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When I switched from colo and managed datacenter services to AWS in its early days, I saved a ton of money. But all of that hardware was much more expensive bac

When I switched from colo and managed datacenter services to AWS in its early days, I saved a ton of money. But all of that hardware was much more expensive back then, and the quality of OSS products wasn't quite as good, and all kinds of other temporal realities were at play. Now, it's flipped. Hardware is pretty cheap. There are high quality OSS products that have easy-to-manage, native HA capabilities. It's no longer impractical to operate a production-ready deployment for a few hundred dollars. I guess the early cloud folks saw this coming, and now they're reaping the rewards.

briffle 3y ago
we are still way cheaper than before at a previous company. No need to worry about maintaining/monitoring HVAC (plus emergency AC systems) generators, security systems, water intrusion alarms, fire suppression, backhaul links.. Secondary site for DR that has duplicates of everything else. Firewalls that can handle the actual IPSec traffic on those backhaul links. (large Junipers are not cheap) Crazy lead times on new systems (months?!), and needing to size everything to fit our peak load. (we have some machines that add 12x more CPU to the database servers, run their reports in an hour, then remove all those extra CPU's now.)
- jdoss 3y ago
  It sounds like your workloads need that kind of flexibility and using a cloud provider makes total sense. My point is a lot of deployments most likely don't have those requirements (and never will) and there are way more cost effective means run them.
jdoss 3y ago
For sure. I was at a company in the mid 2000s and we had 50+ racks of servers and managing those back in the day was a very big lift. If we had the tooling we do now back then, we could have done it with a fraction of the cost. When I told some of my old coworkers I was going to get my own rack two years ago, there were some comments that I am a glutton for pain and suffering. Overall, it's been a great experience and cost savings on my end. I couldn't afford to run my workloads on any cloud provider. I also understand that I have a skill set that enables me to take advantage of running my own hardware, but with the advancements in tooling and cheaper hardware costs I believe the folks that don't have these skills have a better chance of doing the same. I am hopeful that datacenter providers will shift their business models in the future to enable easier access to getting space, power and bandwidth. That would help enable smaller teams to run their own hardware. The network/bandwidth part has gotten better. Almost all of the major datacenter providers offer some sort of software defined network service so you can get cheaper bandwidth and IP space than from the cloud providers. It is still more expensive in the long run than getting a bandwidth provider yourself. IPv4 space is still expensive but you can lease blocks pretty easily too.
lijok 3y ago
> Now, it's flipped. Hardware is pretty cheap. There are high quality OSS products that have easy-to-manage, native HA capabilities. It's no longer impractical to operate a production-ready deployment for a few hundred dollars. Yes, and cloud got cheaper and easier as well. Why are we pretending here that the cloud stood still while hardware made strides? Cloud is still cheaper

briffle 3y ago

we are still way cheaper than before at a previous company. No need to worry about maintaining/monitoring HVAC (plus emergency AC systems) generators, security systems, water intrusion alarms, fire suppression, backhaul links.. Secondary site for DR that has duplicates of everything else. Firewalls that can handle the actual IPSec traffic on those backhaul links. (large Junipers are not cheap) Crazy lead times on new systems (months?!), and needing to size everything to fit our peak load. (we have some machines that add 12x more CPU to the database servers, run their reports in an hour, then remove all those extra CPU's now.)

jdoss 3y ago
It sounds like your workloads need that kind of flexibility and using a cloud provider makes total sense. My point is a lot of deployments most likely don't have those requirements (and never will) and there are way more cost effective means run them.

jdoss 3y ago

For sure. I was at a company in the mid 2000s and we had 50+ racks of servers and managing those back in the day was a very big lift. If we had the tooling we do now back then, we could have done it with a fraction of the cost. When I told some of my old coworkers I was going to get my own rack two years ago, there were some comments that I am a glutton for pain and suffering. Overall, it's been a great experience and cost savings on my end. I couldn't afford to run my workloads on any cloud provider. I also understand that I have a skill set that enables me to take advantage of running my own hardware, but with the advancements in tooling and cheaper hardware costs I believe the folks that don't have these skills have a better chance of doing the same. I am hopeful that datacenter providers will shift their business models in the future to enable easier access to getting space, power and bandwidth. That would help enable smaller teams to run their own hardware. The network/bandwidth part has gotten better. Almost all of the major datacenter providers offer some sort of software defined network service so you can get cheaper bandwidth and IP space than from the cloud providers. It is still more expensive in the long run than getting a bandwidth provider yourself. IPv4 space is still expensive but you can lease blocks pretty easily too.

lijok 3y ago

> Now, it's flipped. Hardware is pretty cheap. There are high quality OSS products that have easy-to-manage, native HA capabilities. It's no longer impractical to operate a production-ready deployment for a few hundred dollars. Yes, and cloud got cheaper and easier as well. Why are we pretending here that the cloud stood still while hardware made strides? Cloud is still cheaper