3 ms·

Of course it saves money. The main selling line of the cloud is you're too dumb to administer, so just trust them and throw money at them. If you're not too du

Of course it saves money. The main selling line of the cloud is you're too dumb to administer, so just trust them and throw money at them. If you're not too dumb to administer, then running your own hardware is invariably cheaper. What's surprising is that so many otherwise technical people believe the cloud BS without really thinking things through. Anyone who can do basic maths can see that aside from trivial uses renting is always going to cost more in the long run.

aaronharnly 3y ago
I don’t think that’s the main selling point of cloud? The main selling points are that (1) you can scale capacity up and down, so you aren’t purchasing, provisioning, and operating hardware for peak demand (2) with infra-as-code tooling, software teams can configure and deploy significant infrastructural capabilities without scaling specialized operations roles. Dumbness does not play into it.
- sgarland 3y ago
  IME, much of the “need to easily scale” is fixed by understanding your bottlenecks, being able to understand the metrics being captured, and how to address them. You would be shocked (or not) at how few people raised on cloud can explain what IOPS are, or what IOWAIT is, let alone linking the two up. Re: IaC, you definitely should understand what it is you’re instantiating (and why), no matter how you’re doing it. AWS Community TF Modules are all well and good until something breaks, and you realize you don’t really understand what’s going on.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > how few people raised on cloud can explain what IOPS are I think you would be shocked at how few people raised in a fully on-prem world can adequately explain even that simple concept and its first-order implications.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      Thanks, I hate it.
    - garciasn 3y ago
      We did an analysis for a local data center leader on their SAN IOPS before we would sign on and they asked if they could have the results because they'd never done it. I was utterly shocked. Not only because they hadn't done it but that NO ONE ELSE had ever asked and/or done it either. Literal insanity.
- vidarh 3y ago
  My experience in doing devops on contract for years, though, is that what instead happens is that a bunch of different teams scale things up beyond what they need, don't take things down again, and nobody understands which servers are actually needed or why they're being billed what. There's good money to be made in just helping companies figuring out their cloud billing. I also don't for a second agree that software teams can deploy significant capabilities without specialised ops roles - if anything my consulting showed me the clients I had that deployed to clouds needed far more help on average. It may be a selling point, but it's a fiction. And almost every single colo-provider and managed hosting provider these days also provides cloud services, so you can lease servers or racks, and get cloud instances often in the same data centre tied into your network if you suddenly need to handle a spike. As a result, you can typically load your managed servers far higher today than you used to be able to.
thelastparadise 3y ago
Right, and we're talking computers here. Sure, they can easily be set up in a complex, failure-prone way. But if we keep it simple and stick to known fundamentals, they can run almost entirely passive. Think: a basic debian stable server with SFTP vs. a cluster of some complex storage protocol. The basic debian SFTP server can run for years and years with minimal intervention. Cloud has become a cargo cult.
- johnklos 3y ago
  Indeed. Too often I hear about how people need "features" without even knowing what they think they need them for. It's like the drug companies selling drugs on TV - suddenly people are asking their doctors if they need some random drug that has absolutely nothing to do with anything wrong with them. Your Debian SFTP server example is apt. Many times I've asked people why they think they need all sorts of complicated things when everything they need could be run off of a Raspberry Pi. I've even set up Raspberry Pis to show people that they literally don't need more than that.
vidarh 3y ago
A whole lot of people want to believe because hardware is a big unknown they don't understand that often has complicated requisition paths for them. It's tempting to buy all the arguments when it means you can just get more resources with an API instead of having to justify the need for them.

aaronharnly 3y ago

I don’t think that’s the main selling point of cloud? The main selling points are that (1) you can scale capacity up and down, so you aren’t purchasing, provisioning, and operating hardware for peak demand (2) with infra-as-code tooling, software teams can configure and deploy significant infrastructural capabilities without scaling specialized operations roles. Dumbness does not play into it.

sgarland 3y ago
IME, much of the “need to easily scale” is fixed by understanding your bottlenecks, being able to understand the metrics being captured, and how to address them. You would be shocked (or not) at how few people raised on cloud can explain what IOPS are, or what IOWAIT is, let alone linking the two up. Re: IaC, you definitely should understand what it is you’re instantiating (and why), no matter how you’re doing it. AWS Community TF Modules are all well and good until something breaks, and you realize you don’t really understand what’s going on.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  > how few people raised on cloud can explain what IOPS are I think you would be shocked at how few people raised in a fully on-prem world can adequately explain even that simple concept and its first-order implications.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    Thanks, I hate it.
  - garciasn 3y ago
    We did an analysis for a local data center leader on their SAN IOPS before we would sign on and they asked if they could have the results because they'd never done it. I was utterly shocked. Not only because they hadn't done it but that NO ONE ELSE had ever asked and/or done it either. Literal insanity.
vidarh 3y ago
My experience in doing devops on contract for years, though, is that what instead happens is that a bunch of different teams scale things up beyond what they need, don't take things down again, and nobody understands which servers are actually needed or why they're being billed what. There's good money to be made in just helping companies figuring out their cloud billing. I also don't for a second agree that software teams can deploy significant capabilities without specialised ops roles - if anything my consulting showed me the clients I had that deployed to clouds needed far more help on average. It may be a selling point, but it's a fiction. And almost every single colo-provider and managed hosting provider these days also provides cloud services, so you can lease servers or racks, and get cloud instances often in the same data centre tied into your network if you suddenly need to handle a spike. As a result, you can typically load your managed servers far higher today than you used to be able to.

thelastparadise 3y ago

Right, and we're talking computers here. Sure, they can easily be set up in a complex, failure-prone way. But if we keep it simple and stick to known fundamentals, they can run almost entirely passive. Think: a basic debian stable server with SFTP vs. a cluster of some complex storage protocol. The basic debian SFTP server can run for years and years with minimal intervention. Cloud has become a cargo cult.

johnklos 3y ago
Indeed. Too often I hear about how people need "features" without even knowing what they think they need them for. It's like the drug companies selling drugs on TV - suddenly people are asking their doctors if they need some random drug that has absolutely nothing to do with anything wrong with them. Your Debian SFTP server example is apt. Many times I've asked people why they think they need all sorts of complicated things when everything they need could be run off of a Raspberry Pi. I've even set up Raspberry Pis to show people that they literally don't need more than that.

vidarh 3y ago

A whole lot of people want to believe because hardware is a big unknown they don't understand that often has complicated requisition paths for them. It's tempting to buy all the arguments when it means you can just get more resources with an API instead of having to justify the need for them.