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Exactly, a key attribute of "The Cloud" has always been offloading the risk and costs of scaling. You get linear elasticity in scale without step functions in c

Exactly, a key attribute of "The Cloud" has always been offloading the risk and costs of scaling. You get linear elasticity in scale without step functions in cost. Once you plunk down all the money for networking and hardware yourself you've lost elasticity and will have a step function in cost the next time you want to scale. When you turn off VMs, you aren't saving anything at all. You just have expensive idle computing resources.

Spooky23 13y ago
There's a maturity cycle -- risk shift with time. On day one, buying equipment, labor and software to stand up a computing environment is a risk. You don't truly understand your needs. After a couple of years of operations, you should have a better idea of your typical run state and growth patterns. At that point the risk may shift. If I can deliver compute with AWS for $X, but can also deliver that compute through some other means for $X-Y, you have a new risk/cost evaluation to do. The key is continuing to use the cloud thought process.
dpark 13y ago
You're looking at this wrong. You're thinking of TestingBot as the customer, so you see one customer replacing AWS with dedicated servers and calling it a cloud. That's not the actual scenario, though. TestingBot built a cloud for their customers. They built a way for their customers to offload the risk and costs of scaling their test infrastructures. They built a simple[1], automated way for their customers to easily scale. They built a way to share the same hardware among many customers and thus lower costs and improve utilization. This is a cloud. I also don't really agree with your claim that the key attribute of "the cloud" is offloading the risk and cost of scaling. From my perspective, "the cloud" is primarily about simplifying and automating scaling, thus reducing the human and time costs. It's not just about dumping the cost of physical machines onto someone else. I see taking less risk on machine purchases as a nice benefit, but not the core purpose. [1] I haven't actually used TestingBot, so this isn't an endorsement. I have no idea if they actually do a good job or not.
- onli 13y ago
  You are not totally wrong. TestingBot seems to offer their servers as a cloud to their customers. Which means that TestingBot did not move to its own cloud (compare that to the title of the blogpost please), but they moved to their own servers (and build a cloud on them, like you said). Their customer can scale easily, they can not. Their customers don't have to pay for all the hardware needed, they do. Hence they are not using a cloud, they did not move to a cloud - they are using servers, they moved onto their own servers. The title is wrong. Why is that important? Not only because it is a basic misconception, but because saying "we moved to our own cloud" misrepresents their current abilities regarding their ability to scale and their cost structure.

Spooky23 13y ago

There's a maturity cycle -- risk shift with time. On day one, buying equipment, labor and software to stand up a computing environment is a risk. You don't truly understand your needs. After a couple of years of operations, you should have a better idea of your typical run state and growth patterns. At that point the risk may shift. If I can deliver compute with AWS for $X, but can also deliver that compute through some other means for $X-Y, you have a new risk/cost evaluation to do. The key is continuing to use the cloud thought process.

dpark 13y ago

You're looking at this wrong. You're thinking of TestingBot as the customer, so you see one customer replacing AWS with dedicated servers and calling it a cloud. That's not the actual scenario, though. TestingBot built a cloud for their customers. They built a way for their customers to offload the risk and costs of scaling their test infrastructures. They built a simple[1], automated way for their customers to easily scale. They built a way to share the same hardware among many customers and thus lower costs and improve utilization. This is a cloud. I also don't really agree with your claim that the key attribute of "the cloud" is offloading the risk and cost of scaling. From my perspective, "the cloud" is primarily about simplifying and automating scaling, thus reducing the human and time costs. It's not just about dumping the cost of physical machines onto someone else. I see taking less risk on machine purchases as a nice benefit, but not the core purpose. [1] I haven't actually used TestingBot, so this isn't an endorsement. I have no idea if they actually do a good job or not.

onli 13y ago
You are not totally wrong. TestingBot seems to offer their servers as a cloud to their customers. Which means that TestingBot did not move to its own cloud (compare that to the title of the blogpost please), but they moved to their own servers (and build a cloud on them, like you said). Their customer can scale easily, they can not. Their customers don't have to pay for all the hardware needed, they do. Hence they are not using a cloud, they did not move to a cloud - they are using servers, they moved onto their own servers. The title is wrong. Why is that important? Not only because it is a basic misconception, but because saying "we moved to our own cloud" misrepresents their current abilities regarding their ability to scale and their cost structure.