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The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1

The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost. Yet AWS keeps growing and the people running these companies must be unable to do basic math. My account just crossed 11 years, and I think the whole cloud vs on-prem conversation is probably one of the most least productive conversations on HN. If there was so much waste out there you would think someone would figure out how to just siphon all that waste directly into their pockets instead of Jeff's; and maybe they have, I don't know, but the posts are always the same, handwaving about how the mark ups are insane the engineers at these companies aren't able to balance a checkbook.

kkielhofner 3y ago
Inertia, group think, marketing, FUD, and "no one ever got fired for buying X" is INCREDIBLY powerful. At this point even the not-infrequent public cloud outages are essentially shrugged off with "Eh, we use $CLOUD, that's what everyone uses. What are you going to do?" The ops team can actually say "It's Amazon, not our problem." while they sit around powerless to do anything about it. Yes there is the "survive anything AWS related" geo-distributed multi-region approach that you pretty rarely even see because it itself requires an army of AWS experts and drastically increased cost to actually implement and operate while not shooting yourself in the foot left and right - actually decreasing reliability. Not to mention the uber-unicorn "multi cloud" which at least I've never seen or actually heard of in practice. These don't usually survive even an initial cost review.
betaby 3y ago
> there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost and some of them just did. Both know names and small shops. Big names like cloud-flare R2 or Backblaze b2.

kkielhofner 3y ago

Inertia, group think, marketing, FUD, and "no one ever got fired for buying X" is INCREDIBLY powerful. At this point even the not-infrequent public cloud outages are essentially shrugged off with "Eh, we use $CLOUD, that's what everyone uses. What are you going to do?" The ops team can actually say "It's Amazon, not our problem." while they sit around powerless to do anything about it. Yes there is the "survive anything AWS related" geo-distributed multi-region approach that you pretty rarely even see because it itself requires an army of AWS experts and drastically increased cost to actually implement and operate while not shooting yourself in the foot left and right - actually decreasing reliability. Not to mention the uber-unicorn "multi cloud" which at least I've never seen or actually heard of in practice. These don't usually survive even an initial cost review.

betaby 3y ago

> there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost and some of them just did. Both know names and small shops. Big names like cloud-flare R2 or Backblaze b2.