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I see anything that reduces the relience on vendor lock-in I upvote. Hopefully cloud services see mass exodus so they have to have reasonable pricing that actua

I see anything that reduces the relience on vendor lock-in I upvote. Hopefully cloud services see mass exodus so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT. Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY.

geek_at 10mo ago
I'm worrying that the increasing ram prices will drive more people away from local and more to cloud services because if the big companies are buying up all the resources it might not be feasible to self host in a few years
- kachapopopow 10mo ago
  the pricing is so insane it will always be cheaper to self host by 100x, that's how bad it is.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Wait what? can you show me some sources to back this up? I assume you are exaggerating but still, what would be the definition of cheap is interesting to know. I don't think after the fact that ram prices spiked 4-5x that its gonna be cheaper to self host by 100x, Like hetzner's or ovh's cloud offerings are cheap Plus you have to put a lot of money and then still pay for something like colocation if you are competing with them Even if you aren't, I think that the models are different. They are models of monthly subscription whereas in hardware, you have to purchase it. It would be interesting tho to compare hardware-as-a-service or similar as well but I don't know if I see them for individual stuff.
    - andruby 10mo ago
      100x is probably hyperbole. 37 signals saved between 50 and 66% in hosting costs when moving from cloud to self hosted. https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit
      - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
        But they have scale. A small company will save less because it’s not that much more work to handle say a 100 node kubernetes cluster vs a 10 node kubernetes cluster.
        shimman 10mo ago
        Self hosting nowadays is way way way way easier than you're thinking. I'm involved working with various political campaigns and the first thing I help every team do is provision a 10 year old laptop, flash linux, and setup a DDNS. A $100 investment is more than enough for a campaign of 10-20ish dedicated workers that will only be hitting this system one/two users at a time. If I can teach a random 70 year old retiree or 16 year old on how to type a dozen different commands, I'm sure a paid professional can learn too. People need to realize that when you selfhost you can choose to follow physical business constraints. If no one is in the office to turn on a computer, you're good. Also consumer hardware is so powerful (even 10 year old hardware) that can easily handle 100k monthly active users, which is barely 3k daily users, and I doubt most SMBs actually need to handle anything beyond 500 concurrent users hardware wise. So if that's the choice it comes down to writing better and more performant software, which is what is lacking nowadays. People don't realize how good modern tooling + hardware has come. You can get by with very little if you want. I'd bet my years salary that a good 40% of AWS customers could probably be fine with a single self hosted server using basic plug in play FOSS software on consumer hardware. People in our industry have been selling massive lies on the need for scalability, the amount of companies that require such scalability are quite small in reality. You don't need a rocket ship to walk 2 blocks, and it often feels like this is the case in our industry. If self hosting is "too scary" for your business, you can buy a $10 VPS but after one single year you can probably find decade old hardware that is faster than what you pay for.
        victorbjorklund 10mo ago
        Yea, but admit that I am right that it is not that much harder to manage 100 nodes vs 10 nodes. (At least you can agree you don’t need 10x more staff to manage 100 nodes instead of 10) That’s the key. If you need one person or 3 persons doesn’t matter. The point is the salaries are fixed costs.
  - dijit 10mo ago
    not 100x. 10% is the number I ordinarily see, counting for members of staff and adequate DR systems. If we had paid our IT teams half of what we pay a cloud provider, we would have had better internal processes. Instead we starved them and the cloud providers successfully weaponised extremely short term thinking against us, now barely anyone has the competence to actually manifest those cost benefits without serious instability.
    - kachapopopow 10mo ago
      I genuinely mean that, fly.io (although as unreliable as it might seem) is already around ~5x to 10x cheaper depending on use case, depending on some services it's actually <infinity> times cheaper because it's actually completely free when you self host! GCP pricing is absolutely wicked when they charge $120/month for 4vcore 16gb ram, can get around 23 times more performance and 192gb ram for $350/month with Xtbps-ish ddos protection. I have 2 2x7742 1tb ram each, 3 9950x3ds 192gb ecc, 2 7950x3d's all at <$600/month obv the original hardware cost in the realm of $60k - the epyc cpu's were bought used for around $1k each so not a bad deal, same with ram overall the true cost is <20k. This is entirely for personal use and will last me more than a decade most likely unless there are major gains in efficiency and power cost continues to grow due to AI demand. This also includes 100tb+ hdd of storage and 40tb of nvme storage all connected with 100gbps switch pair for redundancy for a cheap cheap price of $500 for each switch. I guess I owe some links: (Ignore minecraft focused branding) https://pufferfish.host/ https://pufferfish.host/ (also offers colocation) telegram: @Erikb_9gigsofram direct colocation at datacenter (no middlemen / sales) + good low cost bundle deal anti-ddos: https://cosmicguard.com/ https://cosmicguard.com/ (might still offer colocation?) anti-ddos: https://tcpshield.com/ https://tcpshield.com/
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
rozenmd 10mo ago
Probably worth pointing out that the Cloudflare Workers runtime is already open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
- max_lt 10mo ago
  True, workerd is open source. But the bindings (KV, R2, D1, Queues, etc.) aren't – they're Cloudflare's proprietary services. OpenWorkers includes open source bindings you can self-host.
  - buremba 10mo ago
    I tried to run it locally some time ago, but it's buggy as hell when self-hosted. It's not even worth trying out given that CF itself doesn't suggest it.
    - ketanhwr 10mo ago
      I'm curious what bugs you encountered. workerd does power the local runtime when you test CF workers in dev via wrangler, so we don't really expect/want it to be buggy..
      - buremba 10mo ago
        There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress" message in https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services. I mainly use Claude Code to develop, and it often struggles to replicate the local environment, so I had to create another worker in CF for my local development. Initially, the idea was to use CF for my side projects as it's much easier than K8S, but after wrestling with it for a month, decided that it's not really worth investing that much, and I moved back to using K8S with FluxCD instead, even though it's overkill as well.
        kentonv 10mo ago
re-thc 10mo ago
> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT How is the cost of NAT free? > Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY. I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.
- otterley 10mo ago
  They said “charging more than free” - i.e., more than $0, i.e., they’re not free. It was awkwardly worded.
  - re-thc 10mo ago
    They said "instead of charging more than free", which means should be free. Please read it again.
    - otterley 10mo ago
      I think we’re in violent agreement, but you were ambiguous about what “cost” meant. It seems you meant “cost of providing NAT” but I interpreted it as “cost to the customer.” > Please read it again. There’s no need to be rude.
- kachapopopow 10mo ago
  salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this). sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.

geek_at 10mo ago

I'm worrying that the increasing ram prices will drive more people away from local and more to cloud services because if the big companies are buying up all the resources it might not be feasible to self host in a few years

kachapopopow 10mo ago
the pricing is so insane it will always be cheaper to self host by 100x, that's how bad it is.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  Wait what? can you show me some sources to back this up? I assume you are exaggerating but still, what would be the definition of cheap is interesting to know. I don't think after the fact that ram prices spiked 4-5x that its gonna be cheaper to self host by 100x, Like hetzner's or ovh's cloud offerings are cheap Plus you have to put a lot of money and then still pay for something like colocation if you are competing with them Even if you aren't, I think that the models are different. They are models of monthly subscription whereas in hardware, you have to purchase it. It would be interesting tho to compare hardware-as-a-service or similar as well but I don't know if I see them for individual stuff.
  - andruby 10mo ago
    100x is probably hyperbole. 37 signals saved between 50 and 66% in hosting costs when moving from cloud to self hosted. https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit
    - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
      But they have scale. A small company will save less because it’s not that much more work to handle say a 100 node kubernetes cluster vs a 10 node kubernetes cluster.
      - shimman 10mo ago
        Self hosting nowadays is way way way way easier than you're thinking. I'm involved working with various political campaigns and the first thing I help every team do is provision a 10 year old laptop, flash linux, and setup a DDNS. A $100 investment is more than enough for a campaign of 10-20ish dedicated workers that will only be hitting this system one/two users at a time. If I can teach a random 70 year old retiree or 16 year old on how to type a dozen different commands, I'm sure a paid professional can learn too. People need to realize that when you selfhost you can choose to follow physical business constraints. If no one is in the office to turn on a computer, you're good. Also consumer hardware is so powerful (even 10 year old hardware) that can easily handle 100k monthly active users, which is barely 3k daily users, and I doubt most SMBs actually need to handle anything beyond 500 concurrent users hardware wise. So if that's the choice it comes down to writing better and more performant software, which is what is lacking nowadays. People don't realize how good modern tooling + hardware has come. You can get by with very little if you want. I'd bet my years salary that a good 40% of AWS customers could probably be fine with a single self hosted server using basic plug in play FOSS software on consumer hardware. People in our industry have been selling massive lies on the need for scalability, the amount of companies that require such scalability are quite small in reality. You don't need a rocket ship to walk 2 blocks, and it often feels like this is the case in our industry. If self hosting is "too scary" for your business, you can buy a $10 VPS but after one single year you can probably find decade old hardware that is faster than what you pay for.
        victorbjorklund 10mo ago
        Yea, but admit that I am right that it is not that much harder to manage 100 nodes vs 10 nodes. (At least you can agree you don’t need 10x more staff to manage 100 nodes instead of 10) That’s the key. If you need one person or 3 persons doesn’t matter. The point is the salaries are fixed costs.
- dijit 10mo ago
  not 100x. 10% is the number I ordinarily see, counting for members of staff and adequate DR systems. If we had paid our IT teams half of what we pay a cloud provider, we would have had better internal processes. Instead we starved them and the cloud providers successfully weaponised extremely short term thinking against us, now barely anyone has the competence to actually manifest those cost benefits without serious instability.
  - kachapopopow 10mo ago
    I genuinely mean that, fly.io (although as unreliable as it might seem) is already around ~5x to 10x cheaper depending on use case, depending on some services it's actually <infinity> times cheaper because it's actually completely free when you self host! GCP pricing is absolutely wicked when they charge $120/month for 4vcore 16gb ram, can get around 23 times more performance and 192gb ram for $350/month with Xtbps-ish ddos protection. I have 2 2x7742 1tb ram each, 3 9950x3ds 192gb ecc, 2 7950x3d's all at <$600/month obv the original hardware cost in the realm of $60k - the epyc cpu's were bought used for around $1k each so not a bad deal, same with ram overall the true cost is <20k. This is entirely for personal use and will last me more than a decade most likely unless there are major gains in efficiency and power cost continues to grow due to AI demand. This also includes 100tb+ hdd of storage and 40tb of nvme storage all connected with 100gbps switch pair for redundancy for a cheap cheap price of $500 for each switch. I guess I owe some links: (Ignore minecraft focused branding) https://pufferfish.host/ https://pufferfish.host/ (also offers colocation) telegram: @Erikb_9gigsofram direct colocation at datacenter (no middlemen / sales) + good low cost bundle deal anti-ddos: https://cosmicguard.com/ https://cosmicguard.com/ (might still offer colocation?) anti-ddos: https://tcpshield.com/ https://tcpshield.com/
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

rozenmd 10mo ago

Probably worth pointing out that the Cloudflare Workers runtime is already open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

max_lt 10mo ago
True, workerd is open source. But the bindings (KV, R2, D1, Queues, etc.) aren't – they're Cloudflare's proprietary services. OpenWorkers includes open source bindings you can self-host.
- buremba 10mo ago
  I tried to run it locally some time ago, but it's buggy as hell when self-hosted. It's not even worth trying out given that CF itself doesn't suggest it.
  - ketanhwr 10mo ago
    I'm curious what bugs you encountered. workerd does power the local runtime when you test CF workers in dev via wrangler, so we don't really expect/want it to be buggy..
    - buremba 10mo ago
      There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress" message in https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services. I mainly use Claude Code to develop, and it often struggles to replicate the local environment, so I had to create another worker in CF for my local development. Initially, the idea was to use CF for my side projects as it's much easier than K8S, but after wrestling with it for a month, decided that it's not really worth investing that much, and I moved back to using K8S with FluxCD instead, even though it's overkill as well.
      - kentonv 10mo ago

re-thc 10mo ago

> so they have to have reasonable pricing that actually reflects their costs instead of charging more than free for basic services like NAT How is the cost of NAT free? > Cloud services are actually really nice and convenient if you were to ignore the eye watering cost versus DIY. I don't doubt clouds are expensive, but in many countries it'd cost more to DIY for a proper business. Running a service isn't just running the install command. Having a team to maintain and monitor services is already expensive.

otterley 10mo ago
They said “charging more than free” - i.e., more than $0, i.e., they’re not free. It was awkwardly worded.
- re-thc 10mo ago
  They said "instead of charging more than free", which means should be free. Please read it again.
  - otterley 10mo ago
    I think we’re in violent agreement, but you were ambiguous about what “cost” meant. It seems you meant “cost of providing NAT” but I interpreted it as “cost to the customer.” > Please read it again. There’s no need to be rude.
kachapopopow 10mo ago
salesforce had their hosting bill jump orders of magnitude after ditching their colocation, it did not save anything and colocation staff were replaced with AWS engineers nat is free to provide because the infrastructure to have NAT is already there and there is never anything maxing out a switch cluster(most switches sit at ~1% usage since they're overspeced $1,000,000 switches), so other than host CPU time managing interrupts (which is unlikely since all network cards offload this). sure you could argue that regional NAT might should be priced, but these companies have so much fiber between their datacenters that all of nat usage is probably a rounding error.