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> What is old is new again. Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost,

> What is old is new again. Over the years I tried occasionally to look into cloud, but it never made sense. A lot of complexity and significantly higher cost, for very low performance and a promise of "scalability". You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server - and at baremetal costs, you're usually about a year ahead of the curve anyways.

ep103 1y ago
The benefit of cloud has always been that it allows the company to trade capex for opex. From an engineering perspective, it trades scalability for complexity, but this is a secondary effect compared to the former tradeoff.
- et1337 1y ago
  I’ve heard this a lot, but… doesn’t Hetzner do the same?
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  "trade capex for opex" This has nothing to do with cloud. Businesses have forever turned IT expenses from capex to opex. We called this "operating leases".
- radiator 1y ago
  Hetzner is also a cloud. You avoid buying hardware, you rent it instead. You can rent either VMs or dedicated servers, but in both cases you own nothing.
kitd 1y ago
People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  That's how they can get away with such seemingly high prices.
- chatmasta 1y ago
  I can’t believe this cloud propaganda remains so pervasive. You’re just paying DevOps and “cloud architects” instead.
  - codegeek 1y ago
    Exactly. It's sad that we have been brain washed by the cloud propaganda long enough now. Everyone and their mother thinks that to setup anything in production, you need cloud otherwise it is amaeteurish. Sad.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  Every large organization that is all in on cloud I have worked at has several teams doing cloud work exclusively (CICD, Devops, SRE, etc), but every individual team is spending significant amounts of their time doing cloud development on top of that work.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    This. There's a lot of talk of 'oh you will spend so much time managing your own hardware' when I've found in practice it's much less time than wrangling the cloud infrastructure. (Especially since the alternatives are usually still a hosting provider that mean you don't have to physically touch the hardware at all, though frankly that's often also an overblown amount of time. The building/internet/cooling is what costs money but there's already a wide array of co-location companies set up to provide exactly that)
    - ecshafer 1y ago
      The cost to run data-centers for a large company that is past the co-location phase, I am not sure where those calculations come out to. But yeah in my experience, running even a fairly large amount of bare metal nix servers in colocation facilities are really not that time consuming.
odie5533 1y ago
Complexity? I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks and I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches. Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.
- fun444555 1y ago
  I have done many postgres deploys on bare metal. The IOPS and storage space saved (zfs compression because psql is meh) is huge. I regularly used hosted dbs but largely for toy DBs in GBs not TBs. Anyway, it is not hard and controlling upgrades saves so much time. Having a clients db force upgraded when there is no budget for it sucks. Anyway, I encourage you to learn/try it when you have opportunity
- codegeek 1y ago
  This is how the cloud companies keep you hooked on. I am not against them of course but the notion that no one can self host in production because "it is too complex" is something that we have been fed over the last 10-15 years. Deploying a production db on a dedicated server is not that hard. It is about the fact that people now think that unless they do cloud, they are amateurs. It is sad.
  - speleding 1y ago
    I agree that running servers onprem does not need to be hard in general, but I disagree when it comes to doing production databases. I've done onprem highly available MySQL for years, and getting the whole master/slave thing go just right during server upgrades was really challenging. On AWS upgrading MySQL server ("Aurora") is really just a few clicks. It can even do blue/green deployment for you, where you temporarily get the whole setup replicated and in sync so you can verify that everything went OK before switching over. Disaster recovery (regular backups to off site & ability to restore quickly) is also hard to get right if you have to do it yourself.
    - fisf 1y ago
throwaway894345 1y ago
If you’re just running some CRUD web service, then you could certainly find significantly cheaper hosting in a data center or similar, but also if that’s the case your hosting bill is probably a very small cost either way (relative to other business expenses). > You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server What do you mean by “time to add another server?” Are you thinking about a minute or two to spin up some on-demand server using an API? Or are you talking about multiple business days to physically procure and install another server? The former is fine, but I don’t know of any provider that gives me bare metal machines with beefy GPUs in a matter of minutes for low cost.
- radu_floricica 1y ago
  Weeks. I'm talking about multiple business weeks to spin up a new server. Sure, in a pinch I can do it in a weekend, but adding up all the stakeholders, talking it over and doing things right it takes weeks. It's a normal timespan for a significant chunk of extra power - a modern day server from Hetzner comes with over 1Tb of RAM and around 100 cores. This is also where all the reserve capacity comes from - you actually do have this kind of time to prepare. Sure, there are scenarios where you need capacity faster and it's not your fault. Can't think of any offhand, but I imagine there are. It's perfectly fine for them to use cloud.
Lalabadie 1y ago
I'm a designer with enough front-end knowledge to lead front-end dev when needed. To someone like me, especially on solo projects, using infra that effectively isolates me from the concerns (and risks) of lower-level devops absolutely makes sense. But I welcome the choice because of my level of competence. The trap is scaling an org by using that same shortcut until you're bound to it by built-up complexity or a persistent lack of skill/concern in the team. Then you're never really equipped to reevaluate the decision.
f1shy 1y ago
If everything is properly done, it should be next to trivial to add a server. When I was working on that we had a written procedure, when followed strictly, it would just take less than an hour
hibikir 1y ago
A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers. I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Yeah, clouds are such a huge improvement over what was basically an industry standard practice to say oh you want a server fill out this 20 page form and will get you your server in 6 to 12 months. But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be. And if it makes the entire management and cost side and performance with bare metal or closer to bare metal on the provider side, then that is all good. And this doesn't even address the fact that yeah, AWA has a lot of hidden costs, but a lot of those managed data center outsourcing contracts where you were subjected to those lead times for new servers... really weren't much cheaper than AWS back in the day.
  - bstsb 1y ago
    in my experience i can rescale Hetzner servers and they'll be ready in a minute or two
    - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
      Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to impugn Hetzner by saying they were an hour delay, just that there could be providers that are cheaper that didn't need to offer AWS-level scaling. Like a company should be able to offer 1 day service, or heck 1 week with their internal datacenters. Just have a scheduled buffer of machines to power up and adapt the next week/month supply order based on requests.
binary132 1y ago
It’s kinda good if your requirements might quadruple or disappear tonight or tomorrow, but you should always have a plan to port to reserved / purchased capacity.

ep103 1y ago

The benefit of cloud has always been that it allows the company to trade capex for opex. From an engineering perspective, it trades scalability for complexity, but this is a secondary effect compared to the former tradeoff.

et1337 1y ago
I’ve heard this a lot, but… doesn’t Hetzner do the same?
PeterStuer 1y ago
"trade capex for opex" This has nothing to do with cloud. Businesses have forever turned IT expenses from capex to opex. We called this "operating leases".
radiator 1y ago
Hetzner is also a cloud. You avoid buying hardware, you rent it instead. You can rent either VMs or dedicated servers, but in both cases you own nothing.

kitd 1y ago

People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.

HPsquared 1y ago
That's how they can get away with such seemingly high prices.
chatmasta 1y ago
I can’t believe this cloud propaganda remains so pervasive. You’re just paying DevOps and “cloud architects” instead.
- codegeek 1y ago
  Exactly. It's sad that we have been brain washed by the cloud propaganda long enough now. Everyone and their mother thinks that to setup anything in production, you need cloud otherwise it is amaeteurish. Sad.
ecshafer 1y ago
Every large organization that is all in on cloud I have worked at has several teams doing cloud work exclusively (CICD, Devops, SRE, etc), but every individual team is spending significant amounts of their time doing cloud development on top of that work.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  This. There's a lot of talk of 'oh you will spend so much time managing your own hardware' when I've found in practice it's much less time than wrangling the cloud infrastructure. (Especially since the alternatives are usually still a hosting provider that mean you don't have to physically touch the hardware at all, though frankly that's often also an overblown amount of time. The building/internet/cooling is what costs money but there's already a wide array of co-location companies set up to provide exactly that)
  - ecshafer 1y ago
    The cost to run data-centers for a large company that is past the co-location phase, I am not sure where those calculations come out to. But yeah in my experience, running even a fairly large amount of bare metal nix servers in colocation facilities are really not that time consuming.

odie5533 1y ago

Complexity? I've never set up a highly available Postgres and Redis cluster on dedicated hardware, but I can not imagine it's easier than doing it in AWS which is only a few clicks and I don't have to worry about OS upgrades and patches. Or a highly available load balancer with infinite scale.

fun444555 1y ago
I have done many postgres deploys on bare metal. The IOPS and storage space saved (zfs compression because psql is meh) is huge. I regularly used hosted dbs but largely for toy DBs in GBs not TBs. Anyway, it is not hard and controlling upgrades saves so much time. Having a clients db force upgraded when there is no budget for it sucks. Anyway, I encourage you to learn/try it when you have opportunity
codegeek 1y ago
This is how the cloud companies keep you hooked on. I am not against them of course but the notion that no one can self host in production because "it is too complex" is something that we have been fed over the last 10-15 years. Deploying a production db on a dedicated server is not that hard. It is about the fact that people now think that unless they do cloud, they are amateurs. It is sad.
- speleding 1y ago
  I agree that running servers onprem does not need to be hard in general, but I disagree when it comes to doing production databases. I've done onprem highly available MySQL for years, and getting the whole master/slave thing go just right during server upgrades was really challenging. On AWS upgrading MySQL server ("Aurora") is really just a few clicks. It can even do blue/green deployment for you, where you temporarily get the whole setup replicated and in sync so you can verify that everything went OK before switching over. Disaster recovery (regular backups to off site & ability to restore quickly) is also hard to get right if you have to do it yourself.
  - fisf 1y ago

throwaway894345 1y ago

If you’re just running some CRUD web service, then you could certainly find significantly cheaper hosting in a data center or similar, but also if that’s the case your hosting bill is probably a very small cost either way (relative to other business expenses). > You virtually never need scalability so fast that you don't have time to add another server What do you mean by “time to add another server?” Are you thinking about a minute or two to spin up some on-demand server using an API? Or are you talking about multiple business days to physically procure and install another server? The former is fine, but I don’t know of any provider that gives me bare metal machines with beefy GPUs in a matter of minutes for low cost.

radu_floricica 1y ago
Weeks. I'm talking about multiple business weeks to spin up a new server. Sure, in a pinch I can do it in a weekend, but adding up all the stakeholders, talking it over and doing things right it takes weeks. It's a normal timespan for a significant chunk of extra power - a modern day server from Hetzner comes with over 1Tb of RAM and around 100 cores. This is also where all the reserve capacity comes from - you actually do have this kind of time to prepare. Sure, there are scenarios where you need capacity faster and it's not your fault. Can't think of any offhand, but I imagine there are. It's perfectly fine for them to use cloud.

Lalabadie 1y ago

I'm a designer with enough front-end knowledge to lead front-end dev when needed. To someone like me, especially on solo projects, using infra that effectively isolates me from the concerns (and risks) of lower-level devops absolutely makes sense. But I welcome the choice because of my level of competence. The trap is scaling an org by using that same shortcut until you're bound to it by built-up complexity or a persistent lack of skill/concern in the team. Then you're never really equipped to reevaluate the decision.

f1shy 1y ago

If everything is properly done, it should be next to trivial to add a server. When I was working on that we had a written procedure, when followed strictly, it would just take less than an hour

hibikir 1y ago

A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers. I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Yeah, clouds are such a huge improvement over what was basically an industry standard practice to say oh you want a server fill out this 20 page form and will get you your server in 6 to 12 months. But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be. And if it makes the entire management and cost side and performance with bare metal or closer to bare metal on the provider side, then that is all good. And this doesn't even address the fact that yeah, AWA has a lot of hidden costs, but a lot of those managed data center outsourcing contracts where you were subjected to those lead times for new servers... really weren't much cheaper than AWS back in the day.
- bstsb 1y ago
  in my experience i can rescale Hetzner servers and they'll be ready in a minute or two
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to impugn Hetzner by saying they were an hour delay, just that there could be providers that are cheaper that didn't need to offer AWS-level scaling. Like a company should be able to offer 1 day service, or heck 1 week with their internal datacenters. Just have a scheduled buffer of machines to power up and adapt the next week/month supply order based on requests.

binary132 1y ago

It’s kinda good if your requirements might quadruple or disappear tonight or tomorrow, but you should always have a plan to port to reserved / purchased capacity.