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In general when people mention "cost" as an issue for cloud, they're narrowly comparing what a CPU core or GB of RAM or disk costs on paper between cloud and da

In general when people mention "cost" as an issue for cloud, they're narrowly comparing what a CPU core or GB of RAM or disk costs on paper between cloud and datacenter/onprem. This completely misses the business case for cloud, and is why these sorts of analyses don't convince that many business folk, and why cloud use continues to grow fast. The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you, at commodity prices, but you still have complete, direct control over "your" resources and ability to easily automate everything. This tends to save much more money than any % of your CPU, memory, and disk budget could possibly achieve. It's sort of like saying, instead of taking cars from your corporate fleet to a repair shop when they break, repair them yourself! Just hire some mechanics, build or rent a garage and equipment, and voila! And also, why are you buying electricity from the electric company anyway? Just build a generator next to your office building! Maybe make it nuclear just like some of the big electric companies! For many companies, the "just host it in a datacenter" argument is no less silly than these scenarios.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rhaway84773 3y ago
The real business case for the cloud is it replaces capex with opex. Which is great if you have limited capital (bootstrapping, new startup, etc), or are the CEO of a large company that wants to show better cash flow to earn a larger bonus. In reality, the idea that the cloud somehow means you can outsource your infrastructure team rarely works out in practice. At best you’ll get much more expensive developers having to spend time on infrastructure which might look like a couple of fewer salaries to pay, but you’re likely now paying for it through dev time anyways.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  The REAL business case is cargo culting.
ericyan 3y ago
> The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you. Many business people believe that moving to cloud can reduce the headcount needed for managing the infra, but that is usually not what's happening. You will still need more or less the same amount of people to patch the OS and configure the networking, but with a slightly different skill set -- instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. There are also third-party companies that offers this service. Redundant power and air conditioning are the responsibility of the colocation provider and those are covered by the SLA. Those data centres do have generators on-site. That said, configuring you top-of-rack switch is usually not covered by the co-location contract. This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.
- antonvs 3y ago
  If you're treating cloud as a sort of 1:1 replacement of hardware infrastructure, then what you're saying makes sense. But we don't ever "patch the OS." Our cloud provider does that for us. Upgrades and patching are automatic within the maintenance window. We deploy containers, the OS is just a platform layer that the cloud provider manages. As for needing "more or less the same amount of people", that simply isn't true IME. I've seen startups with whole teams devoted to running systems in a datacenter, whereas cloud-based startups will often have one or two guys, possibly even part-time, dealing with their cloud requirements. At larger companies, it can be harder to make this comparison, since you'll typically have a mixture of cloud and onprem. But if you look at teams with products deployed in the cloud, they'll often have much more frequent deployment, with better automation, and much less dependence on the always overcommitted infrastructure team(s). > Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. That's not very compatible with infrastructure as code. You're essentially saying "keep doing things the old inefficient way, it's not really that bad." There are all sorts of failure scenarios that a managed cloud system can cover from completely automatically within minutes, that would require frantic calls to remote hands in the old world. And even when recovery isn't automatic, it may still require nothing more than some pointing and clicking to recover. > instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. > This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs. These aren't comparable at all. Unless a company has some sort of very special networking requirements, they can set up VPCs with some pointing and clicking in the cloud provider's web UI. This is a far cry from the level of knowledge required to manage networks at the hardware level.
adamckay 3y ago
> It's sort of like saying, instead of taking cars from your corporate fleet to a repair shop when they break, repair them yourself! Just hire some mechanics, build or rent a garage and equipment, and voila! And also, why are you buying electricity from the electric company anyway? Just build a generator next to your office building! Maybe make it nuclear just like some of the big electric companies! I think this is an unfair analogy. It would be more akin to saying instead of hiring Ubers and taxi's and spending several tens of thousands a quarter, buy a couple of cars for the company. But instead of needing a single person to onboard people onto the company's taxi account and paying the invoice each month, you instead need someone to buy the cars, ensure they're taxed and certified, create an internal hiring system, etc. For some companies it does make financial sense to have your own fleet of cars, in others it makes more sense to get Ubers. It's exactly the same as cloud vs not-cloud. If you're not taking advantage of the cloud (e.g. serverless technologies) why pay that premium when a small number of dedicated machines and a simpler architecture/stack will do the job better and cheaper? They're only as difficult to maintain as complex cloud environments.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Do the math and think again. Infra engineers needed to run your "managed" cloud stack cost much more than generic sysadmins for commodity open-source on-prem solutions.
- antonvs 3y ago
  One problem is those cheap, generic sysadmins usually can't deliver a fully-automated end-to-end SDLC with IaC and automated deployment out of source control. And asking devs to do that without depending on managed services is slow and expensive.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rhaway84773 3y ago

The real business case for the cloud is it replaces capex with opex. Which is great if you have limited capital (bootstrapping, new startup, etc), or are the CEO of a large company that wants to show better cash flow to earn a larger bonus. In reality, the idea that the cloud somehow means you can outsource your infrastructure team rarely works out in practice. At best you’ll get much more expensive developers having to spend time on infrastructure which might look like a couple of fewer salaries to pay, but you’re likely now paying for it through dev time anyways.

datavirtue 3y ago
The REAL business case is cargo culting.

ericyan 3y ago

> The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you. Many business people believe that moving to cloud can reduce the headcount needed for managing the infra, but that is usually not what's happening. You will still need more or less the same amount of people to patch the OS and configure the networking, but with a slightly different skill set -- instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. There are also third-party companies that offers this service. Redundant power and air conditioning are the responsibility of the colocation provider and those are covered by the SLA. Those data centres do have generators on-site. That said, configuring you top-of-rack switch is usually not covered by the co-location contract. This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.

antonvs 3y ago
If you're treating cloud as a sort of 1:1 replacement of hardware infrastructure, then what you're saying makes sense. But we don't ever "patch the OS." Our cloud provider does that for us. Upgrades and patching are automatic within the maintenance window. We deploy containers, the OS is just a platform layer that the cloud provider manages. As for needing "more or less the same amount of people", that simply isn't true IME. I've seen startups with whole teams devoted to running systems in a datacenter, whereas cloud-based startups will often have one or two guys, possibly even part-time, dealing with their cloud requirements. At larger companies, it can be harder to make this comparison, since you'll typically have a mixture of cloud and onprem. But if you look at teams with products deployed in the cloud, they'll often have much more frequent deployment, with better automation, and much less dependence on the always overcommitted infrastructure team(s). > Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. That's not very compatible with infrastructure as code. You're essentially saying "keep doing things the old inefficient way, it's not really that bad." There are all sorts of failure scenarios that a managed cloud system can cover from completely automatically within minutes, that would require frantic calls to remote hands in the old world. And even when recovery isn't automatic, it may still require nothing more than some pointing and clicking to recover. > instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. > This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs. These aren't comparable at all. Unless a company has some sort of very special networking requirements, they can set up VPCs with some pointing and clicking in the cloud provider's web UI. This is a far cry from the level of knowledge required to manage networks at the hardware level.

adamckay 3y ago

> It's sort of like saying, instead of taking cars from your corporate fleet to a repair shop when they break, repair them yourself! Just hire some mechanics, build or rent a garage and equipment, and voila! And also, why are you buying electricity from the electric company anyway? Just build a generator next to your office building! Maybe make it nuclear just like some of the big electric companies! I think this is an unfair analogy. It would be more akin to saying instead of hiring Ubers and taxi's and spending several tens of thousands a quarter, buy a couple of cars for the company. But instead of needing a single person to onboard people onto the company's taxi account and paying the invoice each month, you instead need someone to buy the cars, ensure they're taxed and certified, create an internal hiring system, etc. For some companies it does make financial sense to have your own fleet of cars, in others it makes more sense to get Ubers. It's exactly the same as cloud vs not-cloud. If you're not taking advantage of the cloud (e.g. serverless technologies) why pay that premium when a small number of dedicated machines and a simpler architecture/stack will do the job better and cheaper? They're only as difficult to maintain as complex cloud environments.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Do the math and think again. Infra engineers needed to run your "managed" cloud stack cost much more than generic sysadmins for commodity open-source on-prem solutions.

antonvs 3y ago
One problem is those cheap, generic sysadmins usually can't deliver a fully-automated end-to-end SDLC with IaC and automated deployment out of source control. And asking devs to do that without depending on managed services is slow and expensive.