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The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost eff

The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost effective than the Cloud. Cloud is more flexible and as a result you pay a premium, however, the cost differences are not as large as claimed in this article

codethief 4y ago
I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.
- sshine 4y ago
  OPEX vs. APEX is an interesting aspect. It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it. I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.
  - codethief 4y ago
    > I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. …unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform. They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too. Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this: - On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)

codethief 4y ago

I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.

sshine 4y ago
OPEX vs. APEX is an interesting aspect. It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it. I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.
- codethief 4y ago
  > I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. …unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform. They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too. Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this: - On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)