage, and maintain. And no matter how good your process, you (or your team member) inevitably will forget to go into the BIOS and turn off power saving...or forget to turn off (or on) proxy arp. Or you'll reboot a box and it won't come back. All costs can be negotiated with up-front commitments. We are small, but we pay .01/GB for egress bandwidth. And we got that price from akamai, fastly, and AWS by asking. I don't remember how much real colo places charge anymore, but it was a whole lot more than that. Enterprise SSDs, redundant hardware, etc cost money. Does your startup qualify for a lease? And really, why spend money on something that has no value to your business? Does having 5 data centers add any real value or competitive advantage? Does having that F5 expert on staff make your end-users happier? If you answer yes, then go for it. But really, it's a total waste of time and money. You might as well make your own pencils and paper for the amount of value it delivers.
- LilBytes 4y ago
  Same here. At massive scale, sure, it might make sense to run your own infrastructure and data centres. Some may even run their own private cloud and get the benefits we see from the public cloud today from their own IT depts. The vast majority of us however had nothing in common with the above. Like you we ran the hardware, and to the business, we were never more than a cost centre and anything pitched to the broader business to "improve" outcomes for the development teams were seen as a cost without benefit. I find a lot of people who are proponents for getting rid of the cloud never had to manage their own infrastructure, and have very rose tinted glasses for a reality that never existed for most.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    I am more the other way. Even the big clouds are too “serverful” for me, and for very small things a modern PaaS is much easier to deal with.
    - LilBytes 4y ago
      Admittedly I've not worked in many environments that could ever be described as being anything less than 'enterprise', and within orders of magnitude larger than medium/large businesses. If you had a niche market and only needed a small footprint. I can see a handful of VPS' or similar being suitable. But once you get to the 200+ people mark, it gets messy. And gets much worse at 2,000 head. And worse yet at 20,000.
- bauruine 4y ago
  I do 2.9 PB a month for less than 1000$. And this is for rented servers so even includes the hardware. That would be more than 30k$ at your rate. Not going to argue about the rest but the cloud is charging horrendous rates for egress even with negotiated discounts.
- noogle 4y ago
  False dichotomy. The alternative to AWS is not building your own data center. It's renting bare-metal servers from Hetzner/DigitalOcean. Zero hardware headaches with x5-10 lower cost.
pwh 4y ago
Agree. I had to calculate the cost of running and upgrading an existing HPC infrastructure that was approaching it's end of life vs cloud. In house HPC beat cloud cost in almost all scenarios.
bufferoverflow 4y ago
This may be an overkill. But I would argue most projects don't even need a cloud. Just go to Server Hunter, find a server up to your specs, and save 90-95% of your cloud costs. These days you can scale vertically or horizontally for a long time without moving to a cloud.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
styren 4y ago
There's an alternative path where cloud companies actually start to compete on price. Right now you will pay gigantic premiums on your AWS infrastructure just by virtue of being in their ecosystem. Personally, I see Kubernetes having huge potential to drive down costs. The ecosystem is still young but it's still possible to run such a wide range of services and tools on top of it, and it can easily be run on-prem or using managed providers. I personally am part of a team building a much cheaper k8s service as I think costs have grown out of proportion and k8s offers the first real good shot at challenging AWS on cloud & costs.

marricks 4y ago

It's funny that that is exactly how disruption works. Use tons of VC money to flood a market with a cheaper product, become dominant, then jack up prices hoping people forgot the alternatives. It doesn't have to be jacking up prices for exploitation either, just sometimes the costs were always there dictating the price and, eventually, you have to foot the bill for those costs.

manv1 4y ago

I've configured Cisco routers, F5s, LOMs, PDCs, NAS boxes, built servers from parts. And I'd never do it again. That shit has literally no value, and it's quite difficult to configure, manage, and maintain. And no matter how good your process, you (or your team member) inevitably will forget to go into the BIOS and turn off power saving...or forget to turn off (or on) proxy arp. Or you'll reboot a box and it won't come back. All costs can be negotiated with up-front commitments. We are small, but we pay .01/GB for egress bandwidth. And we got that price from akamai, fastly, and AWS by asking. I don't remember how much real colo places charge anymore, but it was a whole lot more than that. Enterprise SSDs, redundant hardware, etc cost money. Does your startup qualify for a lease? And really, why spend money on something that has no value to your business? Does having 5 data centers add any real value or competitive advantage? Does having that F5 expert on staff make your end-users happier? If you answer yes, then go for it. But really, it's a total waste of time and money. You might as well make your own pencils and paper for the amount of value it delivers.

LilBytes 4y ago
Same here. At massive scale, sure, it might make sense to run your own infrastructure and data centres. Some may even run their own private cloud and get the benefits we see from the public cloud today from their own IT depts. The vast majority of us however had nothing in common with the above. Like you we ran the hardware, and to the business, we were never more than a cost centre and anything pitched to the broader business to "improve" outcomes for the development teams were seen as a cost without benefit. I find a lot of people who are proponents for getting rid of the cloud never had to manage their own infrastructure, and have very rose tinted glasses for a reality that never existed for most.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I am more the other way. Even the big clouds are too “serverful” for me, and for very small things a modern PaaS is much easier to deal with.
  - LilBytes 4y ago
    Admittedly I've not worked in many environments that could ever be described as being anything less than 'enterprise', and within orders of magnitude larger than medium/large businesses. If you had a niche market and only needed a small footprint. I can see a handful of VPS' or similar being suitable. But once you get to the 200+ people mark, it gets messy. And gets much worse at 2,000 head. And worse yet at 20,000.
bauruine 4y ago
I do 2.9 PB a month for less than 1000$. And this is for rented servers so even includes the hardware. That would be more than 30k$ at your rate. Not going to argue about the rest but the cloud is charging horrendous rates for egress even with negotiated discounts.
noogle 4y ago
False dichotomy. The alternative to AWS is not building your own data center. It's renting bare-metal servers from Hetzner/DigitalOcean. Zero hardware headaches with x5-10 lower cost.

pwh 4y ago

Agree. I had to calculate the cost of running and upgrading an existing HPC infrastructure that was approaching it's end of life vs cloud. In house HPC beat cloud cost in almost all scenarios.

bufferoverflow 4y ago

This may be an overkill. But I would argue most projects don't even need a cloud. Just go to Server Hunter, find a server up to your specs, and save 90-95% of your cloud costs. These days you can scale vertically or horizontally for a long time without moving to a cloud.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

styren 4y ago

There's an alternative path where cloud companies actually start to compete on price. Right now you will pay gigantic premiums on your AWS infrastructure just by virtue of being in their ecosystem. Personally, I see Kubernetes having huge potential to drive down costs. The ecosystem is still young but it's still possible to run such a wide range of services and tools on top of it, and it can easily be run on-prem or using managed providers. I personally am part of a team building a much cheaper k8s service as I think costs have grown out of proportion and k8s offers the first real good shot at challenging AWS on cloud & costs.