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The simplest example is if you have on-prem hardware, you need to have capacity for your peak load. In a lift and shift, you would replace your fleet of 96 core

The simplest example is if you have on-prem hardware, you need to have capacity for your peak load. In a lift and shift, you would replace your fleet of 96 core xeons with a fleet of 96 core xeons in AWS. The cloud native approach would be to modify your app so that it can be scaled up and down so you keep a few machines always running, and scale up and down with your traffic so you only run at capacity when you need it.

wredue 3y ago
This doesn’t demonstrate anything about the savings. Anecdotally, when my previous company was looking at costs, cloud unequivocally came out significantly more expensive, and that wasn’t even a large company (only 2,000 or so employees). I will grant that we did not have globalization problems to solve (but I’d also wager that lots of businesses prematurely “what if” this scenario anyway).
- maccard 3y ago
  > This doesn’t demonstrate anything about the savings. If you neeed 4 CPUs for your peak load for 4 hours per day, and only 1 of them for the other 20 hours a day, you can save by scaling down to 1 cpu for 85% of the day.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    This assumes a lot about the cost of those CPUs and related resources in the respective environments. Cost per equivalently performing unit on a managed server vs. cloud instances is often vastly different. It's also extremely uncommon to have loads that spiky. And when you do, hybrid is often a solution (use a provider that can provide colo or managed servers for your base load and cloud instances for your peaks, or scale across providers).
    - maccard 3y ago
      It's pretty hard to capture the nuance of any possible solution in 2 paragraphs without someone coming along and picking it apart. The guy I replied to didn't know even the most basic information. Even at that, you said yourself that you can use "cloud" to scale into your spikes.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        Yes, but ironically being prepared to handle spikes with cloud tends to make it even less cost effective to do so, because it means you can plan for far higher utilisation of your on prem/colo/managed servers with little risk. It takes very unusual load patterns for cloud to win on cost. It does occasionally happen, but far less often than developers tend to think. There many reasons to choose cloud services, but cost is almost never one of them.
        maccard 3y ago
        > It does occasionally happen, but far less often than developers tend to think. Guy asked what is a cloud workload, I responded. Nitpicking every tiny detail doesn't help. > There many reasons to choose cloud services, but cost is almost never one of them. It's cheaper to pay me to manage IAM roles for lambdas and ECS instances for 5% of my time than it is to pay someone full-time to manage some sort of VMware or other system. It's easier and cheaper to find someone with experience with AWS who can provide value to the team and product than it is to find someone who can manage and maintain a cobbled together set of scripts to update apps. There are click and go options for deploying major self hosted services like grafana, k8s with secure details that I can use without spending any time (and time == $$$) learning about the developers preferred deployment scheme.
        vidarh 3y ago
        This isn't nitpicking, it's why the cloud option is very rarely cheapest. I've costed this out for many organizations over the years and tested the assumptions. > It's cheaper to pay me to manage IAM roles for lambdas and ECS instances for 5% of my time than it is to pay someone full-time to manage some sort of VMware or other system. True, but it's a false equivalence, and one I often see used from people unaware of the ease of contracting this out on a fractional basis. I used to make a living cleaning up after people who thought cloud was easier, who ended up often spending a fortune untangling years of accumulated cruft that just never happened for my non-cloud customers.
jiggawatts 3y ago
The hiccup with this arithmetic is that the big cloud providers charge 7x to 10x the price you’d pay for an on-premises VM. Sure, sure, you’re about to say something about discounts? Granted, that’s available, but only for commitments starting at one year or longer! Okay, fine, I actually agree that there are savings available by reducing head count. The entire network and storage teams can be made redundant, for starters. Even considering that DevOps and cloud infra engineers need to be hired at great expense, this can be a net win… …but isn’t in my experience. Managers are unwilling or unable to make many people redundant at once, so they stick around and find things to do… … things like reproducing the mess that kept them employed, but in the cloud. I’m watching this unfold at about a dozen of my large enterprise customers right now. Got to get back to work and send the fifty seventh email about spinning up a single VM. Got to run that past every team! It’s no rush, it’s only been about fourteen months now…

wredue 3y ago

This doesn’t demonstrate anything about the savings. Anecdotally, when my previous company was looking at costs, cloud unequivocally came out significantly more expensive, and that wasn’t even a large company (only 2,000 or so employees). I will grant that we did not have globalization problems to solve (but I’d also wager that lots of businesses prematurely “what if” this scenario anyway).

maccard 3y ago
> This doesn’t demonstrate anything about the savings. If you neeed 4 CPUs for your peak load for 4 hours per day, and only 1 of them for the other 20 hours a day, you can save by scaling down to 1 cpu for 85% of the day.
- vidarh 3y ago
  This assumes a lot about the cost of those CPUs and related resources in the respective environments. Cost per equivalently performing unit on a managed server vs. cloud instances is often vastly different. It's also extremely uncommon to have loads that spiky. And when you do, hybrid is often a solution (use a provider that can provide colo or managed servers for your base load and cloud instances for your peaks, or scale across providers).
  - maccard 3y ago
    It's pretty hard to capture the nuance of any possible solution in 2 paragraphs without someone coming along and picking it apart. The guy I replied to didn't know even the most basic information. Even at that, you said yourself that you can use "cloud" to scale into your spikes.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Yes, but ironically being prepared to handle spikes with cloud tends to make it even less cost effective to do so, because it means you can plan for far higher utilisation of your on prem/colo/managed servers with little risk. It takes very unusual load patterns for cloud to win on cost. It does occasionally happen, but far less often than developers tend to think. There many reasons to choose cloud services, but cost is almost never one of them.
      - maccard 3y ago
        > It does occasionally happen, but far less often than developers tend to think. Guy asked what is a cloud workload, I responded. Nitpicking every tiny detail doesn't help. > There many reasons to choose cloud services, but cost is almost never one of them. It's cheaper to pay me to manage IAM roles for lambdas and ECS instances for 5% of my time than it is to pay someone full-time to manage some sort of VMware or other system. It's easier and cheaper to find someone with experience with AWS who can provide value to the team and product than it is to find someone who can manage and maintain a cobbled together set of scripts to update apps. There are click and go options for deploying major self hosted services like grafana, k8s with secure details that I can use without spending any time (and time == $$$) learning about the developers preferred deployment scheme.
        vidarh 3y ago
        This isn't nitpicking, it's why the cloud option is very rarely cheapest. I've costed this out for many organizations over the years and tested the assumptions. > It's cheaper to pay me to manage IAM roles for lambdas and ECS instances for 5% of my time than it is to pay someone full-time to manage some sort of VMware or other system. True, but it's a false equivalence, and one I often see used from people unaware of the ease of contracting this out on a fractional basis. I used to make a living cleaning up after people who thought cloud was easier, who ended up often spending a fortune untangling years of accumulated cruft that just never happened for my non-cloud customers.

jiggawatts 3y ago

The hiccup with this arithmetic is that the big cloud providers charge 7x to 10x the price you’d pay for an on-premises VM. Sure, sure, you’re about to say something about discounts? Granted, that’s available, but only for commitments starting at one year or longer! Okay, fine, I actually agree that there are savings available by reducing head count. The entire network and storage teams can be made redundant, for starters. Even considering that DevOps and cloud infra engineers need to be hired at great expense, this can be a net win… …but isn’t in my experience. Managers are unwilling or unable to make many people redundant at once, so they stick around and find things to do… … things like reproducing the mess that kept them employed, but in the cloud. I’m watching this unfold at about a dozen of my large enterprise customers right now. Got to get back to work and send the fifty seventh email about spinning up a single VM. Got to run that past every team! It’s no rush, it’s only been about fourteen months now…