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People say cloud is cheaper, but that's based on horrible assumptions such as the idea that companies don't have staff that know how to maintain a server, so cl
by johnklos 3y ago
People say cloud is cheaper, but that's based on horrible assumptions such as the idea that companies don't have staff that know how to maintain a server, so cloud costs have to be compared with in-house plus the salary of a systems administrator.
People forget that services in the cloud require technical know how, and that the lack of technical know how can easily result in wildly insane cloud bills.
Really, though, any heavily used service will always cost more in the cloud. Transfer? Sure, bringing Internet to your location might cost an arm and a leg, but it's trivial to find colocation with transfer that's significantly cheaper than anything cloud.
CPU? Definitely. Ancient Xeon cores are a dime a dozen, but they don't compare to even an inexpensive last generation Ryzen. Storage? Absolutely, and the price differences are absolutely ridiculous. Even GPU workloads are cheaper if you have to run them for more than a handful of months.
"But you can scale in the cloud!" Right. You can scale in real life, too, AND you can scale in real life WITH the cloud, if you want, so that's a silly thing to say. It's not one or the other, exclusively.
I have yet to find a single example of a company that isn't doing really silly things saving money by moving to the cloud.
- nullindividual 3y agoYou left out all of the other costs of running a datacenter. Cooling, fire suppression, electricity, DR site, etc.
- johnklos 3y agoNo, I didn't leave them out. They're just not a significant factor because those costs are proportional to need and demand. A company is either large enough to have enough that those things are aggregated across tons of servers, or they're likely colocating. Also, datacenters don't require all of that to be datacenters.
- nullindividual 3y agoYou did leave them out because most people _want_ electricity in their datacenter, or have DR, etc. These aren't free. And colocation is not free -- you pay for all of those things on top of the hardware you have to plan for peak cycles on. Nor what you were talking about in the OP, hence ignoring colo. Please don't move goal posts. This is HN, not reddit.
- Nextgrid 3y agoYour colocation provider handles all that for the flat monthly fee you're paying them for the rack space.
- jjav 3y ago> Cooling, fire suppression, electricity, DR site, etc. No, unless you are particularly huge (google, facebook), you rent space in a colocation facility that handles the real estate stuff (like electricity, cooling, fire). That is the best of all worlds for most companies needs.